204 Afterthought: Rationality and Shame

continuous inability to come to terms with the meaning of the Holocaust, our inability to call the bluff of the murderous hoax, our willingness to go on playing the game of history with the loaded dice of reason so understood that it shrugs the clamours of morality as irrelevant or loony, our consent to the authority of cost-effective calculus as an argument against ethical commandments - all these bear an eloquent evidence to the corruption the Holocaust exposed but did little, it appears, to discredit.

Two years of my early childhood were marked with my grandfather's heroic yet vain attempts to introduce me to the treasures of biblical lore. Perhaps he was not a very inspiring teacher; perhaps I was an obtuse and ungrateful pupil. The fact is, I remember next to nothing from his lessons. One story, however, carved itself into my brain deeply and haunted me for many years. This was a story of a saintly sage who met a beggar on the road while travelling with a donkey loaded with sackfuls of food. The beggar asked for something to eat. 'Wait,' said the sage, I must first untie the sacks.' Before he finished the unpacking, however, the long hunger took its toll and the beggar died. Then the sage started his prayer: Punish me, o Lord, as I failed to save the life of my fellow man!' The shock this story gave me is well-nigh the only thing I remember from the interminable list of my grandfather's homilies..It clashed with all the mental drill to which my schoolteachers subjected me at that time and ever since. The story struck me as illogical (which it was), and therefore wrong (which it was not). It took the Holocaust to convince me that the second does not necessarily follow from the first.

Even if one knows that not much more could have been done practically to save the victims of the Holocaust (at least not without additional, and probably formidable, costs), this does not mean that moral qualms can be put to sleep. Neither does it mean that a moral person's feeling of shame is unfounded (even if its irrationality in terms of self-preservation can be, indeed, easily proved). To this feeling of shame - an indispensable condition of victory over the slow-acting poison, the pernicious legacy of the Holocaust - the most scrupulous and historically accurate computations of the numbers of those who could' and those who 'could not' help, of those who could' and those who 'could not' be helped, are irrelevant.

Even the most sophisticated quantitative methods of researching 'the facts of the matter' would not advance us very far toward an objective (i.e. universally binding) solution to the issue of moral responsibility. There is no scientific method to decide whether their gentile neighbours

Afterthought: Rationality and Shame 205

failed to prevent the transportation of Jews to the camps because the Jews were so passive and docile, or whether the Jews so seldom escaped their guards because they had nowhere to escape to - sensing the hostility, or indifference, of the environment. Equally, there are no scientific methods to decide whether the well-off residents of the Warsaw ghetto could have done more to alleviate the lot of the poor dying in the streets of hunger and hypothermia, or whether the German Jews could have rebelled against the deportaton of the Ostjuden, or the Jews with French citizenship could have done something to prevent incarceration of the 'non-French Jews'. Worse still, however, the calcu­lation of objective possibilities and computation of costs only blurs the moral essence of the problem.

The issue is not whether those who survived, collectively - fighters who on occasion could not but be bystanders, bystanders who on occasion could not but fear to become victims - should feel ashamed, or whether they should feel proud of themselves. The issue is that only the liberating feeling of shame may help to recover the moral significance of the awesome historical experience and thus help to exorcise the spectre of the Holocaust, which to this day haunts human conscience and makes us neglect vigilance at present for the sake of living in peace with the past. The choice is not between shame and pride. The choice is between the pride of morally purifying shame, and the shame of morally devastat­ing pride. I am not sure how I would react to a stranger knocking on my door and asking me to sacrifice myself and my family to save his life. I have been spared such a choice. I am sure, however, that had I refused shelter, I would be fully able to justify to others and to myself that, counting the number of lives saved and lost, turning the stranger away was an entirely rational decision. I am also sure that I would feel that unreasonable, illogical, yet all-too-human shame. And yet I am sure, as well, that were it not for this feeling of shame, my decision to turn away the stranger would go on corrupting me till the end of my days.

The inhuman world created by a homicidal tyranny dehumanized Us victims and those who passively watched the victimization by pressing both to use the logic of self-preservation as absolution for moral insensitivtty and inaction. No one can be proclaimed guilty for the sheer fact of breaking down under such pressure. Yet no one can be excused from moral self-deprecation for such surrender. And only when feeling ashamed for one's weakness can one finally shatter the mental prison which has outlived its builders and its guards. The task today is to destroy that potency of tyranny to keep its victims and witnesses