I’ve been somewhat haunted for several years by the book “Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.” Not so much by the book itself (which is incredible), but by the words of Bruno Bettehheim in the Forward, which by itself was well worth the price of admission. He raised ideas I had never considered.
Bettehheim, a Jew, survived Dachau and Buchenwald. He brutally criticized the “business as usual” attitude of Jews who offered little or no resistance, and skewered such sainted figures as the Ann Frank family. It was 70 years ago today that Ann Frank was arrested.
In Buchenwald, Bettelheim said he asked hundreds of German Jews why they didn’t leave Germany when they had the chance.
“Their answer was: How could we leave? It would have meant giving up our homes, our places of business. Their earthly possessions had so taken possession of them that they could not move; instead of using them, they were run by them….For a long time the intention of the Nazis was to force undesirable minorities, such as the Jews, into emigration. Only when this did not work was the extermination policy instituted.”
In Poland, he said, many Jews left everything and fled to Russia…and survived. In Holland, where the Franks lived, thousands fled the country or took up arms in the underground. Those who didn’t want to give up the lives they had built ended up dead—“suicidal behavior” in Bettelheim’s opinion.
The Ann Frank story, he said, is a perfect example of “business as usual.”
“All the Franks wanted was to go on with life as much as possible in the usual fashion. Little Anne, too, wanted only to go on with life as usual, and nobody can blame her. But hers was certainly not a necessary fate, much less a heroic one; it was a senseless fate. The Franks could have faced the facts and survived, as did many Jews living in Holland…But for that she would have had to be separated from her parents and gone to live with a Dutch family as their own child. Everybody who recognized the obvious knew that the hardest way to go underground was to do it as a family; that to hide as a family made detection by the SS most likely.”
But instead of recognizing the need for extreme action, the Franks tried to preserve the family togetherness to which they were accustomed. At the least, Bettelheim said, they could have armed themselves and shot one or two SS before being hauled away. “There was no surplus of SS men. The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the police state….They could have sold their lives dearly instead of walking to their death.”
The play ends with Anne stating her belief in the good in all men. But this, Bettelheim argues, is what got them killed. They needed to accept the reality of the gas chambers, of the existence of pure evil around them, and take drastic action accordingly. Instead, they clung to life as they had known it.
He says that when Jews, like the Franks, waited passively for the SS to knock on their doors, it was the first step in a voluntary walk into the crematoria.
I can make a leap to the Christian life. Jesus told the disciples that following him would be far, far from “business as usual.” Am I so enamored with the life I lead that I’m unwilling to give it up so I can flee to something better, if God directs me so?
