In Memoriam

By Otto Friedrich

ONE, BY ONE, BY ONE: FACING THE HOLOCAUST

by Judith Miller; Simon & Schuster

319 pages; $21.95

Judith Miller's challenging thesis is that many countries remember the Holocaust in different ways, and from these different perceptions come different distortions of what the Holocaust actually was. A veteran reporter and editor for the New York Times, Miller pursues her thesis over a lot of familiar terrain -- the Barbie trial, the Waldheim election -- but when she ventures off the beaten track, which she does fairly often, she discovers some very interesting things. Like the fact that the Dutch government still pays a pension of about $11,000 a year to the widow of the country's deputy Nazi leader during the German Occupation, and that she unrepentantly spends part of the money to distribute neo-Nazi propaganda. Or that the monument the Soviets reluctantly built at Babi Yar is actually half a mile away from the ravine where thousands of Jews were slaughtered, and that in the process of building the monument the Soviets bulldozed Kiev's main Jewish cemetery.

Miller explores the collective memories of six countries and finds them all in various ways deceptive. The West Germans have made some amends, but they have forgotten too much; the Austrians deny they were Hitler's willing accomplices; the Dutch idolize Anne Frank but overlook the fact that she was betrayed by one of the many Dutch collaborators; the French cherish the myth of the heroic Resistance but began mistreating Jews well before the Nazis asked them to do so; the Soviets steadfastly denigrate the Jewishness of most Holocaust victims; and all too many Americans are turning memories of the Holocaust into a vulgar fund-raising carnival.

All of that is more or less true, but there are some strange gaps in Miller's indictment. One is Poland, where most of the victims lived and most of the killing actually occurred, and where the poison of anti-Semitism was still visible last year in Jozef Cardinal Glemp's resistance to the removal of a Carmelite installation at Auschwitz. The other is Israel, which probably would not exist but for the Holocaust and which still tends to cite the 6 million dead as justification for whatever actions it undertakes.

Strangest of all, while Miller devotes most of her chapters mainly to Gentile distortions and evasions, she writes about American reactions as though the Holocaust were purely a Jewish question. "While it is now evident that the United States did not do enough to prevent the genocide in Europe . . . the Holocaust is not an American experience," she claims. "Americans did not do it, nor were they its targets or victims." But it was President Roosevelt who did nothing to increase the immigration quotas, and the State Department that refused to fill even those narrow quotas, and the U.S. Congress that rejected a measure to allow in 20,000 children. And when Jewish leaders pleaded for Allied bombers to knock out the railroad lines to Auschwitz, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy responded, "I am very chary of getting the army involved in this."

No, whenever we examine those terrible years, we do not find very many people with clean hands. But what does Miller's subtitle Facing the Holocaust actually mean? What are we asking when we demand that people "confront" or "deal with" such a disaster? The Holocaust certainly can and should be studied, analyzed, remembered, but memory is of rather limited value. Even after all that has been said about it, in anger or in sorrow, the Holocaust cannot really be understood -- or expiated.