Trivializing the Shoah
Though it was odd, perhaps, of God to choose
the Jews, it is much odder to abuse
the Jews by claiming that their near-extinction
does not deserve the horrible distinction
of being as unique as God was said —
first by Jews! — to be. While God seemed dead
when six million of his people nearly
became extinct, the Shoah was not merely
a genocide like many others. Those
who claim this was the case we should oppose,
since saying this alleges diminution
of the horror of this failed Solution,
thus trivializing it as if it was the Jews
who caused such horror, and confuse
it by dilution, seen as gen-
ocide Jews do, allegedly, to gentile men.
History repeats itself, and antisemitism
most sadly illustrates this fact, immortal,
reflecting Marx’s historic witticism,
a tragedy that as a farce makes Jews’ foes chortle.
In “Marcel Ophuls, Myth-Shattering War Documentarian, Is Dead at 97,” NYT, 5/26/25, Jonathan Kandell writes:
Marcel Ophuls, the German-born filmmaker whose powerful documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” exploded the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, died over the weekend in France. He was 97……
Mr. Ophuls had directed several minor feature films before vaulting to fame in 1969 with “The Sorrow and the Pity,” his four-and-a-half-hour documentary on wartime Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city located almost at the center of France. In a dispassionate, incisive style, he interviewed shopkeepers and farmers, bankers and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers who either collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy regime or actively resisted the occupation — but who in most instances had turned a blind eye to the roundups of Jews and anti-Nazis.
When the film was first shown in Paris cinemas, it was met with shock, outrage and tears. It stripped away the myth — fostered by Charles de Gaulle when he returned to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 — that a vast majority of his compatriots were either open or secret supporters of his resistance movement……
But the true protagonists of Mr. Ophuls’s film were the ordinary citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, whom he and his colleague, André Harris, a journalist, interviewed at length. Among them were two farmers, brothers who fought in the resistance — the older one was captured and sent to a concentration camp; a shopkeeper who took out newspaper ads to explain that he and his family had always been Catholic despite their Jewish-sounding last name; and two schoolteachers who claimed not to remember the cases of colleagues persecuted by the Vichy regime. Also memorable were interviews with the former Nazi garrison commander of Clermont-Ferrand, who fondly recalled the passivity and collaboration of most of the locals in contrast to his previous service on the Russian front.
Commenting on the way that Louis Napoleon had made himself emperor of France, Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first by tragedy, secondly by farce.
