The Jews

BY NATALIA GINZBURG

Translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee

The day after the events in Munich, the Catholic Press Association called me to say it was conducting an inquiry regarding the massacre and asked if I would express my opinion. I refused to respond. I told them that I never respond to inquiries.[*]

Pronouncing a few sentences over the telephone seemed both stupid and useless. But later, I wanted to respond to those journalists at length and in detail. I didn’t have only one opinion to express, I had many. Above all, I wanted to collect my thoughts on the subject, thoughts scattered within me.

When a tragedy happens in the world, we find ourselves considering how we would have acted if we’d been directly involved or had possessed the power to act. Since such power is entirely out of our hands, these thoughts are merely vacuous fantasies. However, even though we’re dealing with vacuous fantasies, I will express how I would have acted in response to the events in Munich if I’d had the power to act.

If I were Golda Meir, I would have acquiesced to the guerrillas’ demands and liberated the two hundred prisoners. They say that you must never give in to blackmail. But even blackmail, it seems to me, must be accepted when it comes to a world tragedy of this magnitude. They say that if the two hundred prisoners had been liberated, those prisoners, in turn, would have taken more innocent people hostage and perpetrated further massacres. But the world today is so disastrously constructed that, from one minute to the next, one must decide how to defend oneself and whom to defend. I think every other consideration should have been put aside and those nine hostages saved. If Golda Meir had freed the two hundred prisoners, she would have given the world a lesson, not in weakness but in power, or, at least, in the only power it is legitimate to believe in: the power that doesn’t care about winning and is ready to lose, the power that doesn’t reside in weapons or in oil or in pride but in the spirit. 

If I were the head of the German police, I would have let the guerrillas escape unharmed, taking the nine hostages with them wherever they wanted to go. If there was even an atom of a chance that one of the nine hostages could be saved, that atom should have been considered essential.

If I were the head of the Olympics, I would have canceled the games, since, after what happened, they obviously no longer made sense.

Finally, if I were a head of state, I would ask the Americans to withdraw their troops from Vietnam. Naturally, I would already have asked them to do so, but I would repeat the demand all the more emphatically at this particular moment. I don’t believe that Vietnamese children are any different from the nine Israeli hostages. The only difference is this: we’ve all become accustomed to knowing that Vietnamese children die, and we’ve even become used to watching, without batting an eye, how they die, having seen them die on television and at the movies. This is a horrifying thing to get used to. There doesn’t seem to me to be a decisive difference between the fact that there is a war in Vietnam and the fact that the officials wanted the Olympic Stadium to be considered an “island of peace.” It is false to believe that islands of peace can still exist in a world like ours. And human destinies are now so wrapped up and entangled with each other that a war in one part of the world propagates every day and everywhere indifference, habituation, and an overfamiliarity with carnage. If the US were suddenly to recall its troops from Vietnam, the nine Israeli hostages wouldn’t have died in vain.

Read the rest of the essay here

[*]Editor’s Note: At the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972, the Palestinian militant organization Black September killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team and took nine others hostage. Their leader, Luttif Afif, demanded the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners, along with the leaders of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. West German police ambushed the terrorists: five of the eight Black September members were killed, as were all of the hostages.

This essay is included in Vita Immaginaria