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Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Macedonian Outpost
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Thanks Mango, but going forward please post the article or a short summary instead of just a link.
Quote:
Challenging traditional views seems to be a specialty of Professor Ed Gaffney, a lecturer in law at Valparaiso university in Indiana and a writer and filmmaker.
Empty Boxcars: Murder and Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews in World War 2, a new 90-minute documentary that had its world premiere in Bulgaria on October 11, permeates traditional comfort zones and highlights some unpalatable facts about Bulgaria's actions.
This seems to be Gaffney's vocation, to prick self-satisfaction. As an Irish-American Roman Catholic engaged in Jewish-Catholic dialogue for decades, Gaffney is deeply critical of anti-Semitic animus and contempt for Jews within his own church. But Gaffney is by no means a "pro-Jewish, right or wrong" evangelist of the type to be found in the US on the Christian Right. He targets injustice wherever he perceives it.
Gaffney is also a friendly critic of Israeli policies he deems unlikely to promote Israel’s own interests; for example, he regards demolition of Palestinian homes as inflicting on others "the horrible attacks on the fragility of Jewish homes over the centuries when Gentiles dispossessed Jews or sent them into exile, or when the Nazis stole their violins and pianos and art and homes all over Europe during World War 2." So it was that Gaffney was also moved to make an earlier documentary exploring how bereaved families on either side of the Israel-Palestinian divide (murdered by the other) came to empathise with each other's suffering. The film, Unbroken Circle, features many (Jewish) critics of the Israeli government.
I make this point lest readers think Gaffney is an unbridled supporter of every Jewish/Zionist cause – rather he is a humanitarian.
Under Bulgaria's thumb
Gaffney refuses to play what could be called the preferential numbers game regarding Bulgaria's Jews during World War 2. When I cite the fact that 50 000 Jews in Greater Bulgaria survived the war, Gaffney shoots me down.
"That's a distinction without a difference," he says. "I don't think there's a plausible justification for singling out Greek or Macedonian Jews, on the one hand, and saying they were somehow worthier of death in Treblinka. Claims by the Bulgarian authorities that they couldn't stop it (murders outside so-called Greater Bulgaria) are baloney. Nobody's going to indict Bulgaria for any of these crimes in 2010 but these WERE crimes against humanity nonetheless," he says.
Empty Boxcars features, among others, the story of a Bulgarian Rabbi, Haim Asa from Plovdiv, who survived the war. Other family members, however, didn't. This, says Gaffney, is a crucial part of the film.
"There were three different members of the Asa family, all of whom thought of themselves as Jews," says Gaffney.
Asa had a cousin in Bitola, in Macedonia, who he remembers visiting in the 1930s, and another in Kavala. Both were murdered at Treblinka.
"What are we saying – that we're going to differentiate between members of the Asa family, that national borders is the way you discern moral legitimacy or legality? No, it's illegal and immoral every time," says Gaffney.
And, as Gaffney points out, these people were in areas administered and controlled by Bulgarians.
"They were issuing postage stamps with pictures of King Boris right at the top and then it showed you three major cities in Macedonia - Skopje, Ohrid and Bitola. During their occupation the Bulgarians ran everything from the post office through to the police station and the educational curriculum. One of the dumbest reasons given by Bulgarians for why they couldn't save Jews in those other countries is that they weren't citizens of Bulgaria. Well, who decided that? The Bulgarians did! Under the Law to Protect the Nation, they denied citizenship to Jews," says Gaffney.
Starting out
Gaffney first became interested in Jewish-Christian relations when he studied theology in Rome. This was a time when the Church was starting to acknowledge its long history of Christian anti-Semitism.
"In a way this film is one person's attempt to turn around centuries of mistaken and outrageously false teachings about Jews," he says.
Reading a book called the War Against the Jews (by Lucy Dawidowicz) first stoked Gaffney's interest in Bulgaria. In the book she lists the fate of the Jews in each country during the war.
"At the time it (Bulgaria's story) struck me as pretty remarkable. Then, subsequently, I met someone at my law school who asked me which country, allied to Nazi Germany, had more Jews after the war than before." (The answer was Bulgaria). "It turned out he was married to the former cultural attache of the Bulgarian embassy in Washington."
From 1998 onwards Gaffney started making many trips to Bulgaria and Israel (where most Bulgarian Jews emigrated after the war) to interview survivors. Incidentally, but perhaps inevitably, this also stirred his interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Origins of race laws
Bulgaria's race legislation post-1941 emulated Germany's. Gaffney sees modern anti-Semitism - reaching its most virulent zenith in the 20th century - as a continuum. Hitler did not invent it. He merely added some rather obscure racial theories to an enduring animus against Jews that began with the erroneous Christian assertion that the Jews crucified Christ. As Gaffney says, it was actually Pontius Pilate.
"When Hitler grows up in Linz there are few Jews around. Then when he goes to Vienna to see the Jewish community he's filled with revulsion and disgust. In Mein Kampf all these animal metaphors are brought in – the Jews are 'sub humans' – people always use animal metaphors when they hate someone; it's always rats or something like that," says Gaffney.
According to Gaffney, hatred towards Jews is a feeling that the anti-Semite then justifies with various spurious charges.
"The Protocols of Zion (a notorious forgery) recites the world's ills and scapegoats Jews but that, of course, puts the cart before the horse. The hatred existed first and then the justifications, which are bogus and totally false, are used to explain it," he says.
Inside the anti-Semitic mind
Holocaust-denial and anti-Semitic websites particularly concern Gaffney.
I cite David Duke, who seems obsessed with Jews, as a perfect example. Gaffney agrees.
"There was a time when he (Duke) was running for governor of Louisiana and people had bumper stickers on the back of their cars urging support for the incumbent governor – who's now dead but was known to be 'on the take' a lot – saying 'vote for the crook, it matters'."
Can one, I wonder, have a rational conversation with the anti-Semite to change their mind?
"I don't think it's a question of reasons that are thought through," says Gaffney. "These people are not attentive to facts. Rational people are humble enough to change their mind when they're told – 'wait a minute; you didn't take into account enough of the data'. Duke doesn't do that, he starts off with the judgment, not the facts, just as the only experience that Hitler needed to justify his revulsion was to meet a few Jews in Vienna and invoke the same vulgar stereotypes that guide the Protocols."
Gaffney says that personal encounters helps to cure hatred of other groups.
"It's certainly not having a rational conversation with David Duke. Hope for transformation comes from – to cite the example of what San Francisco's celebrated gay activist Harvey Milk said – when people meet individuals in the group they dislike. In other words, they meet Aunt Sally who's a lesbian but a fabulous family member. And you simply can't help but love her even before you discover her sexuality. Similarly, change comes when you consult your Jewish neighbour about the crossword puzzle because he knows a word you don't. Then you find that they're extraordinarily sweet and generous people – that's what shifts attitudes."
Hitler's rise
Gaffney believes that so many Germans bought into Hitler's anti-Semitism, either actively or passively – due to a confluence of well-timed (from the Nazi point of view) factors.
He sees Hitler's rise to power as resulting from a fusion of unjust war reparations, longstanding Franco-German enmity and severe economic crisis set against the background of a desperate people looking for a scapegoat. (Gaffney, by the way, sees the European Union's greatest achievement as rendering impossible another war between France and Germany).
"You impose massive reparations on a country and the price of a loaf of bread jumps from one mark to 10, and then to 100, and you have huge debts. That's the moment Hitler enters the scene. Democratic persuasion plays no part. He says that the way out of the mess is to overcome these Jews" – although they made up less than one per cent of the population – "but a demagogue needs a scapegoat, a handy person. Sadly, the Germans didn't invent racial purity, the Americans did. Just look at the history of American race theory. Unfortunately, all this Aryan baloney that Hitler pumps out becomes part of the story in Bulgaria, which is all the more ludicrous because there is no racial purity in Bulgaria – it's a country of immense ethnic diversity."
Does that imply that such ethnic purity existed in Germany?
"I don't believe in racial purity anywhere; it's a fairytale," says Gaffney.
"I teach my students that Barack Obama is not the first Afro-American president. Warren Harding was. Every black person in the US who knows anything about black history in the US acknowledges that. But most whites don't. Harding was one eighth African-American and that was enough in racial purity theory not only to put you at the back of the street car, but to put you in jail in the US. So the racial differentiation in Germany (between a Jew and an Aryan) was no stranger than a white man showing up in South Africa, saying that a Dutch God had declared that they were the rulers."
All racism, says Gaffney, defies scientific analysis or rational thinking.
"As I said, Obama is not the first African-American president but if you want to take seriously everything we know about genetics and about human origins, we're all Africans. There's no justification for it. In Germany, one of the first acts of the Nazis was to force Jewish scholars and academics out of their jobs. Why? Because somebody decides so. That doesn't answer why; that doesn't satisfy an inquiring mind, that's just a dictator talking."
The Bulgarian case
Gaffney does not diminish the Bulgarian rescue of its Jewish population, describing it as "extraordinary, stunning and staggeringly wonderful". He does, however, qualify it.
"All by itself it's a beautiful story. What's wrong with it from our point of view as journalists is that it's not a complete story. That's why Rabbi Asa's story is such a compelling part of this film."
A total of 11 393 people from the occupied areas were murdered in Treblinka – about 7000 from Macedonia and 4000 from Thrace.
"The really destructive act of rounding up everyone in a community is described by Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum in the film. 'When you deport the entire population of a town what you get is the absence of presence and the presence of absence'." Gaffney says these crimes can't be overlooked. "In Bitola or Skopje and Kavala, you see Bulgarian gendarmes and soldiers guarding Bulgarian trains and you see the Jews of Bitola in Skopje's tobacco warehouse."
The pictures sometimes seem so mundane that Hannah Arendt's remark about "the banality of evil" comes to mind.
"One of the extraordinary things about the Bulgarian story is that we expect our rescuers to be 100 per cent saints and never get anything wrong. The very improbability of the Bulgarian story makes it a compellingly human one because most of us are like that; we're not saints and we get it wrong as often as we get it right," says Gaffney.
Boris - saint or sinner?
Perhaps that's never more true than about Bulgaria's King Boris. What, I ask Gaffney, is his true legacy?
"In criminal law, no prosecutor ever attempts to prosecute the dead," says Gaffney. "When a person dies, historians can evaluate a person's life but it's useless trying to vilify someone. For example, in Hitler's case, why are so many skinheads admiring of him? That's a contemporary cultural issue that we have to wrestle with and take seriously. We can't ignore that, just as we can't ignore the David Dukes of this world. But what's the point of trashing Hitler? He trashed himself; he trashed the entire civilisation of the country he governed. As for King Boris, Hitler's description of him is enough – 'a fox' – he was clever and very attentive to facts. Hitler used to love it when Boris visited Berlin because he'd find out what was really happening. He'd say to his staff – 'How come I didn't know that until Boris came to town?'"
Gaffney says that Hitler demanded payback for negotiating with the Romanians to cede lands to Bulgaria. Part of that price was the deportation of Bulgaria's Jews. The result was catastrophe for Jews in the occupied territories.
"The year 1943 was the most horrible year for mass murder," he says. "In just a few months between 700 000 and 850 000 Jews were killed in Treblinka. Some people say the title I chose for the film – Empty Boxcars – is false. 'The trains were full, not empty', people say. Well, they were full until they get to the terminus but here's what you should know about Treblinka. Eichmann had these trains running on a precise schedule - 20 cars with exactly 2000 people in each – and then the boxcars would leave empty because no freight cars had food or water, nothing like that. It was a place of extermination."
Going back to Boris, however, Gaffney does believe that some of his anti-Semitic comments – as with his infamous address to the synod of bishops in 1943 – was merely a way of covering his back in Berlin.
"When Boris met Hitler you get a sense of how insightful he was about Hitler's pernicious psyche. For example, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he relates how Hitler talked non-stop and didn't seem interested in what other people had to say."
Weighing up the evidence, however, Gaffney rejects the notion that Boris was in any way a hero. "What's wrong with this theory is not that Boris didn't have the courage to stop the deportation, it's that he didn't do it earlier," he says.
Integration
Jews were more integrated in Bulgaria than they were in Germany and this may have been a decisive factor in their salvation, according to Gaffney. If you put people in a ghetto, then you create a 'them and us' attitude that perpetuates discrimination.
"In fairness to the Germans they didn't invent the ghetto. It began in Rome and Venice, from where the name derives. But when you lock people up in an area, telling them that they belong there and there is no integration, then it becomes 'Jew town'. That's what Hitler witnessed in Vienna. But in Bulgaria, by contrast, the Jews were common labourers and artisans. There may have been a couple of Jews in banking but there was no data to say they wielded an undue influence or any basis for alleging that they ran the country's finances."
Bulgaria, according to Gaffney, has always tried to wriggle out of responsibility for its wartime role to the extent that even some claim that the Star of David that all Jews had to wear in public was smaller than that of the German equivalent, as if this in some way diminished the humiliation.
"If a Jewish kid was on his way to school, it meant that thugs caused trouble for them, just like Norbert Yasharoff (who features in the film) from Pleven, who recounts in the film how he was beaten up daily as a kind of price of admission into the Fascist youth group."
As we end, I try to draw more solace from Bulgaria's actions. Does the saving of Bulgaria's Jews indicate a greater compassion in the Bulgarian national character?
"Compassion is a human question, not one of national stereotypes," says Gaffney. It seems an appropriate conclusion from a person whose work has always repudiated the notion that inherent or ingrained characteristics define any group of people.
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In the name of the blood and the sun, the dagger and the gun, Christ protect this soldier, a lion and a Macedonian.
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02-01-2012, 05:37 AM
