The "viscous core" of the "defective heart"
"Then came days of orgiastic slaughter. Jews from all over the region, families in carts, women pushing their children in strollers, trains full of Jews, columns of Jews on foot were being dragged into the city, by the hundreds, by the thousands, and were being massacred everywhere, in the streets, in the fields, alive. They were being shot, shot at, I saw a German officer approaching and looking at a pretty thirteen-year-old girl who had just gotten off a train. Mordecai Striegler, a Polish Jew, escapee from various camps and ghettos, was telling the American journalist Meyer Levin about his life and survival one April day in 1945 in Buchenwald.
Meyer Levin wrote it down in so many words: "We knew it. The world had heard about it, vaguely. But until now, none of us had seen it. Even that morning, we could have imagined that we would see this. It was as if we had finally penetrated to the blackest heart, to the slimy core." These were the Nazi concentration and extermination camps in Europe in 1945.
Since the fall of 2023, we have been seeing, every day, the "slimy core of a corrupted heart," that space that was once described as the largest open-air concentration camp in the Middle East (and also in Europe), which was Gaza. The "corrupted heart," naturally, is that of the Israeli leaders who carried out brutal revenge in response to a terrorist attack of unknown dimensions until October 7, 2023. The "slimy core" of the "corrupted heart" is not exactly Gaza; it is what the Israeli government, its followers, want Gaza to be.
The images are powerful; the witnesses, too. One need only return to the black-and-white photographs of Eric Schwab at Buchenwald, and the color photographs of photographers who have graphically reported the deaths from hunger and starvation in the Gaza Strip; hold them upside down and look at them carefully. The Jews pushing strollers along roads controlled by the SS and German soldiers are projected into the images of the Palestinian corrugations moving up and down the territory, while the Israeli infantry and aircraft (and their auxiliaries on the ground, American mercenaries, for example) press against them.
In 1973, the Montserrat monk and theologian Evangelista Vilanova wrote: "There is no way out: Auschwitz symbolizes a dark age." Now it is Gaza that symbolizes the darkness of our times; the great debate has returned about what is there, in that punished territory: genocide? Crimes against humanity? War crimes? But no one cites Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who attempted to define a new crime in 1945: genocide, the systematic, organized, conscious destruction of a national group, a collective perfectly identifiable in its distinct nature. We must be fair to those who tried to illuminate the "slimy core of a corrupted heart" in 1945, because now, in 2025, we have found it close to home, when we thought we would never see it again in a geography like Palestine, executed by executioners—executed by executioners! This is the great paradox of history and our present. Meyer Levin couldn't possibly know the future.
