Black Earth(108)

Further east, in places such as Latvia and Ukraine, a few German women murdered Jews without the structure and experience provided by such facilities and indeed without any orders to do so. These women went beyond their instructions, in the spirit of what they saw and heard around them every day. German women who killed or took part in the killing of Jews during the war lived unremarkable lives in Germany before the war, and, unless they were prosecuted, which was rare, lived normal lives in Germany after the war. The role that German women played in mass killing was probably indispensable, but women were not taken seriously as actors during the war and were therefore able to shelter themselves after the war. Sometimes they spoke to their daughters.

If statelessness drew German women to the East to become murderers, the fact that Nazi Germany was a state attracted Jewish women from the East. From the perspective of Jewish women in occupied Poland or in the occupied Soviet Union, Germany could be a relatively safe place. Jewish women presented themselves to German occupation authorities as gentiles and asked for labor assignments in Germany, believing, quite correctly, that their chances for survival were higher there. If a woman had a contact in the Polish or Soviet underground (or, more rarely, with a sympathetic German) who could arrange false papers, she could work in relative security in Germany, pretending to be a Pole or a Ukrainian or someone else. For men this was much harder, since Jewish males bore an identifying mark, the circumcision, which could always be checked and would always be a source of anxiety. For Jewish women, however, false documents were a step back toward the world of recognition by the state. To be sure, they were stigmatized as racial inferiors in Germany: Those from Poland wore a patch with a P, those from the USSR a patch with the word Ost. All were required to live a life only of labor and could expect heavy punishments for breaking rules. Some died from poor working conditions, some were executed for breaking rules, a few were murdered. Nevertheless, a piece of paper that permitted a return to a zone where some kind of law functioned usually meant life.

The end of states meant the end of state protection, and the scramble for the next best thing. When whole countries ceased to be, old passports and identity documents became useless by the million. New ones had to be acquired one by one, and usually on German (or Soviet) terms. The importance of documentation and citizenship was perfectly clear at the time. In the eastern Polish city of Lwów, surrounded by Ukrainians and largely inhabited by Jews, occupied by the Soviets in 1939, the Germans in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944, a certain lapidary bit of wisdom made the rounds: “The passport is what holds body and soul together.” This meant that the people who had the power to rescue others were those who could dispense identity documents.

In eastern Europe most people understood the importance of regime transitions, and with time the western Allies also came to grasp the importance of documents. An attempt by the United States to rescue Jews depended precisely on the provision of documents and thus the extension of state recognition. In 1944, Washington appealed, under the auspices of the War Refugee Board, to European neutral states to use their diplomats to rescue Jews. Sweden cooperated with this plan, providing an amateur diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg. He was to enter Hungary in 1944, with the mission of extending to Hungarian Jews the protection of the Swedish state. Wallenberg did have backing from his own government and from the Americans, but he also knew that he was opposing German policy and provoking Hungarian fascists. Nevertheless, he issued something like fifteen thousand “protection passports,” and probably saved more Jews than anyone else.

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Wallenberg, an exceptional man, represented a certain class of rescuer, diplomats who, by virtue of their position, embodied state sovereignty and could confer state recognition. In general, the only people who could rescue Jews in large numbers were those who had some direct connection to a state and some authorization to dispense its protection. A diplomat could grant to a Jew a passport or at least a travel document—an invitation to return to the world of human reciprocity, in which a person must be treated as a person because he is represented by a state. Wallenberg was a businessman who chose and was chosen to act as a diplomat at a crucial moment: the German occupation of Hungary, when the largest remaining population of European Jews was under threat. Yet there were also other professional diplomats who found themselves serving in situations where the sovereignty of the states in which they worked was compromised, who understood that this was a disaster for Jews, and who chose to try to save them.

One such man was Ho Feng-Shan, the consul of the Republic of China in Vienna when Austria was incorporated by Germany in March 1938. Ho identified with the Austrian state and nation, and he sympathized with Chancellor Schuschnigg in his resistance to the Nazis, whom he regarded as “the devil.” Ho took a rather unusual view of the essence of national greatness, believing that it was “only possible through inclusion and tolerance.” His response to the “scrubbing parties” and pogroms that followed the collapse of Austria was to give Chinese visas to Jews. He issued at least a thousand, some of them to people whom he personally extracted from concentration camps. Ho could not have known in 1938 what fate awaited Jews who remained in central Europe, but he was responding to what was, at the time, an unprecedented outbreak of violence against them.