Word: holocaust
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This is what the Holocaust seems to have come to--an exchange of dollars for unspeakable suffering and loss, and a shared pretense that money is an instrument of justice. In cases where restitution is at issue--the return of artworks, homes and property to their rightful owners, for instance--financial repayment may come close to settling the score; but even there, no compensation would take account of what it cost to be dragged away from one's home or to have had one's beloved possessions seized by the state...
This point is being made obliquely by Jewish groups and individuals who abjure these offers of institutional compensation and even gently condemn those whose accept them. In TIME last December, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, himself a Holocaust survivor, said those "who have claims deserve to bring them forward, but it's at a heavy price. The next generation will believe it's all about money." Yet the plain, if unsatisfactory, truth is that money is the most tangible instrument of compensation that society has at its disposal. Verbal apologies have been proffered in recent...
...helpless and airless because, of course, the Holocaust cannot be compensated for. Not only does money not serve; no form of justice serves. Lawrence Langer says it just right in his new book, Preempting the Holocaust: "Here injustice prevails." Injustice wins. Thus the general feeling of emptiness, of the absence of retribution, at the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1962, and even at the Nuremberg trials, where "war crimes" were supposed to find a fitting punishment. There are no moral equivalents. One might have hanged Himmler, Goebbels, Goring, Hitler himself--hanged them...
Money, the love of which used to be thought of as the root of all evil, is supposed to become the offsetting factor for evil, but who believes it? Payers and payees alike are powerless, stupefied. The Holocaust not only lies beyond compensation; it also lies beyond explanation, reconciliation, sentiment, forgiveness, redemption or any of the mechanisms by which people attempt to set wrong things right. In a way, that fact is as much a sign of its unique enormity as the monstrosity itself. All moral thought is grounded in the possibility of correction. Yet here is a wrong that...
...went to Yugoslavia a few years ago with Elie Wiesel, whose work repeats what is, in the context of the Holocaust, an unassailable warning: Never forget. Yet now we descended into a place where memory--indignant, obsessive, murderous--is both a way of life and a fatal disease...