Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on Dachau)

“We are not entirely guiltless, we the Allies, because it took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again. We must know now that there can never be peace if there is cruelty like this in the world.

And if ever again we tolerate such cruelty we have no right to peace.”—Martha Gellhorn, “Dachau,” in Reporting World War II: Part Two: American Journalism, 1944-1946 (Library of America, 1995)

(Elsewhere in her dispatch on the American troops’ discovery of the worst of the concentration camp Dachau, Gellhorn offered up a descriptive gem of a death-camp survivor that, in its spare but evocative detail, could have been written by her husband, Ernest Hemingway:

“What had been a man dragged himself into the doctor’s office; he was a Pole and he was about six feet tall and he weighed less than a hundred pounds and he wore a striped prison shirts, a pair of unlaced boots and a blanket which he tried to hold between his legs. His eyes were large and strange and stood out from his face, and his jawbone seemed to be cutting through his skin. He had come to Dachau from Buchenwald on the last death transport.”

Of course, Gellhorn would have hated the comparison I made between her and Hemingway—not only as a reminder of a man she was now trying to erase from her life but also as a negation of the very real achievement demonstrated in this passage. In justice, I would have to admit the justice of any annoyance she would feel toward myself or anyone else on this score.

Today’s quote is not only meant as a celebration of Gellhorn—the centennial of whose birth today passed without notice, to my knowledge, on the blogosphere—but as a good opportunity to review the choices we face if, like Gellhorn, we resolve never to permit genocide again.

Let’s start with the celebration first. Hemingway’s marriage to Gellhorn was the shortest of his four—much to the chagrin of his sons, who welcomed this fun-loving woman to the family as their stepmother with great enthusiasm. The union might have been misbegotten because the two were so alike in so many ways: driven, athletic, politically impassioned, glamorous, and competitive in their literary pursuits. They also both eventually committed suicide.

I have not read Gellhorn’s fiction, though I hope to read eventually my copy of her A Stricken Field, which was inspired by her experiences as a foreign correspondent in Czechoslovakia at the time it fell under the Nazi shadow. After reading the selections by her in Reporting World War II, however, I’m fully prepared to believe that she was Hemingway's superior as a journalist—someone who put her subject rather than herself at the center.

Now, about the resolve of “Never again” when it comes to permitting another Holocaust:

In one sense, of course, that ship has sailed. Even after the Holocaust, the twentieth century presented what former Secretary of State Warren Christopher called “a problem from hell”: the prevalence of mass, ethnic-center mass murder. Everybody of good will is against genocide, of course, but the question is, “What are you going to do about it?”

Do we try sanctions—even if they hurt the poor the hardest without really touching the rulers?

Do we engage in multinational military missions—even if that is for purposes, or using methods, with which this nation disagrees?

And what if one or only a couple of powerful nations—Russia or China, say—blocks action in international forums such as the U.N.? What do we do then? How many tens—or even hundreds of thousands—do we permit to die before we take action?

Bill Clinton has expressed regret that he did not act against Rwanda, even when his wife advised intervention. Yet rulers the world over have moved not only against their own dissidents but against ethnic minorities within their countries, as Saddam Hussein did against the Kurds. Which rulers will we act against? How? Under what circumstances? For how long?

Though the Obama camp sounds like it blanched when Joe Biden said Obama would be tested not long after taking office, our VP-to-be was, in another sense, just stating the obvious. The challenge that Martha Gellhorn posed at the end of her searing dispatch on Dachau remains more relevant than ever. The moral handwringing in which we’ve engaged since then seems less justifiable than ever.

We as a country had better discuss—and soon—what we’re going to do about this. Because you can rest assured that, in a world of scarcer resources and rising ethnic and religious tensions, genocide will appear on the world’s radar screen again.)