Hello there all,
A while ago I transcribed a video interview with Rabbi Michael Berenbaum from the University of Judaism. The interview concerns Jehovah's Witnesses during the second world war in the German concentration camp system. Berenbaum is a historian and specifically researches Jehovah's Witnesses during the Shoah and also the idea of martyrdom. I transcribed it [very roughly and I apologize for the errors] for a personal project that I'm working on and today I thought I'd post it here for posterity. The interview comes from the documentary 'Knocking' and is in the extra features section.
Its primarily of historical interest and makes for some interesting reading.
Hope you enjoy it
SB
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Reality in the Holocaust is always stranger than fiction, because our imagination lacks the capacity to fully project the reality that was experienced in the camps.
I wouldn't say that so few know about it, I would say so few study about it. So I wouldn't say that so few scholars know about the fate of Jehovah's Witnesses in the concentration camps, so few scholars study the fate of Jehovah's Witnesses in the concentration camps. I study it because of the very fact that I'm interested in the question of choice, I'm interested in the religious categories and I'm also interested in the historic question of martyrdom.
Kiddush HaShem which is the classed definition of martyrdom means the sanctification of God's name. Most Jews were denied the possibility of Kiddush HaShem because they weren't killed because of their faith, they were killed because of the blood they contained within them.
In the classical sense of the term Jehovah's Witnesses were the embodiment of Kiddush HaShem. They died for the sanctification of God's name in their view. One would probably not be accurate by saying Jehovah's Witnesses as a group would be the only martyrs of the holocaust. There were groups of Jews that experienced martyrdom.
There's a famous story of a rabbi who prepared his community for martyrdom and even made the blessing of martyrdom. “Blessed art thou Lord our God, sovereign of the universe, who has commanded us to sanctify God's name in public”, and with that he prepared to enter the chambers and to die. That's a group martyrdom. There are indications of other types of martyrdom.
Jehovah's Witnesses as a collectivity had the greatest choice as to whether to leave the camps or not; and therefore as a group when Jehovah's Witnesses chose not to leave the camps, they had the clearest indication of martyrdom because the clearest indication of martyrdom is [that] they sanctify God's name by refusing even to sign their name to a Nazi document.
The deal was very simple: Renounce your faith, indicate that you're not going to participate in Jehovah's Witnesses meetings, you're not going to proselytise, you're not going to spread the faith and you can go free. Simple half page document, fill it out, sign it and you go free.
Now let me tell you something, the Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to sign that document had an integrity of their own, its not an integrity I agree with because anybody who could have gotten out of camps should have signed any damn thing they wanted [you] to sign for the Nazis, because to treat their documents as a serious document, which is asking you to regard that as an agreement, or as a statement, is to treat their society with a respect it does not deserve.
But the deal was simple: Sign a document renounce your faith, you go free. Few renounced their faith and most chose to suffer rather than to sign the documents that would have set them free. Let me stress, I don't agree with that because its according the other side an integrity they did not earn and they certainly do not deserve; and anything you could do, anything you could do to get out of the camps was in my point of view a mitzvah, a good deed; and surely far more beneficial than signing or not signing a document that the Nazi's requested of you.
They should have signed the form and said my signature on a document presented to me by the Nazis has no force whatsoever; They should have said: "They can take this document and do with it exactly what it's worth; which is zero; I'm going to continue my faith and the hell with them." But get out of the camp; Why give them a free victim? Why regard them as having integrity enough to be concerned as to what the hell you give them?
If they're oppressing people, if they're killing people, if they're systematically murdering people, what difference does it make if you behave with integrity towards them? I would never tell a Jehovah's Witness, never instruct them to give up their faith. But I would say that the Nazis were unworthy of such a magnificent demonstration of faith.
So I would be prepared to face God and say: "God, you know I signed a document renouncing my faith in order to get out of a concentration camp and not allow the Nazis one cheap victory." I hope that's the worst thing that I can do; but I'd be a pretty damn good human being; be a pretty wonderful human being if that was the worst thing I did in life. So I'd be prepared for God to see me do that.
The story about the Holocaust for Jews is that the Holocaust was an atrocity. They suffered and they were killed not because of their reason and not because of their choice but because of the choice made by others; and they faced a situation which they had no ethically proper choice. They had the choice between the impossible and the horrific. Jehovah's Witnesses were classically in that sense martyrs and tragic figures. They understood precisely why they suffered and they had the capacity to imagine enduring it and outlasting it.
The interesting thing is that people who study suffering say that the person who understands why he suffers and for what he suffers can endure a greater amount of suffering without it destroying their self and their soul.
So Jehovah's Witnesses have a higher rate of survival than other victim groups in the camps. They had a higher level of solidarity and they had a higher level of being able to maintain their own peculiar spiritual integrity; and actually their own unique spiritual integrity. Peculiar is to give it a pejorative description, they had an easier time retaining their own unique spiritual integrity, something that was denied to other victim groups because they lacked the mechanisms of solidarity; most particularly for example the German male homosexuals who died in far greater percentages among the number of incarcerations. The number of incarcerations were somewhat comparable to the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Very often in the camps there was the war of all against all. People survived in part because human beings offered assistance to one another that kept people from going down to the deepest level of savagery. Women's experience differs from men in that women report that they had the equivalent of camp sisters; that they established a close relationship with somebody else that enabled them to overcome at least some of the brutality of it all.
Jehovah's Witnesses had group solidarity and they had a greater sense of allegiance, one to another and a greater sense of assistance one to another; they also offered assistance to other prisoners at least in the recollection of survivors in their memoirs; they offered assistance to one another with a greater frequency and they succumbed less to the brutality of the camps than other groups. If you read survivors memoirs you're impressed with the way in which Jehovah's Witnesses retain their integrity.
One survivor said of Auschwitz: “If you cried you died”. If you expressed feelings. Feelings were dangerous. Most people who went through the camp experience became numb and it was only later that they could return to absolutely feeling and they could return to the full sense of normalcy in terms of values or anything else.
Anybody who was unprepared to organize, which is a combination of – to trade – to steal – to arrange – to negotiate; anybody who was unprepared to organize had a very difficult chance of survival; so that you had to break the system in order to survive, especially if you were Jewish because the system wanted to kill you, it wanted to destroy you, it wanted you not to exist.
Remember the other reason Jehovah's Witnesses could retain their integrity is they weren't under a death sentence; they merely had to endure the suffering. Jews were under a death sentence.
In the camps the Nazis understood Jehovah's Witnesses behaved with a peculiar integrity and they were so deeply pacifistic that they could serve as barbers to the SS; and I don't agree with their pacifism but I have to acknowledge it and I have to make note of it. If I had the opportunity to have a razor to the neck of a SS officer the temptation to cut that neck and to slice him into smithereens would be too great to resist.
I can truly say that I admire the religious integrity of the Jehovah's Witnesses who behaved with integrity, who refused to commit idolatry and a who refused to violate the integrity of their faith even before the Nazis by signing a document.
I think that was wrong because I think it accorded the Nazis an authority and a dignity that they had completely violated, just as I think that their pacifism was wrong because the Nazis were unworthy of pacifism; they could only be defeated by force and if there were only pacifism then the Nazis would still be in power. Only force defeated them, that is one of the reasons I cannot be a pacifist and one of the reasons I regard pacifism as an inappropriate religious choice, but one certainly has to make note of it.
It appears as if the leadership of Jehovah's Witnesses, at the beginning of the Nazi regime tried to find a neutral space; We're not Jews, were not pro-Jewish, they didn't say we're not anti-Jewish, but they said we're not Jews, we're not pro-Jewish; we have no challenge to offer you; that's not our world. Your world is not our world; leave us in this neutral space. Later on as the nation state Nazism became all pervasive there was no neutral space.
If you weren't part of it; if you weren't opposing Nazism you then were conforming to it and that didn't allow for neutrality. And I'm not sure Jehovah's Witnesses were ever enormously embracive of Jews, but they were enormously dissonant from the Nazi conformity; and therefore they didn't hate Jews with the vehemence that the rest of German society manifested.
Jehovah's witnesses were consistently anti-idolatrous; most Christian groups tried to find a means of accommodation and many Christian groups essentially succumbed to the cultural conformity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant groups ended up going along and some very enthusiastically so. Jehovah's Witnesses ultimately resisted Nazism once they understood that there was no neutral space that could be found in that society.
I [collaborated] with a very distinguished Christian colleague of mine John Roth on a book called “The Holocaust religious and philosophical implications”.
The clearest religious implication of the Jehovah's Witnesses is that if one takes God seriously and scorns idolatry then one could not be a Nazi, and if one reveres God then one must resist Nazism. Same cannot be said for other groups that succumbed to idolatry. Same cannot be said for other Christian groups that succumbed to idolatry.
I'm less interested in keeping a scorecard, good guys - bad guys than I am observing historical phenomenon, and the historical phenomenon I observe with Jehovah's Witnesses as a group who understood why they suffered, who had a choice as to whether to suffer or not, who lived with their integrity. If others want to laud that they may. I want to note that and I guess I do believe that it was laudatory.
Joseph is again a unique character. There are not many people who underwent a conversionary experience. I am a religious Jew, I want Jews to remain Jews. I think Judaism is correct and it is a correct and appropriate path; and is the correct and appropriate path for Jews, so I can only look at the story and observe what happened, and I can look at the story and observe what happened; and certainly some people in camp situations also undergo what is called the Stockholm syndrome in which you begin to mimic your captors and you sort of incarnate their values and you lose any sense of your own humanity and decency.
What Joseph did was to essentially look for other role models and what he did was to essentially adopt the Jehovah's Witnesses as role models of people who lived with integrity. Jews who abandon their faith are regarded by many/most Jews as traitors. You have joined the other side. Now I can look at the circumstances in which he converted and say - okay those are extraordinary conditions and people respond to extraordinary conditions in unusual ways, but most Jews including myself feel that those who have abandoned our faith and embraced another faith are traitors. Certainly light years less traitorous than for example Jews becoming Nazis.
Most Jews learned how to rebuild from the ashes and they followed the tradition of the great Hasidic master who said: "Nothing is as whole as a heart that has been broken."
Joseph chose an alternate path and what he did was to choose the path that within the camps represented to him the group that retained their integrity. Again if one could argue objectively one can say okay they retain their integrity because they merely had to endure this, they weren't going to be destroyed by the system if they could retain themselves intact, but the experience of a 16-year-old, a 15-year-old, a 17-year-old is not the experience of objective history its the experience of a subjective mind living through an event.
Evangelizing is not necessarily anti-Semitic its anti-Judaic because of you're trying to say to a Jew, your faith is not adequate and mine is better, that's anti-Judaic; so you know when I have Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door and sometimes we have African-American Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door [and] I said: "The possibly of me becoming a Jehovah's Witnesses is roughly the equivalent of you becoming white."
I am who I am, I live with my own integrity, I believe in my traditions, I embrace my faith; I cherish my own history and my own values. So the fact that somebody wants to proclaim their faith that's their prerogative but to begin to say that my faith is inadequate is a somewhat insulting and usually brings up cackles from the Jews and rightfully so. I find my faith fully adequate. I think I can live with integrity with God and walk humbly with history.
If you for example say that the Jew can live with integrity with his God and that God spoke to the Jews; and if you then said that God furthermore spoke on to Christians with a new covenant, a new Testament, a new view, then you could be theologically consistent, which says to the people to whom the first word of God was spoken: It endures and continues and they should take it forward; To the people in whom the word of God came for the second time they can live with that word but they need not say that Judaism itself has no more function to perform.
So as a Jew; as a religious Jew when somebody says your tradition has fulfilled all that it has to do and has completed its mission and has no raison d'être and mine is better; I find that hubris and I find that offensive.
In the ideal world there should be room for a Jew and Jehovah's Witness experience to coexist because they shared a universe in common. In the real world there are plenty of barriers to be overcome and plenty of tensions that have to be grappled with.
I believe the divisions can be bridged and divisions can be healed, but I don't believe it is ever easy or its ever simple and even in nuclear family were everybody is of the same religion as one another there can be great divisions; and those divisions may have nothing to do with anything religious and everything to do with the dynamics the family; who feels embraced; who feels scorned. I mean that’s what half the comedy on television is about.
Auschwitz displayed the Jehovah's Witnesses prominently because it was an affirmative action programme. For many years they had avoided it; for many years they had not emphasised it and consequently they felt it was time to do something to make up for all the years in which they have essentially ignored it; and museums always have something called a special exhibition which comes front and centre and then after the special exhibition is completed it goes back and recedes.
Auschwitz now has a special exhibition on the gypsies within Auschwitz who were murdered like the Jews; even murdered in gas Chambers; smaller numbers, [a] less totally absorbing process; so I would dare say that it was a special exhibit. In museum terms it was a special exhibition, in contemporary political terms it was an affirmative action to make up for previously ignoring the plight of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Why care? Because the people who run the Memorial Museum in Auschwitz have an obligation to tell the story of Auschwitz. Jehovah's Witnesses are part of the story of Auschwitz. They are not the dominant story, they are not the central story, but they are part of that story. Why care? Because you care for the place and care for the integrity of its history.
Look Jehovah's Witnesses were consistent; they refused to serve in the German army; they refused to serve in the American army. They refused to swear allegiance to the Nazi state; they refused to swear allegiance to the American state. Dissent is important to Jehovah's Witnesses because it represents the fullness of their faith; and the dissent is important to those of us who are not Jehovah's Witnesses because it represents the nature of a religious people that remind us that the state, even the great United States of America is a human rather than a divine instrument, with all the frailties of human instrumentality.
Most of us in the United States find the only interaction we have with Jehovah's Witnesses is when somebody comes to our door. What I would like people to see when that person comes to their door to proselytize them; is to, even as you're rejecting the proselytization, and I can tell you I always reject the proselytization; I was born a Jew; I live as a Jew; and I will die a Jew; but even then I want us to look at that moment and understand that the person before us is acting out of an integrity that is uniquely their own, and that's a part of their tradition...and the integrity of that tradition was tested by fire.
END OF INTERVIEW