Cheering Hamas on campus, too uneducated to grasp how grotesque that is
In German-occupied Poland on a November day in 1942, a Jewish woman carrying a baby realizes an SS man is following her down the street. She catches the eye of a woman walking toward her. Peter Englund tells what a witness saw:
“Some sort of wordless communication takes place — maybe no more than an almost invisible gesture or a glance or an eye movement — and the approaching woman spreads her arms a little and, without any sign of hesitation, the Jewish woman passes the baby across while hiding the movement with her body to prevent the SS man from seeing.”
The Jewish woman, who knows her life is about to end, saves her baby. A block later, she is arrested, destined for annihilation.
This is from Englund’s “November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World War II.” He has deftly stitched a tapestry of vignettes from letters, diaries and memoirs of people tossed like fallen leaves by a global typhoon. It is a book suited to 2023, the year of the West’s awakening from the grand illusion that large-scale, high-intensity warfare ignited by barbarians is a thing of the past.
From Stalingrad to El Alamein to Guadalcanal (where U.S. troops could smell the new leather of nearby Japanese soldiers’ gear), large events of November 1942 changed the course of the war as individuals endured its particularities. In besieged Leningrad, whose population that November was about 800,000, down from 3.3 million in just over a year, “Some people murdered for food — to steal ration cards or, in the worst cases, to eat their victims,” Englund writes. In China, people are “collecting and sieving the droppings of wild geese in order to pick out undigested grain which they will then eat.”
Englund recounts the difficulties of making a movie titled “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” (retitled “Casablanca”). In Savannah,
Ga., where bloated bodies washed ashore from vessels sunk by German submarines, the shipyard worked three shifts a day, seven days a week, eventually producing Liberty ships in 42 days. The first ship did not survive its first voyage.
A Japanese officer struck by a tracer round from a heavy machine gun “caught fire and his body was gradually reduced to something that resembled grey cigarette ash.” At the end of November, in a squash court beneath the University of Chicago football stadium, a controlled chain reaction in fissile radioactive material presaged a new element, plutonium, and a new kind of weapon.
In Poland, in the Treblinka extermination camp, where 14,000 Jews could be murdered in a day, there were 15 to 20 suicides a day. Englund:
“Committing suicide may be seen as a form of resistance — initially, many people were too crushed and too powerless even to take their own lives. The prisoners began to help one another hang themselves from the roof beam in the darkened barrack hut. That is the first stage of becoming a collective.”
And of collective resistance. The doomed but life-affirming Treblinka uprising came in August 1943. This was less than five years before the creation of the necessary response to Treblinka: Israel. Today, the desire of Hamas to complete the Holocaust is applauded by moral cretins in academic cocoons (some Princetonians chanted “Globalize the intifada”), too uneducated to understand the grotesque pedigree of their enthusiasm.
When photographers from Mathew Brady’s New York studio produced the 1862 exhibit “The Dead of Antietam,” the New York Times said it brought home war’s “terrible reality and earnestness.” During World War I, however, no photo of a corpse appeared in a British, French or German newspaper, and not until 1943 did Life magazine create controversy by publishing a photo of dead U.S. troops.
Since Vietnam, graphic journalism has given us living room wars, but broadcast snippets of combat have drained war of its power to shock. Englund’s more than 400 pages of words, mere words, excavated from experiences 81 Novembers ago, convey war’s “terrible earnestness.”
Today, academic ethicists at a safe distance are instructing Israel to be “proportionate” in its response to what was done on Oct. 7. Perhaps the students and faculty exhilarated by Hamas need to see pictures of what was done. So, give every U.S. college and university the 46-minute video that Israel compiled from Hamas cameras and other sources, showing the sadists inflicting their carnage. Challenge the schools to screen it. This would be disturbingly educational, but the schools should do it anyway.