Punishments and Reparations: How Long O Lord?

Banning companies that profited from the Holocaust may seem at first blush a good and fair idea. As someone whose mother-in-law still receives a check every month from Germany for her suffering and slave labor in Nazi work camps, I indirectly benefit. As someone whose mother received compensation only a few years ago for our apartment house that was stolen by the Nazis and later held by the East German Communists, I have also indirectly benefited.

Yet when AB 619, proposed by San Fernando Valley’s own Bob Blumenfield, passed in Sacramento this week, I was forced to have second thoughts. The “Holocaust Survivor Responsibility Act,” sounds fair enough. I certainly don’t want the monsters that perpetrated the Shoah and the companies that profited to be rewarded. But, how long is long enough to carry out this doctrine of inherited guilt and responsibility? Though it was fitting that my mother and mother-in-law got something (that could never be enough to achieve justice for them,) what am I due today? I don’t think anything.

The larger question is about what the children, grandchildren and now great grandchildren of the perpetrators owe anyone? Do the sins of the fathers and grandfathers pass “unto the seventh generation,” as per Isaiah? Sixty-five years after liberation can we wipe away the debt without erasing the memories and the lessons?

If we can’t, do we condemn ourselves to follow the well-worn disastrous path of eternal enmity? How do we deal with the injustices America committed against Americans of Japanese origins during WWII–and for how many generations? How do we recompense Blacks for being kidnapped and being enslaved? What is fair compensation to our Native Americans whose land we took and whose liberty and culture we did our best to destroy?

The ultimate question is this: When I say that “we committed” these injustices and atrocities, what does “we” really mean? It wasn’t me. Nor was it my parents or grandparents who were busy not enjoying their own hells in Eastern Europe. What I owe is a real question. What the children of the perpetrators of the Holocaust owe is the very same question.

Is there a statute of limitation on outrage? If not we can continue our intractable situations with Israel and the Palestinians, the endless enmity between Serbs and Croats, the internecine conflict between Sunni and Shiah and all the other historic conflicts and eternal cries for justice. As Gandhi observed, “An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind.”
2010 Jonathan Dobrer