In my hotel brochure in Jerusalem there was a story about a sculptor, the daughter of a holocaust survivor. Almost all her mother’s Polish family had been killed — Grandpa had gasoline injected into his vein; one brother was made with a bunch of other starving children (described as ‘Muslims’) to run round a table full of food, and anyone who touched it was shot. I have to say that I found these stories suspiciciously individual and interesting. I don’t doubt for a moment the fact of the holocaust, but the overwhelming majority of those 6m deaths were without melodrama or special cruelty. That was the point. Murder became an industrialised routine.
I watched half Shoah; I couldn’t sleep for two nights afterwards, and never managed to watch the second half; and what I remember most is that the haunted faces belonged to the survivors. The perpetrators’ faces had the fleshy stolidity of candlewax. Only the people who had suffered there could not forget the evil. It’s not just that we can’t look straight at the horrors of the world: we can’t see them straight, either.
A peculiarly grim example of this was supplied at the end of the story. The sculptor’s mother had survived Auschwitz, and had discovered, thirty years after the war, that one of her brothers had too. They had been reunited, which was horrible, in some ways, for both of them. But after that, her children had prayed that God relieve her of her tormenting memories. And, the article continued, their prayers had been partly answered: she had developed Alzheimer’s. So now she can’t remember what happened last week, but the holocaust is still vivid to her.
I don’t know whether it is worse that this story should be told as if it justified prayer, or that it should be told in a hotel brochure, whose purpose is to drive tourism.
My intellectual development, an uneven process at best, tends to be sparked by small phrases that stick. I can’t remember when I first heard the term “the banality of evil” but it sunk in fast and deep, coming to rest right at the bottom. All manner of things have been growing from that seed ever since: it seems to me to be a core perception in understanding how things can go so horribly wrong – and how once they have, they can spread their insipid perversion out through so many unremarkable channels in space and time. The phrase is certainly twinkling away as I read that.
Perhaps that’s why a sense of the surreal, the grotesqueness at the heart of normality, is so worth cultivating. You can look on the face of unthinkable evil and see how it can be thinkable, even unremarkable, and you can read a hotel brochure and feel the link in the other direction.
Or perhaps it’s just an accommodation, a way to avoid thinking too much about the naked lunch.
Gah.
R