Indeed it wasn’t; on the 14th March, just a fraction under fifty years after the foundation of modern Israel, around seventy students met to listen to the witness of two Latvians, Mr and Mrs Ginsburg. During the hour for which Mr Ginsburg spoke, only the last half actually dealt with the terrible events of the Second World War. What we heard was not simply an impassioned description of atrocities — although these there were, Mr Ginsburg’s voice deepening, slowing and becoming quieter as he retold of the burning of the ghetto hospital on 4th October 1941, with its doors nailed shut, killing all inside: doctors, patients and visitors. Or the infamous Kinder Aktion, the children's action, when all the children, the sick and the elderly were led away to be murdered, while mothers who struggled to retain their children were beaten or shot. Or many, many other events.

What we really listened to, above all, was an attempt to make sense of the insensible: the public murder, over many years and in many locations, of six million Jews, as well as three million Russian POW’s, and countless gypsies, homosexuals, prisoners of conscience, and any one else the Nazis and their allies took a hate to. The whole community finished up as ashes, I mean literally so. Even the bones were crushed to ashes. That was the fate of my whole community.

For Mr Ginsburg the answer lay in the past: we listened to the tale of increasing persecutions associated with Christian mission. Eastern Europe slowly built up a solid Jewish population over centuries as Jews left Western and Central Europe for the still unconverted areas in the east, away from the priests and their denunciation of the Christ-killers. Latvia, the Ginsburgs’ native country (my country, he said, despite fifty years of exile) remained unconverted until the fifteenth-century. Jews settled here, selling their literacy and numeracy to the landowners, and in return being granted independence.

Yet, a successful minority is never popular especially if that minority is reclusive. The issue of never becoming fully integrated, and thus becoming disliked by the local population was a recurrent theme. The ghetto — and Jews were first placed in ghettos after the Russian invasion of Latvia in 1775 — was simply an extension, a manifestation of what already existed in the community. Jews even had their own ghettos separate from the ghettos that the Russian Orthodox rulers placed the Roman Catholic Latvians in. The origins of persecution, Mr Ginsburg seemed to be suggesting, lay as much in the fault of the community for failing to overcome their own arrogance, as in the bigotry of their Christian persecutors. That is, until the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet ideological conflict.

Myth, doctrine and ideology proliferate[d] … gullible people lapping them up … each side feeding on the paranoia and prejudices of the other. With fear of the rise of Communism, across Europe right-wing political groups seized power, abolishing democracies only recently founded after the First World War. Anti-Semitism spread like a bacillus. Latvia lay on the fault-line of this great conflict. When the Russians invaded in 1940 all ‘capitalists’, all property-owners — and especially the rich Jewish elite — were slowly rounded up by the Soviet secret police and deported to labour camps. We lived in fear of the midnight knock, he said in that hushed voice reserved for those parts of his tale that were the most disturbing. A year and a half later, Nazi troops were greeted as liberators by the Latvians. The Ginsburgs decided to stay in Latvia: fourteen of the Ginsburg family had met to discuss which way to run. The decision was swayed by two elderly members who had lived during the German invasion of Latvia in 1915. Back then the Germans had been gentlemen, they would not hurt innocent harmless civilians, they asserted. By the end of 1945, only one of those fourteen Jews remained alive.

From being proper capitalists, the Jews under the Nazi regime became identified with the Bolsheviks: betrayers of Latvia. In the capital 5,000 Jews disappeared; the rest, 30,000, were squeezed into an area previously inhabited by 5,000. Once in the ghetto, the killings continued in increasing numbers. At first with peculiar subtlety: 500 volunteers were needed to sort the archives of the town hall. Mr Ginsburg got up later than he planned and hurried to volunteer, but being the 539th person he was rejected: the Germans selected the first 534. It was a ruse: all those volunteers were led from the camp and shot. On the 4th of October, 1941, 1,500 more were rounded up and shot also. On the 28th, 10,000 people similarly were murdered. By that time seven of the Ginsburg family were already dead. Over several months the population continued to be whittled away until eventually Mr Ginsburg found himself in Dachau concentration camp, building an underground armaments factory, where the policy was to kill us by work.

How could this all be allowed to happen? Mr Ginsburg’s answer was not a comforting one. ‘Normal’ people became wolves, other ‘normal’ people became sheep. An individual need not be a monster in order to commit murderous deeds, he testified. Hitler Youth (secondary-school aged boys) attacked Russian POW’s with pick-axes. Why did they not defend themselves? Later on … I understood what malnutrition and maltreatment do to the morale of prisoners. How could near-children become mass-murderers? If you’ve got a Hitler Youth and you start indoctrinating them at the age of ten [or] twelve and the parents are afraid …

At this point his wife disagreed, and we were reminded of what we were really listening to: an attempt to explain. She could not accept her husband’s statement that the Hitler Youth did not think they did something wrong. Sure they should have known! she cried (later we found out that she had ‘lived’ in Auschwitz). At the centre of the issue was the question of morality: are there ‘rules’? Was the Holocaust a meticulously planned action, bespeaking order (albeit perverted), or was it pure chaos? Was it evil, or was it ‘nothing’? Hannah Arendt, a journalist attending the trial in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann had coined the phrase the banality of evil. Mr Ginsburg seemed to agree: I can only confirm from my own experience that the actions of the Nazis were of such overwhelming stupidity, they made mediocrity outstanding. For him, there was not collective guilt. What to do with the perpetrators still at large? The South African solution is the best: [a confession and then] let them go free. I can't see any sense in imprisoning them.

The questions of ‘why’ are endless. What about God? someone asked. Mr Ginsburg had lost his faith before the events he was describing, puzzled by the duality of the Old Testament God: one moment the deity was benevolent, the next vindictive. A religious faith had been replaced for him by a secular one, in a progressive humanity and the perfectibility of man. The holocaust had killed that. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If you lose vigilance, you lose freedom; we lost it twice, were his chosen final words. A return to an individualised suspicion? Or a pragmatic axiom for life?

And he also mentioned Christ. If Christ would have turned up he would have been counted for the death chambers, too. He said this just after answering a question about the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Yugoslavia (practically a replay), most surely another confirmation of Arendt’s general dictum. Perhaps here we get to the heart of it: was not the crucifixion in its way another of the countless holocausts? A product of hatred, bigotry, fear, of incompetence, injustice, the disciples running away: Peter’s “no I don’t know this man” repeated on the lips of all those who have failed to intercede on behalf of the persecuted? In becoming human, does God join in the human fate, the all too frequent meaninglessness of existence, its corruption, the banality of evil, rooted deep as a tree? Or to put it the other way, were the holocaust and the ‘ethnic cleansings’ of this decade other crucifixions?

And what of resurrection? Christ had a resurrection. What for the murdered six million? A re-born Israel when after the war hundreds of thousands of Jews burst free from the tomb of Europe? Is this ‘enough’? What for the Bosnian victims?

Our luck is that when this war is over no-one will believe what was done said an SS cook to Mrs Ginsburg after he had beaten a Jew for trying to steal potato peelings from the bins. One thing I believe: two survivors were proving him wrong.

Mark Smith

For those who wish to know more, the remarkable account of one man’s experience can be found in Night by Elie Wiesel, (126pp.) Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981. Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.