The Difficulty of Belief: Even When the Atrocities Take Place Nearby

Rabbi Yoḥanan said: From the day that the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from the prophets and given to fools and children.
- Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 12b

Our sages taught that with the destruction of the first temple, Divine prophecy was taken from the 'professional' prophets and instead, given to two surprising groups – fools and children. If so, perhaps it isn't surprising that the scale of the destruction wrought by the Holocaust was unimaginable; certainly, it could not have been foreseen. Even as the mass-murder began, many future victims struggled to believe that it would reach them, that such vast destruction was even possible. The difficulty to believe, at times even in the presence of explicit warnings, sealed the fates of many.

In the decades that have passed since the Holocaust, generations of historians have shown that the Holocaust was a rolling project. What began as a violent attempt to push Jews out of public life in the 1930s, in the hope that they would emigrate from Germany, developed into cross-border deportations. Then, in a series of sweeping conquests, the German army advanced across Europe and into the USSR and North Africa. Instead of removing Jews from Nazi territories, the thousand-year Reich declared by Hitler increased by millions the number of Jews under its jurisdiction. The Nazi leadership could no longer carry out its plan to gradually expel such a great number of people; the next stage had to be extermination.

In his autobiographic book, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls Moishe the Beadle; a Jew from his town who, until the invasion by Germany, had been completely immersed in the study of kabbalah and Jewish philosophy. He was a regular in the study hall who preferred to deal with the heavenly realm rather than the realities of daily existence. Moishe, who "had mastered the art of rendering himself insignificant, invisible," was not a prophet; he did not foresee the coming destruction but he did survive its first wave.

From the moment that Moishe survived the firing pits and made his way back to the town of Sighet, where he knew the young Elie Wiesel, the most precise description of him is 'witness'. The change in him was extreme. It seemed that he had lost all interest in his previous mystical preoccupations. "He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen." From then on, against all attempts to silence him, his only interest was to warn his community and to awaken them to the danger. Like the Greek mythological character, Cassandra of Troy, Moshe the Beadle could but proclaim the truth. In practice, nobody listened to him or believed what he had to say. "Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad." Elie Wiesel testified that "Even I," at the time a youth of 13 years old, "did not believe him."

Historian Peter Hayes addressed the difficulty of belief in his book Why?: Explaining the Holocaust. He claimed that initially the Jews struggled to believe what was taking place around them, for the simple reason that the events were unprecedented. They relied on rumors, partial information and occasional reports from eye witnesses who had managed to survive and escape to tell of what was coming. But even as the flow of information increased in both strength and frequency, the future victims often found ways to deny the truth. How else could they have continued?

Hayes provided an example of the denial. In the Polish town of Otwock reports began to arrive that all the Jews of nearby Slonim had been murdered by the Nazi occupiers. The shock in Otwock was deep, but they soon found ways to reasons or explanations for the massacre in the nearby town. The Jews of Otwock didn't deny that the massacre had taken place, but they did refuse to believe that they were next in line. One of the Jews of Otwock wrote in his diary that the massacre had apparently happened because of the location of Slonim between the area under Nazi control (the generalgouvernement) and the area under Russian control; maybe the Jews had been murdered as part of the German war effort, because the town was one of the first places captured by Germany as part of Operation Barbarossa? Another option that he raised in his diary was that the town's Jews refused to accept the authority of the German occupiers. No one in Otwock, including the writer of the diary, considered that this was a new Nazi policy, that the local annihilation of Jews would spread to the whole of Europe and would aim to encompass the entire world, at any price.

Why did so many Jews struggle to believe what was taking place and threatening to engulf them? What can we learn from this about human nature? We will leave this question to historians and psychologists. Instead, we will end with another quote from Elie Wiesel's Night in which he recalls the moment, in his youth, that Moishe the Beadle became his teacher of Jewish mysticism, a few months before Moishe's temporary reprieve from the horrors of the Holocaust.

"From that day on, I saw him often. He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer…"