Holocaust and Rebecca Hodes

TESSA CHELOUCHE, MD

How much more outrageous can it get than the leader of the Black First Land First (BLF) Andile Mngxitama tweeting?

“For those claiming the legacy of the holocaust is ONLY negative, think about the lampshades and Jewish soap.”

Wow! I do not care that Mngxitama’s obnoxious tweet was “an apparent attempt to position himself back in the media spotlight” as suggested in the media or “was possibly a reference to Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s controversial tweets earlier in the year when she said the legacy of colonialism was not all negative.”

Who cares?

Both suppositions are irrelevant and hardly a prophylactic against global opprobrium for what was an affront to Jews.

Mngxitama’s tweet needs to be judged on its own merits – in this case demerits – and the only conclusion any rational, reasonable, and moral human being can come to, is that this political leader is beyond the pale.

That was until I read Rebecca Hodes’s response in the Daily Maverick of August 25. (https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-08-25-the-value-of-mngxitamas-holocaust-tweet/#.WaaYtSgjGUl)

She takes “beyond the pale” to another dimension.

If Mngxitama’s tweet was disturbing, Hodes’ article was frightening!

Who is Hodes?

I understand she “is a historian who works at the University of Cape Town”. This is the way she self-describes at the end of her published diatribe.

So, as a medical practitioner, I respond as a colleague.

Originally from Johannesburg, I am today the director of a primary-care family medical unit, as well as co-director and lecturer of a pre-graduate course on “The Study of Medicine and the Holocaust” at the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel.

I am the co-chairman of the Unesco Department of Bioethics and the Holocaust at the Unesco Chair of Bioethics, Haifa. I lecture at conferences around the world and have written in national and international medical journals about “Medicine and the Holocaust” including a “Casebook on Bioethics and the Holocaust” for the Unesco Chair of Bioethics.

I furnish my background because I am most concerned that young minds today, notably students at universities, understand that the horrors of the Holocaust were perpetrated not by the uncultured and uneducated. On the contrary, those horrors were first theorised and endorsed by the highly cultured and educated – which makes Mngxitama’s tweet and Hodes’ “academic” understanding more horrifying.

It is precisely as a result of these dangers of academic facades, so prevalent among the Nazis, that I lecture and warn against in my field of bioethics.

The collective behaviour of Mngxitama and Hodes exposes how the world arrived at Auschwitz where Jews were turned into “soap” and “lampshades”, and where decades later, some like Mngxitama can joke about it, while others like Hodes will rationalise why it’s okay to joke about it, and should not be “fixated”.

Well, it is not funny and it is not okay and we are not “fixated”!

What we are is that we never want such mass murder to ever occur again.

To that I proudly confess a fixation.

In all my years of Holocaust study, I have never come across such writings as “positive aspects of the Holocaust” or “benefits of the Holocaust” as penned by Hodes. This is a perverse use of words. She should be ashamed as a Jew and embarrassed as a “historian”.

Just read what she writes and then re-read it to make sure you were not imagining her choice of words:

“Those claiming the legacy of the Holocaust is ‘ONLY negative’ are fixated on the most perverse acts of the Nazi genocide, such as stretching the skin of a death camp inmate to make a lampshade, or using the human by-products of industrial killing to produce soap. Their absorption in these atrocities obscures their recognition of the Holocaust’s benefits.”

To suggest that people who think, write, or teach about the Holocaust to ensure that such mass murder never occurs again are “fixated”, is in it itself offensive. The most important aspect of the Holocaust today is to remember and to learn from the lessons, so that it does not reoccur.

Does this ‘historian’ genuinely believe that we are doing a disservice to academic study by not revealing the “benefits” of the Holocaust, whatever she and Mngxitama may believe are such benefits?

Rather than take issue with Mngxitama over his obnoxious anti-Semitic tweet, Hodes takes issue with the Jewish community’s response. She is outraged over their outrage.

How disrespectful to the murdered millions when Hodes writes: “It is the Holocaust fixaters who are doing the thinking, with too much of it devoted to the repurposing of human remains, and not enough to the Holocaust’s positive consequences.”

Dismissing the main outcome of the Holocaust, namely the mass murder of millions,  she suggests by “fixating” on “soap” and “lampshades” we are missing out on recognising the “positive consequences”.

So, what are the “positive consequences” that Rebecca Hodes cites?

She writes:

“The Warsaw Ghetto uprising has its place in the pantheon of audacious resistance struggles. In the wake of revelations about Nazi atrocities, the first global mechanisms for protecting human rights were established.

“After the horrors of the Dachau cold experiments and Mengele’s medicine, the Nuremberg Code for the ethical conduct of research was formulated. These ‘positive consequences’ are not equal in value or meaning to the atrocities that preceded them, but recognising them does not equate them.”

What a diabolical misuse of language!

She is of course correct historically about the events that occurred – the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, codes for human rights and the Nuremberg Code. However, these are consequences and not “positive” results.

To see the heroic and superhuman resistance that the young, brave and courageous faced in the Warsaw Ghetto as “positive” is… (I cannot find the words) or to even think about the Nuremberg Code in terms of a “positive” reaction to the barbaric cruel inhuman actions of the Nazi medical establishment, is beyond belief.

Is Hodes even aware that there were ethical rules for experimentation before Nuremberg and that the medical world certainly did not “need” the German medical establishment’s active involvement in the years before and during the Holocaust?

These deeds by Nazi doctors are the greatest stain on the history of our profession. For decades, the medical world was silent because it was so immensely difficult to come to terms with Nazi medical crimes of which the “Dachau cold experiments and Mengele’s medicine” are only the tip of the iceberg.

We can and should learn the lessons, but we certainly cannot consider these lessons as being a “positive” result of the past.

Of course, “historian” Hodes thinks differently and she really knows how to rub it in when she describes Jewish outrage to Mngxitama’s tweet at the “Shabbat dinner conversations, similar to the consumption of chopped liver on levels of haemoglobin”.

Hodes cannot escape the anti-Semitism inherent in her writing by saying “I’m Jewish”.

The way Hodes honours the dishonourable, defends the indefensible, and takes sides with the victimisers over the victims, she has the ethical standards of a lecturer at the University of Munich in 1938, rather than one at UCT in 2017!

Courtesy of IsraeLink.co.za