“He’s Alive”

Eva Mozes Kor was a Jewish girl, born in Romania to Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, the only Jewish residents in the area.  She had three siblings, one of whom was her twin sister Miriam. Her parents and two older sisters were gassed in Auschwitz; she survived because, along with her twin sister, she was the subject of medical experiments that Josef Mengele was performing on twins there.  After the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, Eva went to live in Poland, Romania and eventually the U.S.  She died on July 4, 2019 at the age of 85 in Krakow, Poland accompanying a group on an educational tour of Auschwitz.

       I mention Eva Kor because her death was so recent and because her life reveals the horrors of Nazism and Hitler’s regime as well as the sinfulness of anti-Semitism.  That is, looking at the horrors of the Holocaust, we can clearly see where anti-Semitism leads.  Given that the Holocaust is such recent history (Kor died a mere seven years ago on this date; another Holocaust survivor, Eva Schloss, died January 3 of this year), the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism is all the more perplexing and perverse— and horrifying.  Bluntly put, it is too soon after the Holocaust for so many people to be that stupid.

       But such is the case.  A dear friend tells me that in his Reformed church circles there are people (marginalized to be sure, but still loud thanks to the internet) who teach that the West was on the wrong side of the Second World War and that we should’ve sided with Hitler.   One person opined that the Church needs another Hitler to arise again and help us, saying “‘Protestant Hitler’ is the right term for the Christian prince we need today.”  Another person denounced the heroic Christian Corrie ten Boom and her biography The Hiding Place, reviewing that classic in the following words: “It celebrates shielding Christ’s enemies [i.e. the Jews] from the political consequences of their evil. It glorifies resistance to just government [i.e. the Nazi regime occupying the lands they conquered] and glorifies co-belligerence with Communists”.  Wow.  Just… wow.  It is as if a monster like Joseph Goebbels was stirring in his long sleep.

       I would love to be able to say that such anti-Semitic tripe is confined to Protestant circles, but alas, it is not so.  We Orthodox have our own collection of anti-Semitic rabble, and they are also loud, given the “blessing” of the internet.  I need hardly name names.  You know who you are.

       And it is not as if the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis were not well known in our culture.  Even apart from such popular films as the 1993 “Schindler’s List”, scholarly historians have been hard at work to investigate and document everything from the Nazi era— a task made easier by the German efficiency of the Nazis which, happily for historians, kept complete records of their atrocities.  Combined with the massive testimony from the survivors, there is really no reason for anyone to deny the horrific facts and become a Holocaust denier or a fan of Hitler and his demonic regime.   

But, reason or not, such deniers and fans exist and (though figures are hard to attain) are currently growing in numbers, even among allegedly Bible-believing conservatives.  One hears of one supposed conservative commentator declaring Oswald Mosely to be a persecuted war hero, Britain’s “leader of the opposition” imprisoned under the terrible Winston Churchill. In fact, the leader of the opposition at that time was Clement Attlee. Mosley was the one who married Diana Mitford in Nazi Germany in 1936 in the home of Joseph Goebbels with Hitler as their guest of honour— which might explain Mosley’s unpopularity in Britain during the war.

Such blunders and stupidities are hard to explain in ostensibly educated people. It seems that hatred tends to blind and to shut down rational faculties and when emotion shoves reason out of the driver’s seat, bad things always happen.  But this all begs the question: how does such perversity still occur so soon after such terrible events?

Maybe in trying to figure out people who inhabit such a strange moral universe we need help from someone familiar with strange universes.  Maybe we need someone with insight into such a Twilight Zone.  Maybe we need Rod Serling.

In January 1963 Serling produced an episode for the fourth season of his Twilight Zone television series dealing with precisely this topic, entitled “He’s Alive” (see image inset above).  It told the story of a neo-Nazi street preacher named Peter Vollmer, haranguing people with his Neo-Nazi message but with little success.  Soon he is visited by a shadowy figure who teaches him the art of enthralling a crowd and growing a movement.  The figure turns out to be Adolf Hitler, more a supernatural phantom than a flesh and blood survivor of the war.  Serling concludes the tale with the following speech.

“Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare– Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami? Syracuse?  Any place, every place where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry, he’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.”

We live in apocalyptic times, times where everything that seemed to be nailed down is coming unstuck and where a whole generation is feeling unsettled and lost.  We are desperate to find secure moorings and this makes some who are not already moored and tethered to Christ vulnerable to finding their moorings in strange places. 

Anti-Semitism is a symptom of being moored in such strange places.  Finding our identity in a tribe often means that we also make our tribe’s enemy our own enemy.  The hate, the prejudice, and the bigotry all become not vices but signs of loyalty to our tribe, indications that we are properly and tightly tethered to something which brings us security and purpose. We are no longer unsettled and drifting; now we have found our place in the world as members of this tribe.  Tribes are political things and therefore they need enemies— usually the neighboring tribe. For some people, the Jews are the obvious choice for the enemy tribe.  In this world, anti-Semitism becomes a matter of tribal loyalty.

That explains the irrationality inherent in all anti-Semitism.  It does not matter to an anti-Semite that the document known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was actually a fake and a Russian forgery.  It does not matter that Hamas is a terrorist organization bent on destroying all the Jews.  Facts do not matter. What matters is tribal loyalty and the security it brings. On this dark journey, emotion remains firmly in the driver’s seat.

What should our response be as disciples of Jesus? In a word: love.  St. John was crystal clear: “He who does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer and we know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:14-15).

This applies to everyone, even if they belong to another tribe.  For the Christian knows that our true enemy is not one from another tribe but rather the principalities and powers, the world-forces of darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenlies (Ephesians 6:12).  We reserve our hatred for the devil; we are commanded to love our neighbour, whoever he may be, whatever tribe he may belong to.

We conclude with a question:  what then of the Jew? Who is he?  The Jew is many things, but primarily he is our neighbour, a soul for whom Christ died and whom God loves. The last word therefore must belong not to Rod Serling, dear man that he was, but to St. John: “Little children, let us not love only with word or with tongue but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18).