OPINION  |  HISTORY

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by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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• In that town, I spied in the debris
• The thorn fragment of a parchment scroll
• And gently brushed away the dirt to see
• What tale it told.
• Written on it was “In a strange land” —
• Just a few words from the Bible, but the sum
• Of all one needs to understand
• Of a pogrom.

 (by Z. Jabotinsky, following the Berdichev pogrom, from Jabotinsky. A Life by Hillel Halkin, Yale University Press, 2014)

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You are from Hashomer Hatsair? Mordecai asked me. Yes, I still remember the Zionists from Vienna.” Surprisingly the man who asked Chaika Grossman the question was an Austrian, officer in the Wehrmacht, stationed in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), who later was captured and killed by the Nazis because, as Grossman remembered, he was

“a tall officer, Schmidt, who served in the Vilna occupation army (…) He headed a collection station for soldiers who had lost their units. Cars and all kinds of papers were at his disposal. In short, the officer began a rescue operation.”

(from The Underground Army – Fighters of the Bialystok Ghetto, by Chaika Grossman, Holocaust Library, New York, 1987; she survived the war, emigrated to Israel and became a member of the Knesset)

So, one Wehrmacht officer who helped the Jews living underground outside the Vilna Ghetto. Is this enough to redeem the honor of Germany and Austria? Is this even worth mentioning at all when focusing not on individual heroism but on the bigger picture of what it is that happened?

I have long believed in the collective guilt of the German and Austrian nations in the perpetration of the Holocaust. That is my opinion.

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