A Survivor for Whom Never Again Means Never Again
by: Mark Dow
May - June  1995
The Link - Volume 28, Issue 2

An interview by Mark Dow at the home of Dr. Israel Shahak on January 4, 1995.

Where in Poland were you raised?

I was born in Warsaw in 1933. 1 was there all the time during the Second World War, during the Holocaust I mean, then finally almost two years in Bergen-Belsen. And because I was raised not only in an Orthodox [Jewish] but in a Zionist family, immediately after this I went to Palestine with my mother, who also survived. I arrived here in September 1945 as a 12-and-a-half-year-old child.

I was first educated in religious institutions, but then, because I went to Tel Aviv to be with my mother, and also because I began to develop some quarrels with my teachers, I transferred myself to secular high school. But I remained religious until the age of 18. Then the usual career of an Israeli Jewish boy- army, . then university, and so on. Political activism only developed in '68.

How many people from Bergen-Belsen survived?

I don't know. The concentration camp was not a single entity. It was divided into very many areas separated from each other by barbed wire, heavily guarded, so I don't know anybody except my own group. I have seen masses of people through the barbed wire, but I have no idea about them.

From my own group I can tell you that 3,300 went in, and then by virtue of what is called selections--you know what it means--we survived 250. But of course there have been not only Jews in Bergen-Belsen, there have been other groups. I have no idea what has happened with the other groups, except visual and casual impressions, so I can tell you only about my own group.

How long were you in Bergen-Belsen?

I arrived there the 29th of June 1943, and I was liberated on the 13th of April 1945 by the American army. But not in Bergen-Belsen itself. The last 7 days we spent in traveling, in being taken east, but it's not really important.

Have you ever written anything about the camps?

No. This is a question of personality type, and I am not inclined to writing autobiography. I am simply not made that way. My choosing of a scientific profession also points in the other direction, as does my type of writing. I think about it, I draw conclusions, but I am not inclined in any way to writing memoirs or autobiography.

So what kind of conclusions are you drawing?

The most important conclusion is that the people who operated the Holocaust machine, or the great majority of them, at least the casual operators whom I saw, German soldiers, did what they did simply from the sense of duty, not because of any hatred, simply from the sense of duty. The great majority of every society, if they will find themselves given an order by a government which is legal, will do the same thing which they did. I don't exclude anyone from this. And therefore the conclusion is that every society and every people is in danger of being nazified.

I'm not thinking now about lynchings and pogroms, which are a completely different thing because they are temporary. I mean exterminating by state power. I mean a bureaucratic operation conducted by state officials and by ordinary soldiers or officials to exterminate people by state decision. I will also include lesser decisions of the same type, let us say, to round up all the Japanese in the United States during the Second World War, or the Armenian extermination, or what is happening in Bosnia.

This can happen everywhere. And it has happened everywhere. I completely deny the opinion that the Holocaust is unique. It is rare, it is true, it is rare. But it has happened. Therefore the first conclusion is that it can happen again, and every person and every group of people has to be on guard against it. Although the Holocaust happened to Jews, it is a lesson for all humanity, including the Jews themselves.

I will add that the lesson is universal because we shouldn't think about most of those who operated the extermination machines as animals, as monsters in human form. We should reserve this appellation only for the actual planners, or for the heads of the Nazis. The ordinary German soldiers who guarded us while we dwindled from more than 3,000 to 250 were, in my manner of judgment, people like you and me, motivated by what is thought of in every society as good motives, obeying orders from a legal government. Nevertheless, they were, objectively, murderers and exterminators.

The conclusion is that human society in every group is composed of a mass of ordinary people who can become exterminators, but who in their ordinary lives are completely usual people, of a minority which protests, and a minority which plans murders or enjoys murder.

You made me think of Primo Levi's work.

Yes, among the very few works on the Holocaust which I really enjoyed and of which I strongly approve are Primo Levi's books. Most of the things, and I here mean memoirs, autobiographies, and so on, written about this, I don't like at all, but Primo Levi is really an exception.

And he's also a chemist.

He's also a chemist, of course. But I must say, without boasting, I have drawn my conclusions before reading, independently of Primo Levi. But it is true that his work on this is completely unique and I think his is the truest, so far as I have seen, approach.

You were saying before that you had some arguments early on with your teachers, but it wasn't until later, when you were about 18, that you broke with Orthodoxy. What were those arguments about?

Let me give you an example. We were studying the Talmudic laws of shabbat--what constitutes a violation of shabbat? And we reached the subject of riding a horse. The Talmud says that although it is permitted to ride a horse by itself--it is not included in the 39 prohibited labors--it is still not allowed, because a rider may take a branch from a tree in order to beat the horse. I accepted the possibility.

At the end of every lesson, we always had additions about modern applications. So when we finished with the horse and so on, the teacher told us that it is prohibited to ride a bicycle because it is similar to riding a horse. At this point, I raised my hand, and I said, "Oh, teacher, I know the reason. It is because we are afraid that the rider will take a branch from a tree in order to beat up the bicycle."

The teacher's response was to give me two big slaps on my face, which was the usual method of education. This was a quite enlightened institution, by the way, a German one, and there were actually boys and girls in the same school, but still this was their reaction--and there were many things of that kind.

After slapping me the teacher told me, your question came by instigation of Satan, of the Devil. Since I was a believer at that time, I repented of this, as I had after each such question of details. I accepted the principle. I had a difficult period in which I searched my conscience for how I was guilty of what the teachers were telling me that I was guilty of--asking bad questions, thinking impure thoughts.

I had to go to Tel Aviv for family reasons anyway, and I decided that maybe it would be better if I would not be slapped on my face every few weeks for asking details. So I transferred myself to secular school, but took lessons in Talmud, and also pursued my studies without being slapped on my face.

When you were talking about the way that any society can become nazified, I wondered if you were thinking of Israel.

Not necessarily so, not necessarily so. I really mean every society. At present, although there is a danger in Israel, it is much less so than in Rwanda, or plenty of other places that I could mention. No, I was mentioning universal principles.

But since you mention this, I will go further. This I didn't draw from my personal Holocaust experience, but by reading about German history, which began much later when I was in my mid-thirties. I began to be interested in German history in general, and in the history of modern Germany in particular, to see from where Nazism arose. And from where in Nazism the extermination of the Jews arose. From the beginning it was clear to me, even from superficial work, that for twenty years the official Nazi program was only the expulsion of Jews from Germany. Purification or cleansing, as they used to say. Germany without Jews.

So it immediately drew my attention to the fact that there are Jews, in fact organized and recognized parties--not only the Kahanes, but the Moledet party and other tendencies--who want to expel all the Arabs from the Land of Israel. [Kahanes are the followers of Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane. The Kach party he founded is made up of young American Jews who specialize in terrorizing Palestinians. The Moledet Party, founded in 1987 by retired Gen. Rehavem Ze'evi, champions the physical removal of Palestinians from their ancestral lands.--Ed.]

Such tendencies were very strong in the Labor movement, in the Zionist movement, in the beginning. Because of this, I am saying that there are Jewish Nazis. Jews who are officially saying that Arabs should be expelled from Israel, or from the Occupied Territories, are, in my opinion, Jewish Nazis. And there are Nazi-like tendencies in Judaism, meaning toleration for people who in their official program desire that all Arabs be expelled.

But this is not unique to Jews. I specified it for Jews, but it is not unique to Jews. We see it before our own eyes in Bosnia.

Sometimes when your work is distributed in the States--I think particularly when the American Educational Trust distributed the translations--they have a little biographical note mentioning that you are a Holocaust survivor . . .

Yes, I know --

. . . and I assume this is because they think it gives you a sort of credential to say what you say about Israel.

Yes, yes. I dislike this, but I also don't like to quarrel with my friends who are sometimes the only distributors, so after asking them and receiving an answer that for their own security, for their own protection, they want this, I agreed to it. You have seen that when I distribute my work I don't add any biographical detail.

Just your name.

Just my name, yes. If I add something for my protection, I am adding only the fact that I am an Israeli citizen who has lived here from 1945. I may even add sometimes that I served in the Israeli army all the times that I had to serve. This, in my opinion, is a much stronger protection of my credibility than being a Holocaust survivor. It's a protection because it means that, first of all, I am behaving according to Israeli law. I am accepting all the duties imposed on me by Israeli law. Second, it means that I am willing to defend Israel if it will be faced by external danger--that until the age when I was not fit for military service, or, as a matter of fact, in an emergency even now if a foreign army, if an Arab army, will invade Israel, I will of course take a weapon in my hand and shoot. This means something much different.

When you first came here in 1945, what were your thoughts about Arabs and Jews living together, or about the idea of a Jewish state?

I was a complete Zionist, or a Ben Gurionist, I should say. I was a great admirer of Ben Gurion until 1956, until I was more than 23 years old. I accepted all the doctrine of Ben Gurion, meaning the official doctrine of Ben Gurion. First of all, I accepted what he said, that the Land of Israel belongs to Jews. That Arabs should be given only personal rights and limited by security considerations, but should have neither national rights nor any rights which hinder Jewish settlement. For example, during the years from '48 to '56, I fully accepted the confiscation of Arab-owned land for the benefit of Jews. Of course, this was also my teachers' ideas, but nevertheless it took much, much time until I liberated myself from those principles, which I fully professed.

In the book ["Jewish History, Jewish Religion"], you say that you changed your mind when Ben Gurion gave a speech on the third day of the Suez War in 1956, saying "that the real reason for [the war] is 'the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon' to its Biblical borders."

Yes, because after I ceased to be an Orthodox Jew, or even, I can say, a religious Jew, meaning a believer in revelation, I accepted those ideas on secular grounds--as Ben Gurion, who never quoted religion, propounded them. It came to me as a very great surprise that Ben Gurion suddenly began to quote Bible. This impressed me much more at the time than the fact of the invasion of Egypt in the Suez War.

In my book I make a division between strategic aims, however bad, pursued on secular grounds, and the same aims pursued on religious grounds. I say that while with secular imperialism I can have a dialogue--I of course oppose it--with religious imperialism, or ideological imperialism, there is no possibility of dialogue. I am against any extreme ideology which will not, let us say, take into account pragmatic considerations. Secular imperialism takes them into account; religious imperialism and pacifism on the other side, do not.

Let's jump to very recent developments. At the end of your book you say: "What is not possible, as long as Israel remains a 'Jewish state,' is the Israeli grant of a fake, but nevertheless symbolically real sovereignty, or even of real autonomy, to non-Jews within the Land of Israel for merely political reasons."

Yes, exactly. I wrote that before the Oslo Agreement, by the way. I had the opportunity to change it, and I decided not to. And you see it exactly. You see that on the question of confiscation of land, and what is worse, of saying that land once confiscated is only for the benefit of Jews, the State of Israel didn't make any compromise. So I am saying that all the Oslo Agreement is a fake. Both sides--of course I am very strongly against Arafat as well--both sides cheat each other.

So you don't think that the Palestinians are even going to get a symbolic sovereignty out of this?

Of course not. There are many facts, symbolic facts, if you want. Israel, for example, insists that Arafat will not call himself, in communication to Israel, "President," but only "Chairman of the P.L.O." And in the negotiations, one of the Israeli conditions is that what Palestinians may elect--I don't think there will be elections, but anyhow--that whatever will be elected will not be called Parliament or House of Commons, but only "administrative council." And so on and on. There are very many Israeli conditions, official conditions, which are intended to prevent this. If you want more than this, then immediately after Oslo, Rabin said in the Knesset that he accepts this accord with five no's which were proposed by Likud and others; he didn't want the Knesset to vote on them. One of the no's--it is also embodied in the Labor Party program--is: never a Palestinian state. There is only a very small minority of people within Israel who are for a Palestinian state. The people who are most against it are religious, meaning Orthodox Jews. Of course Rabin is in an alliance with them.

What do you think is going to happen now?

More of the same. The peace process will be seen in the near future as being a fake. Not because of Arafat, but because of the Palestinian popular opposition. Al Khader was not initiated by Arafat but by the villagers of Al Khader, and there will be more like this. [Al Khader is a Palestinian village in the Bethlehem area. In December, 1994, Jews attempted to settle on a mountain belonging to the village. Faced with strong local protests from Palestinians and Israelis (see Dr. Shahak's letter to an Israeli newspaper), the Israeli government halted the settlement construction. However, instead of giving the land back to the Palestinians, the government retained it as a "military zone" and gave the settlers another mountain to settle on within the same village.--Ed.] Or if you want something more symbolic: the Israeli police have prevented a Palestinian organization from holding a press conference in the middle of Jerusalem. So it is more of the same. The Oslo agreement and all the ceremonies were an exercise in disinformation. Both sides--I emphasize both sides, because Arafat also didn't want to do anything the Oslo agreement obliged him to--both sides intended to deceive each other.

There is another argument, and a very strong one. Israel is a democratic state--for Israelis, but especially for Jews. In a democratic state, you have to announce a plan that you are going to pursue. You cannot therefore pursue a Palestinian state in stealth. You have to say to the people, or at least to the significant minority of the people in Israel who are interested in politics, who read the papers, who hear the political programs--you must know that people in Israel are much more political than in the United States, more interested in national politics--so you have to tell them what you intend to do. The Israeli government generally does, for good and for bad.

When the Begin government wanted to invade Lebanon, then for half a year or more, day and night, it told the Israeli people, we are going to invade Lebanon. The press was full of this; it was not a secret. And the same with every major policy. You can say many things about the Israeli government, but its aims are always announced more or less openly. Only the timing is usually secret.

I never accused Rabin of deceiving people. Rabin is trying only to implement the official Labor Party program on which he was elected in 1992. In his official program he said that he wants a separation of two peoples; the Palestinians will rule themselves in densely inhabited areas, and that we, our army, will watch them from the outside. This is exactly what is happening. Maybe Rabin and Peres are deceiving foreigners, which is quite another thing, but they are not deceiving Israelis.

Is the solution you support a secular Palestinian state and a secular Israeli state?

I will support any program so long as it is democratic. Democratic means an agreement of the majority of the two peoples. At present, all programs are unrealistic, meaning the conquest regime will continue.

But if you will ask me, what is most realistic, in a very minimal sense, it is still the two-state solution, an Israeli state and a Palestinian state.

I hope that a Palestinian state will be secular and democratic. But because of Arafat and his Fatah organization, if by any miracle a Palestinian state will be established--which I don't believe-but if--it will be a dictatorial state. I think Arafat is intending to establish a worse dictatorship than Assad's in Syria. So in fact, I think that the Israeli advantage, pragmatic advantage, is that there is no strong movement for democracy in Arab countries.

But for many years weren't many people saying that the P.L.O. was a democracy, even if it didn't have a state?

Well, I never said it, but I will give you very good proof that it was never a democracy. For many years, fifteen or twenty years, Arafat keeps all the money of the P.L.O. under his personal control, in fact in his name. Democracy has developed from the power of the purse, meaning that no executive ruler is allowed to keep all the money under his possession. Therefore it was never a democracy.