Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

And you know what? She’s right.

I was trying to ask her my question, the “why the Jews” question. Maybe I was getting a little bit strident. I was asking her, I was saying, “Why did the Shoah happen?” She always calls it the Shoah, I grew up calling it the Holocaust, yet another way I feel like not-a-real-Jew, but whatever. I pointed out that the Native American genocide had a very clear motivation — yes, there was a lot of talk about subhuman savages, but in the end it was about greed: We wanted the land. About American slavery, yes there was a lot of talk about subhuman savages, but in the end, again, it was all about greed: White men were making fortunes off the backs of their slaves and they would use anything, even the Bible, to excuse their behavior. I understand the state that Germany was in when Hitler came to power, I understand that all the same subhuman rhetoric was applied to Jews, that they were dirty, that they were “holding back the motherland from her potential” or something, but doesn’t the whole thing seem kind of cracked? It all seems so terribly indirect. Like, exactly HOW were the Jews harming Germany? Show me the money trail, was basically what I was asking.

I mean, I think people who complain about welfare moms in America are just tragically uninformed because we spend way more on rockets and bombs than we do on helping out a few single moms, but whatever, at least they are mad because it is their tax dollars being spent on a group they feel isn’t “working hard enough.” But the Jews were taking care of themselves. They weren’t relying on German handouts or anything. The logic of “if we build a huge expensive killing machine, it will make our economy better” is just way, way out there, right? Except, I guess it kind of did, right? It kind of worked. I mean the Reich hired tons of people and they turned even the bodies of the Jews into products that they made money off of, soap and lampshades, etc., and they confiscated so much Jewish wealth, art, jewelry, gold teeth, I mean, they took it all, so that had to be helping. But still, they could have just motivated themselves to do ANYTHING to create an industry, it didn’t have to be exterminating Jews. It just doesn’t make sense. I literally don’t understand the logic and I don’t understand how everyone wasn’t just confused. Like, they are following along with Hitler’s speeches, and then he’s like, ERGO, we should kill all the Jews, and wasn’t everyone like, huh ?

Maybe this is naïve and totally uninformed. I haven’t read any of Hitler’s speeches and I haven’t read Mein Kampf because Mama said it wasn’t a good idea. So I probably came off as totally snotty and sophomoric to Judith, who after all has been thinking deeply about this her whole life, and anyway, I think she thought what I was saying was that the Jews had DONE SOMETHING to get killed. And it’s true, I kept saying it that way, I kept saying, “But why the Jews? What was it about us? Would it have been different if Jews had been more blend-y, like more assimilated? Or was it Jewish success that was making Germans jealous, like if the Jews had been even poorer than the poorest Germans, maybe they would have just felt pity and not the need to turn us into soap?”

I can think of, like, a million reasons now why all of this bothered her, but I don’t know which are true or if I am just making them up. Maybe she objected to me casually using “us,” as though I were part of the Jewish experience, when really I am a spoiled American girl who hasn’t been to temple in years. Or maybe it was just so obvious that I didn’t know the very basics of the situation and I was asking for, like, a Sesame Street — level history refresher course from her. Maybe she wondered why I had decided she was somehow my teacher and it was her job to explain the fucking SHOAH to me, of all things.

Anyway, what she said was: “You must never entertain this line of reasoning. You must never allow any conversation to begin that predicates German actions on Jewish behavior. There is no reason for what they did. You must never, ever, ever seek to explain the Shoah by exploring Jewish culpability.”

“I’m not saying the Jews are ACTUALLY culpable,” I said. “I’m saying the Germans must have thought we were culpable of something or else they wouldn’t have tried to kill all of us, and I am not exactly sure what we are supposed to be guilty of except not being blond and usually there is just a better reason than that!”

And then she tried to tell me about Heidegger and about how he had this whole argument that Jews were modern and that in embracing modernity they had actually caused their own destruction. He even referred to the Shoah as the Jewish “self-destruction” as though they were the ones doing it to themselves! He said it was the “supreme fulfillment of technology.” But the truth is, Fang, I didn’t understand all of this and I don’t really know who Heidegger is, though she said he was a philosopher, but who cares about philosophy, no one reads it, it doesn’t matter, right? I couldn’t understand why she was bringing him up, so I just kept saying, “But I don’t care about Heidegger and anyway he sounds crazy too!”

Which, I mean, he DOES, right? Was there something in the water? Was there mold in the rye bread? What the fuck was going on? The supreme fulfillment of technology? It’s like a weird 2001: A Space Odyssey fantasy in which the killing machines just decided to start killing Jews on their own.

So she says, “Any argument that hinges on the Jews doing anything at all to cause the Holocaust is that argument. Any argument that even deigns to entertain that as a question, is already insane and should not be pursued.”

So basically she was saying that I was being Heidegger, which I thought was really unfair and I told her so, and she said I was just too young to understand any of this, that I didn’t have any real experience with anti-Semitism, which is probably true but still rude, and I said so, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore and could I please leave her apartment and take the cat with me, she wasn’t fond of cats.

But she said it in this way like she really meant that she wasn’t fond of teenage girls and she was just being too polite to say so outright and all this time she had only been barely tolerating both the cat and me. Which is probably true. But she is the one who decided to come on a weird history tour for vacation. If she wanted to be alone, she should have stayed at home. Because let’s be honest, she wouldn’t be functioning on this trip without me, I am the only one who can open her door and she still can’t find the supermarket on her own.

I am being uncharitable.

I just hate feeling like I am not even allowed to ask questions. Isn’t there something terribly unsatisfying and obviously FALSE about saying that there can be no line of reasoning that explores why the Germans did what they did? That it has to be this sort of spontaneous miracle of cruelty? That it rose up out of pure evil and it isn’t part of the world at all? Because it very much is part of the world. And it isn’t just the Germans. It isn’t just the Shoah. It’s all of history, Fang. The other day, we were walking up these stairs to get to a park and Darius said to look down at the stairs and he pointed out that some of them had inscriptions in Hebrew. The Soviet authorities had destroyed the Jewish cemetery and repurposed the headstones as slate for building projects. Every day Lithuanians literally climb up a hill on the headstones of Jews. Where the Great Synagogue used to be, there is a kindergarten now. I bet there are kids who go there who grow up and go their whole lives without ever knowing there was a temple there.