I can understand why a healthy nation would not want citizens who are so ambivalent, when not downright hostile to it. Every nation has the right to the attitude — love it here or leave.<\/p>\n
Members of tribes, including Jews, have a different relationship to the nation state than Anglos and Nordics. If you are tribal, your primary loyalty is to your tribe and everyone else is likely to fail to live up to your standards. That’s basic social identity theory. If you strongly belong to one group, you’ll shape reality so that your group is the best and other groups suck.<\/p>\n
There’s nothing about surviving a genocide, such as the Holocaust, that imparts wisdom. You don’t become more moral by surviving death camps. You simply become what is now known as a survivor. <\/p>\n
This woman survived the Holocaust but she has little wisdom to share.<\/p>\n
Steven Erlanger writes in the New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n Ms. Loridan-Ivens, who has now written a memoir of her childhood experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau and her effort afterward to find a reason to live, has been provocative before. She shocked France after the Charlie Hebdo killings when she went on France Inter radio, in what was supposed to be a discussion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and accused France of indifference to a new anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n The French president, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, had called a huge rally in support of the values of the French Republic after the January killings. But, Ms. Loridan-Ivens asked, \u201cdo you believe the French would have gone into the streets if only Jews had been killed?\u201d The interviewer was reduced to silence.<\/p>\n In an interview in December in her Left Bank apartment, where she lives alone after the death of her second husband in 1989, she noted that previous killings of French Jews, for instance by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse in 2012, brought little reaction from the French public.<\/p>\n The memoir, \u201cBut You Did Not Come Back,\u201d will be published in English this month by Atlantic Monthly Press. It takes the form of a letter to her murdered father, Szlhama (Schlo\u00efme) Froim Rozenberg, a Polish Jew who came to France in 1919 in search of freedom.<\/p>\n They were arrested together in 1943. She remembers him telling her, when they were at the Drancy internment camp in April 1944, awaiting transport to hell, \u201cYou will come back, perhaps, because you\u2019re young, but I will not come back.\u201d<\/p>\n She writes to her dead father, who thought he could assimilate by buying a chateau in the countryside: \u201cYou had chosen France, she isn\u2019t the melting pot you\u2019d hoped for. Everything is getting tense again. We\u2019re called \u2018French Jews\u2019; there are also French Muslims, and here we are face-to-face \u2014 I who had hoped never to take sides, or at least, to simply be on the side of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n She feels French, she said in her memento-filled apartment, but has \u201ca very complicated relationship\u201d with France. \u201cIt\u2019s the country that returned my father to his birthplace, Poland,\u201d to die. \u201cI can\u2019t say that I\u2019m disappointed with France \u2014 I lost any illusions a very long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Loridan-Ivens said she appreciated that France protected her but wished she had no need of such protection.<\/p>\n For her parents, she said, France meant liberty, equality, fraternity. \u201cThey escaped Eastern Europe because they wanted freedom, to be able to go to school and university,\u201d she said. \u201cIn France there was no pogrom. Life was tough, as they arrived penniless, but they worked hard, they wanted their children to go to school and become French.\u201d<\/p>\n But then came the occupation, and the betrayal. After the war, the family received a death notice from the government saying that her father had \u201cdied for France.\u201d But he died \u201cbecause he was Jewish,\u201d Ms. Loridan-Ivens said. As she wrote to her father: \u201cYou did not really die for France. France sent you to your death. You were wrong about her.\u201d<\/p>\n After the war, Charles de Gaulle \u201csaid that the arrests of Jews had been done by the Germans, but it was a lie,\u201d she said. \u201cThe French gave lists of Jews to the Germans and participated in the arrests. I was arrested by both.\u201d<\/p>\n Also in the aftermath, she said she tried to kill herself twice; her sister and brother later committed suicide. After multiple examinations in the camps by Josef Mengele and others, when she had to strip naked, she never again felt comfortable with her body, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s as if it still bears the mark of the first man who ever looked at me, a Nazi,\u201d she said. For a long time, \u201cI associated getting undressed with death, with hatred, with the icy stare of Mengele,\u201d who decided who would live and die.<\/p>\n Ms. Loridan-Ivens married soon after the war, to Francis Loridan, a civil engineer who traveled for his work; the marriage quickly deteriorated, as did her adherence to the French Communist Party, which she joined for about six months. But she felt the need to testify, somehow, and she was a key figure in a film made in 1960, \u201cChronicle of a Summer,\u201d where she talked about the camps.<\/p>\n In 1962 she was a director of a controversial film, \u201cAlgeria, Year Zero,\u201d and that year met an older and politically engaged Dutch filmmaker, Joris Ivens, and fell in love. Together, they made films about Communist China and North Vietnam, a devotion she now regards, said with a laugh, as \u201cfalse, na\u00efve and simplistic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can understand why a healthy nation would not want citizens who are so ambivalent, when not downright hostile to it. Every nation has the right to the attitude — love it here or leave. Members of tribes, including Jews, … Continue reading