The Schweitzenbasheringen Problem
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, December 26, 1997
It is now time to remember a fundamental fact in the never-ending controversy over Swiss bank accounts and Nazi gold: It isn’t all that important.
This might be an inopportune moment to be saying this — we (by “we” I mean we Jews and our King, H.R.H. Edgar of Seagram’s) have got the Alpine skinflints right where we want them, which is…I don’t know where, exactly.
Yes, we’re getting back a small pot of money that will help poor, old Jews (who in any case should have been helped years ago by rich, young Jews), but the Swiss bankers and their government don’t seem to feel terribly guilty about the past, which is what many Jews want to see. Of course, the Swiss are bloodless and Teutonic, but what might be stopping them from making weepy confessions of guilt is a fact that they surely realize but that Americans do not yet fully grasp, which is that they never killed Jews.
The Germans killed Jews, which is the important fact. Also, the Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, French, Hungarians, Romanians (forgive me if I’ve left someone out) killed Jews.
The Swiss did not murder. An argument has been made that they abetted murder, and they certainly stole and were generally evil and then lied about it afterward, but there were no concentration camps on Lake Geneva. A casual reader of American newspapers, however, might today come to believe that the Swiss were the Nazis and the Germans merely supplied the armbands. Swiss-slamming has become such a phenomenon that it deserves its own completely made-up German word: Schweitzenbasheringen is what I’m calling it.
It should be said that it is primarily Switzerland’s fault that this story remains on the front page day after day. If the Swiss Banker’s Association had only given King Bronfman a chair when he first went to discuss the matter with them, it all might have been over a year ago. (This is a true fact, by the way: The Swiss were so disrespectful of the Jewish claims against them that they refused to seat the King, which is something you don’t do to a man who could buy every chair in Europe, and then have them reupholstered.)
I have conducted an extensive public opinion poll of several Jews I know reasonably well and have reached this newsworthy conclusion: Jews still despise Germans, but have been hamstrung by the smooth manner in which Germany has tried to defuse Jewish anger. In other words, it would look uncharitable to be overtly angry with people who have done such a professional job of groveling. The German method of handling the Jews could be summarized as follows: Apologize, apologize, give Israel free submarines, apologize some more, and then apologize. In this recent episode, the Swiss have behaved in an almost cartoonishly swinish way; their arrogance and wholly undeserved sense of self-righteousness have blinded the to the benefits of the German play-book.
Their smug self-assurance also blinded them to the threat posed by King Bronfman, the bravest of the Jewish billionaires, and his team at the World Jewish Congress, the wily and inscrutable Israel Singer and the master press manipulator Elan Steinberg, who, in a different era, could have spun Der Sturmer.
They have done such an excellent job beating up on the Swiss that the issue has taken on a life of its own, so much so that a dangerous new reality has been created, one in which the casual observer could easily confuse Jewish anger over the Swiss cover-up with Jewish anger over the Swiss crimes. This confusion, followed through to the logical extreme, could lead some non-Jews to believe that Holocaust remembrance is, at bottom, about money. This shouldn’t happen to the genocide that defines the century, as the century comes to a close.
These are all second thoughts I have been having: I jumped on the restitution story early (Warning: Reporter Bragging Zone ahead), first in the Forward (“World Jewry on Verge of Breakthrough in Bid for Billions Stolen by Nazis, Reds, Oct. 29, 1993), then on the Swiss angle in an article in New York magazine that —according to a later story in Time Magazine — King Bronfman used to convince the Clintons to hitch the administration to his cause. Then the issue exploded.
My vague, unspoken discomfort over the subsequent course of events was clarified for me, inadvertently, over lunch one recent day with the Nazi-hunter Eli Rosenbaum. (He is actually chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, but I’ve always believed that “Nazi Hunter” would make for a more dramatic business card).
Eli told me that he had recently hosted in Washington a man named Yechiel Rajchman, a death-camp survivor, formerly of Poland, who now lives in Montevideo. Rajchman had been in Washington to receive an award at the Holocaust Museum on behalf of Jews who resisted the Germans at the Treblinka death-camp. Eli told me Rajchman’s story, which is heroic, and then he told me a stunning fact: Of the nearly one million Jews who entered Treblinka, fewer than 100 made it out alive. Of those 100 or so survivors, fewer than 20 are alive today.
We are nearing the day when the last Holocaust survivor will die. Without witnesses and the moral authority they bring to the subject, it will be far easier for the deniers to do their work. And not only the flat-out deniers: Those who would deny the singularity of the Holocaust, and those who would interpret its causes and meaning in ways offensive to Jewish memory, will have a far easier time of it when there are no survivors left alive to tell them how wrong they are.
Which is why it’s important to remind the politicians who are so ferociously exploiting the overdone Jewish anger at Swiss banks that the Swiss aren’t the devils of the Holocaust story, a story that isn’t about money.