Echoes of Atrocity

When Art Remembers

My earliest Holocaust memories are stark, simple black and white paintings hung on the basement hallways of my childhood synagogue: A crevice with a skull wedged in. A pile of bodies. Barbed wire.

When I eventually learned of the Nazis and their handiwork, these preprogrammed images helped illuminate my sense of horror. When they weren’t torturing and murdering their victims, the Nazis were busy plundering their homes and businesses to fund the war effort and line their pockets. Everything was taken, from precious metal heirlooms to priceless works of art. We hand down the gravity of the Holocaust from generation to generation in strange and awful ways.

As an adult I took a job fundraising for a synagogue, and the coolest part of my orientation was choosing from the congregation’s collection which art pieces would adorn my office wallspace. As my employer possessed fine art pieces in the hundreds, the older and larger synagogue where I grew up likely held thousands in its collection. Only then did I realize how much thought must go into deciding which of an organization’s art should be on public display at any given time. What stories do we choose to tell?

For its part, the ecosystem of Holocaust books, films, museums, academic study and religious ritual has produced a name-brand level of recognition for Hitler’s industrial venues of torture and mass murder. Take for example certain editions of the prayerbook for Judaism’s holiest day, Yom Kippur, which intersperse the traditional confessional list of sins (we have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have stolen) with a list of Nazi death camps:

Dachau.

Bergen-Belsen.

Sobibor.

These names alone evoke vast swells of horror, of history’s gravest ills;

Treblinka.

Buchenwald.

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

When Jonathan Glazer received the Academy Award for The Zone of Interest’s haunting treatment of Auschwitz, his acceptance speech triggered a round of perverse condemnation.

Glazer revealed the entirely noncontroversial goal of the film: to make us see ourselves (including the Israelis and the Palestinians) in the Nazis, so that we may resist the evil inclinations of nations.

Trembling at the podium while he touched one of Zionism’s nearly 613 third rails, Glazer sparked a lamentably predictable firestorm for violating the illicit injunction against comparing the Nazis to anyone, let alone God’s chosen people.

The Holocaust commemoration industry has built up the Nazi genocide as singularly evil, elevated Hitler to special villain status, and sanctified the memory of only his Jewish victims as uniquely pure and worthy of irrational recompense: absolute qualified moral immunity for the Jewish state. The warping of Holocaust memory to serve the Jewish state’s propaganda program has rendered this important 20th century event all but useless in understanding and navigating our present challenges.

We have committed abominations.

We have gone astray.

We have led others astray.

Exceptionalizing Europe’s Jews and their midcentury nightmare seeds defensive reactions to other cases of genocide or creeping authoritarianism held up against Nazi Germany. Unable to engage with comparisons that inherently demystify Jewish victimhood, such reactions seem to emerge from an almost religious reverence rather than historical understanding.

The severe backlash inveighed against Jonathan Glazer–and the film itself–is but one instance of the routine demonization of artists, journalists, academics, advocates and politicians who dare puncture Zionist mythologies. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message is another prominent recent example of this retaliatory reactionism. Even the United Nations and the most respected human rights organizations are subject to the same defensive delegitimization playbook.

Glazer at the 96th Academy Awards

B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (Gaza and the West Bank), has been labeled disloyal, extreme, a “Hamas apologist,” traitors “attacking our right to self-defense,” and the “tip of the spearhead against Israel.” Its ads listing the names of Palestinian victims were banned from Israeli radio, and members of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) regularly call for its investigation.

We have sworn false oaths.

We have harbored baseless hatred.

We have fallen to confusion of the heart.

In the October 17 issue of the New York Review of Books (NYRB), Open Society Foundations President Emeritus and Human Rights Watch Co-founder Aryeh Neier reviewed an August 2024 B’tselem report on Israel’s post-October 7 system of Palestinian torture camps. Quoting one of the prison guards from prisoner testimony, the report is titled “Welcome to Hell.”

The most remarkable feature of Neier’s writing is how straightforward and unemotional it is. When reviewing the damning report, Israeli evils are laid bare by Neier’s banal language. This is the genius of a good review: not a positive review per se–though that is the case here–but a review that is a metaliterary achievement in its own right.

“We love to love to read,” quip the Pod Save America bros, capturing the honest intellectual’s foible. Insofar as we truly love to read, and as much as we actually prioritize reading over its leisure time competitors, most of us can’t help but aspire to be more literary than we are or ever can be.

Here great reviews fill in the gap, whether regarding books, art, film (like The Zone of Interest), or as is the case here with Neier, scathing NGO reports.

Sparing us the time and emotional impact of digesting B’tselem’s full report, Neier demonstrates how all great reviews serve the reader: they metabolize, summarize, contextualize, and judge on quality and impact. A great review applies expertise and distance, first evaluates the work and then distills something deeper than the original.

I have no plans to read “Welcome to Hell.” I don’t think I could stomach it. No matter; Neier has shown me as much as I need to know. From the report’s detailed patterning of systemized torture, Neier identifies two characteristics distinguishing Israel’s post-10/7 torment of Palestinians from his decades of experience observing human rights abuses:

Israel tortures for no discernible reason, a departure from others who typically seek to extract something (usually information or loot) from their victims. Historical examples of systemic torture also rely on secrecy and isolation, whereas Israel tortures its victims in front of other victims to add insult to injury and attack the collective Palestinian psyche. Long promoting itself as the “start-up nation,” Israel has innovated the systematic use of torture as a novel form of terrorism.

Like film, like painting, good writing holds the power to deeply disturb the reader. “I don't so much hope that any reader agrees with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates. I took a lot from this review, but in the somatic experience of reading it my heart only broke open when reading the names of the torture camps themselves:

Megiddo.

Ketziot.

Be’er Sheva.

For Palestinians and for anyone with a modicum of empathy in the years to come, these names will strike a chord in the same hallowed register as the names of those eternally branded Nazi death camps.

The fallacy that Jews could never be comparable to Nazis is now completely shattered. But even without that direct comparison, you can’t absorb this kind of writing and not leave haunted by the names.

Hopefully, in time, the names of Gazan cities currently under Israeli siege will evoke life and joy more than they signal torture and slaughter. May the names of these camps in Israel proper, on the other hand, only endure as totems of man’s darkest depravity towards his brother. And as Tevye said, “there is no other hand.”