Black Earth(145)

We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world.

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Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity. That is not enough for its victims. No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. Perhaps it is true that to save one life is to save the world. But the converse is not true: saving the world does not restore a single lost life.

The family tree of that boy in Vienna, like that of all of the Jewish children born and unborn, has been sheared at the roots: “I the root was once the flower under these dim tons my bower comes the shearing of the thread / death saw wailing overhead.” The evil that was done to the Jews—to each Jewish child, woman, and man—cannot be undone. Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future.

That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.





Acknowledgments


Wanda J., with the help of others, saved herself and her two sons. One of them grew up in postwar communist Poland to become a historian. He taught in the secret study circles that were known, by reference to a tradition of the nineteenth century, as a Flying University. After martial law was declared in Poland in 1981 he was interned in a camp. A decade after that, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he agreed to be one of my two doctoral supervisors. In that sense I owe my career as a historian to the people who aided Wanda Grosmanowa-Jedlicka, to Wanda Grosmanowa-Jedlicka herself, and to her younger son Jerzy Jedlicki. In the quarter century in which I have had the good fortune of making the study of eastern Europe a career, I have been instructed by several other people who survived the Holocaust. Among my colleagues are people who owe their lives to rescuers mentioned here, such as Sugihara, and among my students people descended from people saved by others, such as Sheptyts’kyi. It would be absurdly conceited to describe these encounters as a personal debt; I acknowledge them as a source of this book. History goes on, for better and for worse; the pale light of each rescue refracts down the mirrored passages of the generations.

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Much of this book was written in Vienna and in the northeast of Poland: two places where some of the most notorious oppression of Jews took place, the discussion of which has produced outstanding histories that have preceded and informed my own. The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna is the special creation of my late friend, the philosopher Krzysztof Michalski. Without his intellectual welcome and without the support of his colleagues there, especially Ivan Krastev and Klaus Nellen, I would not have undertaken this book nor seen it through to completion. I am grateful to IWM fellows for a seminar devoted to this book and to Dessislava Gavrilova, Izabela Kalinowska, and Shalini Randeria for their friendship in Vienna. In the summers I was privileged to have been the guest of Krzysztof Czy?ewski and Ma?gorzata Szporer-Czy?ewska and their Borderlands Foundation in Krasnogruda, staying with my family in a house that once belonged to the family of Czes?aw Mi?osz. The Borderlands Foundation does what so many humanists recommend: seek and find ways to understand the other.

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Some of the debts go back to the years just before I began this book. Discussions of my book Bloodlands, a history of German and Soviet mass killing on the lands where the Holocaust took place, helped me to ask what I hope were some of the right questions about the origins of the Final Solution. The books of Peter Longerich have been significant, in that I am seeking to extend his case for politics to peoples beyond the Germans and lands beyond Germany. Christoph Dieckmann’s study of Lithuania has been exemplary in its unity of theoretical understanding and regional knowledge. On the specific question of the psychic consequences of the appearance and disappearance of state power, I have been influenced for two decades by east European rereadings of Hannah Arendt, in particular that of Jan Tomasz Gross. Several of the lines of thought I pursue here were initiated in his books Revolution from Abroad and Neighbors. For almost a quarter century, Andrzej Wa?kiewicz has challenged me to think more broadly about the category of politics. While I was writing Bloodlands I was also helping my late friend and colleague Tony Judt create a book of discussions called Thinking the Twentieth Century. Those conversations in New York helped me clarify some of the thinking about the state that figures in this book.