Three Lies

Pierre Sauvage: Because it raises fundamental questions about what American Jewish attitudes were during the Holocaust. And because we live on lies about that period.

David Samuels: What are the biggest lies we tell ourselves about the Holocaust?

Pierre Sauvage: The biggest lie is that we didn’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, for some rancher in Montana who wasn’t reading the press or listening to the radio maybe not to know. But it was massively present. God, this question goes in so many directions. When you think of movies that come out, like Woody Allen’s Radio Days. What is Woody Allen’s Radio Days about? A happy childhood in Brooklyn, in a Jewish family, during the years of the Holocaust. Or Lost in Yonkers, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Neil Simon having nothing to do with the Holocaust. Wonderful play, by the way. But it’s like Hitler is totally removed from their frame of reference. This is nonsense. This is absolute nonsense. Woody Allen’s parents—Woody may not realize it—but Woody Allen’s parents were in their bedroom scared to death about what was happening to their relatives in Europe. So that is the biggest lie.

The second biggest lie is that we couldn’t have done anything. That was the conventional wisdom after the war. The people who were propounding that point of view were, for the most part, the people who had done nothing.

But I’m not so interested in judging the generations then. I think those were very difficult times, very challenging times. Yeah, I believe they made mistakes. But I don’t believe that we would have acted any better. That is facile and glib and smug.

What shocks me is that we today are not willing to let in that past, we’re not trying to understand it. I’ll give you one example: At one point in the Bergson film, I mentioned Einstein, we were talking about Rabbi Wise, and I have some footage of Einstein, who actually is in his office sitting down. Well, Einstein was the most powerful Jew, virtually in the world and certainly in America. In 1938 at Princeton, there was a vote among Princeton freshmen, and he was judged the second greatest living person in the world. The first greatest person in the world—according to the Princeton freshman class of 1938—was Hitler.

There was a book a few years ago, by Walter Isaacson, on Einstein. And there is a chapter in it called “1939-1945.” The main title of that chapter is “The Bomb.” There is not one word about how Einstein was reacting to the murder of his relatives. But Einstein could’ve picked up the phone, and he would’ve been received by Roosevelt at any time.

Again, my point is less about Einstein, but how can Walter Isaacson write a biography of Einstein and consider that his reactions to the massacre of his culture, his people, his culture, was not on his mind? That’s absurd.

David Samuels: It actually raises a very funny counter-factual history. What if Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and everybody else working on the bomb said, “You know what? We’re going to stop working.”

Pierre Sauvage: There’s a great movie there.

David Samuels: “We’re going to stop working on the bomb for three days unless you bomb the tracks to Auschwitz. Because otherwise we will be guilty of mass murder twice over.”

Pierre Sauvage: I love it. I never thought about that. But that is so far removed from the reality of that time. All that time, in fact, Einstein is giving advice. There’s no way they could have ignored his comments.

David Samuels: Astra, how did your father explain the American Jewish community and how it acted during the war? He came to this community, as a young man, and told them that everybody was being killed in Europe, and they had to do something—and they didn’t do it. He then chose to live here. He obviously must have had strong feelings of attraction to American life, and he also must have had strong feelings of anger and real criticism of the community that hadn’t listened to him.

Astra Temko: I think that’s probably true. But I think he loved America. He was quite inspired by it.  You know that he was a member of the first Knesset and then resigned. I think he was the only Knesset member who ever resigned out of principle. He thought that they should write a constitution. He felt very passionately about that. They weren’t interested, so he resigned.

He always had the more unpopular view. But he loved America. During the war, he had a real belief that if only he could get the word out there, Americans would make the moral choice and do the right thing.

David Samuels: You’d think that that would be a devastating experience for someone to come here with that kind of belief and to find that in fact he wasn’t listened to. But it didn’t affect him that way. Why not?

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David Samuels, Tablet Magazine's literary editor, is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.