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Horrible crimes will be committed as long as mankind endures. What is unique, though, and will never be repeated is the work the European Jews created in the course of this century, and without which Europe-its art, its thought, its very existence-would not be what it is.
There is first of all the obligation that we in Germany have-even if no one else any longer assumes it-to keep alive the memory of the suffering of those murdered by German hands, and to keep it alive quite openly and not just in our own minds.
The two epigraphs to this review present contrasting views concerning what must be remembered now, at this point in history, when we reflect on Shoah. Perhaps a balance can be struck between these poles; to me, that would be preferable. Nevertheless, I want to do something that will perhaps shock and upset my readers. I feel compelled to quote several sentences taken from a memoir in which a twelve-year-old Jewish child witnessed the Nazi destruction of a maternity ward in the Lodz ghetto in which his older sister had just given birth:
Suddenly, two Germans appeared in an upper story window and pushed it open. Seconds later a naked baby was pushed over the ledge and dropped to its death directly into the truck below. We were in such shock that at first few of us believed it was actually a live, newborn baby… The SS seemed to enjoy this bloody escapadehellip; the young SS butcher rolled up his rifle sleeve and caught the very next infant on his bayonnet. The blood of the infant flowed down the knife onto the murderers’ armhellip; (quoted in Eisen, 1988, pp. 17-18)
How do we read these words? How do we experience this? A sample of writing that describes the atrocities of Shoah-ask yourself how you react. How can anyone possibly react? How should a person react? Before encountering a recently published book by Cornell University's distinguished intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, I might have