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Mass Murder, Or Humanity In Death
By Philipp Fehl

"Disappointment often has been voiced, with a gratuitous condescension that presumes to excuse as it heaps scorn, at the silence and the obedient grief with which the vast majority of the Jewish victims [in Nazi Germany] accepted their doom. They cooperated, it is alleged, with their murderers. . . . The martyr . . . accepts his death not at the hands of his enemies . . . but from God to whom he has to give an account of the state of his soul."

WHEN Jews living to the west of the Holy Land pray their most solemn prayers, they rise and turn to the east. To designate the right direction to the worshippers, the eastern wall of synagogues and of the principal room in Jewish homes is, or used to be, distinguished by an inscription which usually is decorated with a picture or an emblem, the so-called mizrah ("the rising of the sun," "the East").

Figures 2 and 3, which follow, are the pictorial units of such a mizrah. Originally the work was about four feet long and two feet high. The inscription, which took up a rather large space, was in the center. It contained the word mizrah in Hebrew capital letters and the text of a prayer built probably around the traditional quotation: From the rising of the sun to the setting thereof, the name of the Lord is praised (Ps. CXIII; 3 Hebr.). The two paintings flanked it, the view of life in the Holy Land being on the left.

A Viennese refugee, Philipp Fehl received a doctor's degree from the University of Chicago. He is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Illinois. At the present time, he is in residence at the American Academy in Rome where he is preparing a volume on the art of Paolo Veronese. The prints for this article have been supplied by the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna.

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The work was made in 1947, in Germany, when a Jewish survivor of the concentration camps commissioned it from a fellow sufferer as a parting gift for an American couple who had become his friends. The pictures are all that remain of the work. The identity of the artist (who probably was also responsible for the writing of the text, now lost) is unknown. judging from the harbor scene in Figure 2, which resembles more the view of a canal in Amsterdam than a harbor in Israel, he may have been a Dutch Jew.¹

Since the inscription was in Hebrew, the natural sequence of looking at the two pictures was from right to left, and they are related to each other as "before" and "after." When we imagine the pictures joined to the written prayer, they become again, as originally they were intended to be, a living commentary, demonstrating beyond the reach of words the timelessness of the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt and the blessings of the promise of the return to the land of Israel.² The view of the victims is at once a monument to them and a summation of their sufferings, in the language of tears, which bestows upon the daily prayer for the redemption of Israel an ever new urgency before God. All is hope and blessedness in the picture on the left, as all is grief in the picture on the right. The smoke stacks of the industrial plant on the left are a response in the form of a matching parallel, on the side of the light, to those of the crematoria on the right. And so the orange trees and palms, exultant in the sunny sky of the promised land, are an answer and an echo to the wintry firs in the landscape defiled by murder.

The view of the camp and the procession of the victims, even though it is difficult to identify the locale exactly-the camps having been built according to schemata-bears all the marks of authenticity. A look at a photograph of Jews being marched to their execution which was taken by a German soldier (Figure 1) shows beyond measure that the artist was present at such scenes and stored them in his

¹ The pictures are still the property of the original recipients of the gift. The Mizrah was painted on oilcloth, presumably a simple table cover, with oil paints which unfortunately did not adhere well to the oil cloth base. The work could not be folded or rolled without inflicting serious damage on it. In order to transport it safely to the United States, the owners cut up the cloth and took the two pictorial units with them aboard ship. The inscribed part of the mizrah was shipped separately and lost in transit. The pictures are now transferred to canvas and are in good condition. Our photographs were taken before the restoration.
² The procession toward the furnaces resembles somewhat, but in the terms of an unconscious assimilation rather than a quotation, the depiction of the exodus as it appears frequently in popular illustrated editions of the Haggadah for Passover.

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memory.3 To my knowledge our picture is the only published painted report of such a last walk. It is, of course, not only a record of what happened, but-unlike the photograph which indeed is heartbreaking because it shows us what happened with all the reliability of the cold indifference of a snapshot-it is also a clarification of what happened. The artist's technical equipment, his skill as an artist, is elementary only. His choice of emphasis, however, in the giving of his account is the result of observation joined by compassionate reflection.

There is a great silence in the picture and almost a sense of peace, as the procession of the moribund slowly moves to the gates of death.

³ The photograph first appeared in the New York Times Magazine of January 26th, 1964. The picture evidently is a detail of a larger view. A number of photographs by German camera buffs of views of ghettoes and camps with people being marched off to their death survive. Some of them were entered as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

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It takes only a few guards to supervise the march. One uses a dog to keep the victims in line; another threatens to shoot a prisoner who almost breaks ranks in order to help, or bid a last farewell to, a figure lying bleeding at the feet of the guard. In the rear of the procession a woman walks slowly with the aid of a cane. At some distance behind her, unrushed and gently, a very old woman, bent

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low, leads a child by the hand. They are Joined in an almost idyllic loneliness and tender concern for each other. The old and the young are now of the same age, if one will but count it from the hour of their death.

In the foreground, dominating the picture like a symbol of darkness stands an officer in full SS uniform, separating with a gesture as

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effortless as it is beyond the reach of appeal, two children, presumably brother and sister. On the left, those not yet selected for their death return to the camp, dejected and in mourning. A guard, his rifle at rest, looks at them almost kindly, as if he were a friend and not another henchman. The quiet camp with its fir trees in the snow, protected, as it were, by the barbed-wire fence, also looks almost cozy.

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II

In recent years, disappointment often has been voiced, with a gratuitous condescension that presumes to excuse as it heaps scorn, at the silence and the obedient grief with which the vast majority of the Jewish victims accepted their doom. They cooperated, it is alleged, with their murderers, because they obeyed orders when,

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already marked for certain death, they could have defied them in a, beau geste of heroic resistance. The critics, one fears, feel humiliated by the record of the dead and are disappointed, as if they had been cheated of a merited right to trumpet forth equivalents of the Marseillaise in a riot of self-congratulatory memorial exercises. Death in the fury of battle they know is glorious, but meekness in the hour of death is curiously culpable, a sign of weakness, and it compromises in the eyes of history.

I am reminded, when I hear these voices, of an instructor I once had in military science, when I was still a boy in Austria. He was a former officer, had served in the first World War, and passed on to us, who were to be new recruits in the not-too-distant future, an old military lie: "When the enemy outnumbers you," he said with evident self-satisfaction, "you keep on firing back at him until you run out of ammnuition. And then you throw at him whatever you can pick up from the ground. And when you run out of that," he continued with a grin that was as cunning as it was evil, for he really meant us to believe him, "you throw your shoes at him." Toughness is all, to the end.

Two great paintings, Bruegel's Murder of the Holy Innocents, and Dürer's Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, may serve better than the mere development of an argument as commentaries on our picture, in defense of the work of a survivor who, insufficiently equipped as a painter to deal with events of this magnitude, but armed with his memory, set out not only to record but to celebrate, in the language of a witness, the silence of those who died.

III

Bruegel's work, as perhaps no other picture in the whole history of art, brings near to us the agony of surprise and terror, the tension between a last hope and despair, the variety of temptations and failings, the bravery and the foolishness and the demonstrations of love which all play themselves out in grotesque exaggeration when death descends all of a sudden, in the form of a pitilessly efficient military operation upon unsuspecting ordinary people. The place is Bethlehem, but the scene is laid out as if it were a village in the Flanders of Bruegel's day, and so it becomes Everyman's country (Figure 4). The event, which occurred so long ago, is made timeless by this device, and ever present, as are the sins and tribulations of mankind.

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The overall view, with its gay colors set in the crisp whiteness of the snow which covers the ground and the house tops, is at first glance deceptively exhilarating. One might think we are attending a merry game of sports. It is with a shocked surprise, an echo almost of the terrible surprise which befell the peasants when the soldiers began the executions, that our eye identifies, unwilling to believe what is so inevitably obvious, the details of the work.

The principal scene of slaughter takes place in the center. Weeping women hold on to their dead babies. One woman, covering her eyes with her hands and bent over in grief, walks off alone. A troop of horsemen under the leadership of a strict-looking white-bearded dignitary dressed in black, perhaps Herod himself, stands at rest and cuts off the escape route to the rear.4 A number of soldiers break into an inn-its shield showing us that it is called "The Star" (of Bethlehem)-to search for babies which might be hidden there. This "Operation Beer House" is commanded by an officer who lowers his baton to give the signal for the storm as if it were a major campaign. The innocent peacefulness of his obedient horse at standstill contrasts strangely with the brutality surrounding it (Figure 5).

A number of episodes, highlights, as it were, in the definition of the naturalness or the genre aspect of inhumanity, are singled out by Bruegel. In the foreground, to the left, a desperate mother, clutching her still living child in her arms, tries to escape from a soldier who, sword in hand, runs after her. She might have succeeded, were it not for one of the gaily dressed mounted officers still nearer to us who, accompanied by his dog, cuts off her escape ever so efficiently, as if he were on a fox hunt.5 A relatively big child is brought forward and held between a soldier, with his sword at the ready to kill him (but awaiting the verdict of his officers), and the desperate mother trying to restrain him. The father kneels and begs. The child, it appears, is above the age of two, the limit set

⁴ The flag displayed directly behind this figure shows a cross potent between four crosslets, that is, the arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The horsemen, in other words, come from the capital city and, probably, are an elite troop. The irony of the cross in the hands of the murderers of the Holy innocents could hardly have been lost on anyone. I am much obliged to my friend Patrick Reuterswaerd who identified the armorial device for me.
⁵ The motif of the hunt occurs also on the other side of the picture. There a soldier breaks into the front door of the farm house directly behind the inn, while an accomplice waits at the side door. The quarry, a mother bearing her child, promptly appears at the door she thought was still safe. We see the scene as the murderer is about to pounce on her, full of pleasure at his own and his companion's cleverness. The two hunting scenes are placed on the diagonal, at opposite ends of the picture, like two brackets. The joys of sport are sweetening the labors of military duty.

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for the general slaughter of the infants, but then he may be just tall for his age. The righteous gesture of denial by the officer on the left seals his fate. Farther in the background, in a separate group to the left, a soldier walks off with a child hanging limp from his arm, still alive but already as if dead. The soldier's pose, the gesture of his head and the very way in which he holds his sword, is almost bored as he looks in condescending self-righteousness at the peasant couple from whom he is taking the child. The father still points imploringly to his frightened little girl whom he pulls along by the hand, as if to say, "Take her instead of the boy, he is my only son!" The soldier refuses. He holds the victims whom he has driven to their utmost degradation in contempt because they are degraded. The very fact that they appeal to him seems to offend him: "Soldiers find their honor in obeying orders. They are not like ordinary killers who could be swayed by pity, or lust, or the love of gain."

Farther behind, a group of peasants restrains bodily and with cautionary, anguished talk, one of their number who wants to break loose, unarmed and alone as he is, to fight the soldiers. And at some distance behind them, quite at his ease, one of the soldiers in armor has dismounted and urinates against the wall of a peasant hut.

On the other side of the picture, almost in the foreground, a soldier carries off a little boy from the arms of his mother who stands petrified by grief. A little girl holds on to her apron, weeping. A second soldier, having just helped the first to wrench the boy out of the arms of his mother, stretches forth his hand to the little girl as if to pacify her, as uncles sometimes do, by teasing: "There, there, little girl!"

Some steps behind, a number of peasants surround a youthful, well nourished, and therefore seemingly good-natured herald mounted on a dapper horse. "Help us, kind sir!" He only lifts his arms and appears to shrug his shoulders, with the idle sympathy and the fleeting embarrassment of those who can stand by and regret what is happening and wish they could help, and who then go on eating their meals undisturbed by the memory of what happened. This listening youth, though he becomes prettier through his affectation of humanity, is no more lovable than the active villains about him. It is his very charm that makes him one of the most grotesque figures in this landscape alive with murder (Figure 6).

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In the extreme distance, by the bridge where the river makes a bend, and accessible only to the eye that searches the landscape for a single touch of comfort, one discovers a peasant fleeing with a child in his arm. As he makes his way forward, he looks over his shoulder in fear that one of the soldiers might be following him. He does not know that his doom is in front of him. The painter leads us to discover, just as we begin to share the peasant's hope, that the bridge, on the other side of which lies safety, is occupied by the rear guard: a horseman and a foot soldier, both armed with spears. The two delicately painted figures in the farthest background suddenly loom large before our eyes, like Nemesis herself. Herod's military operation, planned and executed with routine efficiency, spared no one and must be pronounced a complete success.

IV

Dürer's Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand represents, in the language of the vivid experience of the moment, the story of a particularly macabre attempt to solve the Christian problem in ancient Persia (Figure 7). Unlike the victims in Bruegel's painting, the victims here are not surprised by the murder that befalls them. They have anticipated it. The price of their life, they know, is the renunciation of Christ, and they are prepared to accept their death meekly, as befits followers of Christ. The cruelty of the punishments they suffer (Dürer presents us with a veritable inventory of monstrous tortures) is, of course, a measure of the exasperation of the enemies of Christ, who desire at all cost to make the victims understand and acknowledge the superiority of force over meekness. They want them to behave, they would put it, reasonably in the face of the finality of their law, to go along, as they do, with the way the world turns.

The Sultan himself (on horseback in the lower right hand corner of the picture) supervises the executions (Figure 8). He is a monarch of no mean aspect. There is in him no appearance of hatred, just a stern and efficient rectitude and, above all, distance. In the left middle ground a bishop who is ready for death is urged once more to recant by an impatiently arguing Persian savant or priest. An associate of the latter points in mocking pity at the vast train of Christians who are being driven, bound and naked, up a hill to meet a horrible death. It is as if he were saying to the bishop that all of

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these victims were going to their death because of him. "How can you not ask them to acknowledge the religion of the land, and live?"

The victims, even in extremis as they are driven over the cliff, pay no regard to their tormentors; only their bodies respond to the tortures. Their intent is upon surrendering their soul to Christ, "to die well," as the old phrase puts it, in repentance of their sins and forgiving their enemies. On top of the cliff a man and a woman, naked, still attempt to cover their nakedness in the very moment when they are being pushed to their death so as to die in decency. A fat man quite near to them (to the left), whose hands are tied behind his back, cannot even do that. Ludicrously naked as he is in the conspicuous frailty of his flesh, he is yet endowed with, or one might say clothed in, the very special splendor of his resignation unto death and the humiliation he suffers for the sake of Christ (Figure 9).

Through all of this universe of torture, perpetrated in a romantically beautiful and rich landscape on a day filled with sunshine, there walk, in awed sympathy, two men from out of time and place, the artist and a man in doctor's robes, probably Dürer's friend, the humanist Conrad Celtes who had died shortly before Dürer painted this picture.6 Dürer carries a tablet with the Latin words, iste faciebat anno domini 1508 Albertus Dürer alemannus ("this was made in the year of our Lord 1508 by Albrecht Dürer the German"). Celtes, the learned man who has joined the shades, is Dürer's guide, as Virgil was Dante's (Figure 10). All that words can tell is made vivid, and transcends what words can tell, through the painter's art. The guide's leadership made it possible for him to transpose himself in time and place, to see and to comprehend what happened in those distant regions, and to be fortified in his faith, as we in turn might be in ours because Durer's art brings the ancient story (whether it be true or not) before us in all the timelessness of its lesson.7 In the silence of the fulfillment of their vows' the martyrs teach, ever so gently amidst all the terror, the art of dying well.

⁶ I here follow the interpretation of Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943, Vol. I.p. 122.
⁷ For an earlier version of Dürer's Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, see his woodcut (ca. 1498); Panofsky, op. cit., no. 337, fig. 69. This work, at least by comparison with the second and final version, is chiefly a bravado piece in the representation of tortures. Short of the signature, it does not contain any reference to Dürer's person. The final version (dated 1508) was commissioned by the Palatine Elector, Frederick the Wise. Dürer, in revising the original work, emphasized the conclusions which the painter of such a terrible subject must draw for the benefit of his own soul. By the example of his own response, he

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V

The victims of the concentration camps, to apply the lessons of these two great paintings to the better understanding of our modest one, had not the opportunity to grow and to prepare themselves for the end. Its inevitability was brought home to them by the cruelty of each new day. The only choice they had was how they would act in meeting their death.

Religious Jews had the comfort of the teaching of the rabbis and the example of those many Jews who in former times chose martyrdom over "being reasonable" in accepting conversion. What is true in Dürer's picture, in the truth of its poetical essence, was true for them also in the dreadful reality of their last hours.

Ernst Simon, in a moving essay entitled "The Spiritual Legacy of German Jewry," gives the text of a prayer which was composed in the fourteenth century to be spoken by a martyr when he faced the last moments of his life. It begins with a confession as follows:

My God and God of my fathers, the soul which you have given me was clean, immaculate, and pure, but I have sullied it with evil inclination; I have made it unclean with my sins and errors and wrongdoings which are so many, for I have sinned, I have failed, I have broken the faith . . . .

And it closes:

And now the hour has come to take my soul away from me and place it in your hands for the sanctification of your one and only name . . . praised be you, our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us to love the name of him who is revered and honored in awe . . .

The martyr's final words are another blessing and the pronunciation of the Hear, O Israel.⁸

The prayer is not very different from certain prayers prescribed for the day of atonement and for the hour of death of every Jew;

also helps the viewer of the work to look at the ludicrously fascinating scenes of horror (they are too real to be believed) with an appropriate sense of awed commitment. Our discovery of the presence of Dürer and Celtes on the field of slaughter at once gives us a badly needed aesthetic distance from the scene and, as we respond to Dürer's glance and Celtes' gesture, leads us directly back to it, no longer as judges of a work of art but as witnesses according to the example set by Dürer and Celtes.
⁸ Ernst Simon, Brücken: Gesammelte Aufsätze, Heidelberg, 1965. pp. 47f. My translation was made from Simon's German translation of the Hebrew text.

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only the emphasis differs. The martyr finds the strength to ignore the aggressor, the pains, and the humiliations inflicted upon him in the urgency of the need to make his confession, and to praise God who had granted his lot to be different from that of the murderer. He accepts his death not at the hands of his enemies, who are at this ultimate moment of privacy (although they are killing him) no longer near him, but from God to whom he has to give an account of the state of his soul.

I once heard a survivor say musingly that he believed that people who had studied Latin in high school often were able to bear their misfortune with greater equanimity and act more nobly under duress than most others in the same desperate circumstances. He thought that the precision of the language and the examples of stoicism, which the student of Latin so often encounters in his reading, were the source of their support.

But the great majority of the victims, of course, were people not tutored or experienced in either religion or philosophy, or (to give due regard to the musings of our informant) in Latin literature. Surely in certain instances they were affected by the example of the resolve of those happy few (as it were) among the learned and pious among them who were able to pass the supreme test, but by and large their quiet manner in the face of death must have been accomplishments they worked out for themselves, not so much as a resolve as in that unspoken and perhaps unspeakable knowledge of the dignity of man that is acquired in the absorbing privacy of one's contemplation of death. The victims, aided only by the shreds of memory of the life they once had led (or had been hoping to lead) as citizens of states participating in what we still call western civilization, rediscovered in their loneliness and their suffering the foundations of this very civilization. As its breakdown was demonstrated to them in the bell that surrounded their agony, they reaffirmed its validity in the silence of their exodus to the gas chambers. To the memory of this accomplishment of humanity in death our picture pays its humble tribute.

In spite of all the insufficiency of his art, the unknown painter, by giving an account of what touched him most deeply in the history of all the horror he witnessed, becomes in this one instance a brother artist of Dürer and Bruegel. He knows from his own experience

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the confines of hell on earth which they charted with their imagination, and his knowledge of grief and of the wonder of a victim's Silence on his way to death is as great as theirs. He cannot be their rival in art, but his picture, which celebrates the loneliness of a collective martyrdom in a cause never before so desperately put to the test, may be a useful companion to theirs, if we are to consider them (as Dürer surely wished us to consider his painting) in our own attempts to prepare ourselves for death.