Day 574 – Nothing New Here – Except

Sunday, August 14, 2022

In 1985 I went to see the movie Shoah. This is the Hebrew (I think it’s Hebrew) term for genocide and is particularly used to reference the mass murder by the Nazis. It references both the mass and individual murders asociated with it.

The French director Claude Lanzmann realized that many of the people involved in the holocaust were getting old and dying. Before they left this Earth he wanted to document their stories. 

He had a Nazi guard sing the old camp song. He talked to farmers near Auschwitz. He spoke to the trainman who had to move the trains into that death camp. He reviewed with that man the number of train cars in each train, the number of people in each car, the number of times a day he moved a trainload into the camp. By simple math you understood how many people were being exterminated every day. The movie opened with the trainman recreating what he did when the Nazi guards weren’t looking. He would cast his hand down toward the ground quickly several times. He would pass his hand across his throat in knife slitting gesture. This is how the movie opened. “Why were you doing that?” asked Lanzmann. “To tell them to jump off the train, that they were going to be killed.”

I didn’t understand that gesture at the opening of the movie, but it became brutally apparent by the end. The movie was over nine hours long and was shown in two parts. I saw it on successive nights in different theaters in Washington DC. The second night I was sitting amongst some Jewish women. A person was talking for quite awhile. No subtitles came up. The women nodded knowingly in agreement with whatever was being said. Finally, the subtitle appeared translating the Yiddish (or was it Hebrew?). “it’s a long story,” was all it said. I’d love to know what that story was.

At some point in the second part there was an interview with a Jewish scholar who pointed out that the rhetoric of the Nazis was nothing new. It had been around for years, like seven hundred years. And the pogroms carried out by the Russians in earlier times had the same hateful messages. ( Interestingly, we saw “Fiddler on The Roof” recently which documents the Russian pogrom in Ukraine years before the Nazis. )

Einstein and many urban Jewish people worried when the rural Jewish populations forced off their land and migrating to the cities would stir up anti-jewish sentiment because of their uncouth ways.

But the thing that really struck me in the movie was the Jewish scholar’s comment about the rhetoric being “nothing new.” “Except,” he said, “the final solution.” This was racist code for mass-murder. Hitler like people today use such terms to cover-up their true intentions. The term “Christian Nation” and “Christian Nationalist” is such a term. Hitler never okayed an order to kill the Jews. At most, he said it was time to implement “The Final Solution.” Everyone in his command structure knew what that meant.