Złote żniwa Quotes

“At every stage of the Holocaust decisions had to be made. It is a phenomenon filled with individual initiatives, as the perpetrators were not simply cogs in a machine operating according to preordained rules. Far from it. What this means is that agency in the Shoah, to a degree we perhaps have not yet adequately recognized when thinking and writing about it, rests with a multitude of individuals. and there were, ipso facto, many chokepoints where their initiative could have been slowed down, temporarily halted, even derailed. This was a significant and viable alternative, because from a certain point on it was clear that the Nazis were going to lose the war. Consequently, to say that nothing could have been done once the Nazi policy of killing all the Jews had been set in motion is incorrect. Plenty of people could have done something, or, as it were, not done something. With the result that hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives could have been saved.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa

“What makes the Holocaust such an indigestible subject is precisely the fact of its not being a confrontation between narrowly defined protagonists. It is not a story that can be told by focusing exclusively on the Nazis (members of the SS and the Gestapo and ideological enthusiasts of the Third Reich) and the Jews. Ordinary Germans also participated in the Holocaust – state employees, the Wehrmacht, and the civilian population – by enjoying the fruits of the crime. The Holocaust is also a confrontation between institutions and civilian populations of occupied Europe and the Jews who had lived in these countries for generations.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa

“What renders studying the Holocaust so frustrating is its facelessness: the unacceptable anonymity of victims recognized in their individuality at the moment of death, which every society marks with a solemn ritual, even for the lowliest and poorest. To invoke a million people gassed at Auschwitz, to paraphrase a well-known saying, is only to quote a number. But such is the nature of the subject and the evidence at our disposal that in writing Holocaust history references to staggering numbers of victims cannot be avoided. Nonetheless we yearn to pierce the oblivion to which this relegates individual victims, if only because the violent death they suffered was by nature an intimate and personal experience. Restricted to abstraction, we would not understand what had happened, and our account of the Holocaust would not be truthful. Because, at the risk of stating the obvious, specific individuals were killed in this man-made calamity, and specific individuals carried out the killings.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa

“We are slowly beginning to understand a disturbing feature that surfaces again and again in the way Jews collectively remember this period: a recurring observation that the 'locals' (be they Ukrainians, Lithuanians, or Poles) were 'worse than the Germans.' Jews know better than anybody that the Holocaust was a Nazi invention, one that they carried around Europe as they conquered the continent. The disturbing feature in Jewish narratives of the wartime mentioned above can be explained by pointing out that death administered by people well known to the victims evoked special suffering, as they must have also felt betrayed. But we now realize that death at the hands of neighbors must have been also, literally, very painful.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa

“In private life as well as we have difficulties talking about genocide. When we encounter descriptions of extermination, whatever our temporal distance, our first reaction is to push that knowledge away. Our memory keeps that knowledge in some distant and dark corner, and moves a different history into the forefront: the history of human heroism, of solidarity. The Shoah reminds us not only of death but also of human bestiality. Yet human bestiality is taboo. This is one of the reasons for the constant return to the theme of the inexpressibility of the Shoah: speaking about it is always awkward; the moment for it is never right, the one never proper. The topic is so scorching that touching it can only burn.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa

“Operation Reinhard's objective was the total annihilation of the three million Jews inhabiting the Generalgouvernement - the part of Poland under Nazi control. How to describe such an undertaking? Any generation that did not experience the Holocaust can learn about it only from words, and the knowledge thus gained is never complete. The right words, however, are difficult to find. People who perished had no voice, and those who survived were pushed into a realm of silence by the singular character of their experiences. The violence they had endured - in concentration camps, in hiding, or in prisons - destroyed for their capacity for making contact with the world. Their experience was and remains in great measure inexpressible, because pain and physical violence destroy language and cause a reversion to a state anterior to language. Still, trauma demands to be expressed. What is horrific remains horrific so long as it is not named. Once a name is attached to it, the horror retreats; it diminishes, since the very act of naming reconnects the victim to the world. Theodor Adorno wrote that what the Nazis did to the Jews was inexpressible. Yet a way of expressing it must be found if we do not want to doom the victims to oblivion. Their number was too great to name them one by one. This is why, Adorno believed, the concept of 'genocide' was invented. That term acknowledges the facts, codified and inscribed what was inexpressible into the international declaration of human rights, normalizing it and rendering it measurable But the codification did not render 'what the Nazis did to the Jews' easier to express.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa