Once We Were Brothers

In Chapter 17, the novel draws implicit parallels between the Jews’ plight during the Nazi occupation of Europe and issues of immigration in 21st-century America. This is done through the story of Stefan Dubrovnik, the Croatian immigrant who lets the burglars into Ben’s apartment. “They threaten me,” Stefan tells Liam, “open Solomon’s door or we call INS. I got kids in the school” (92). The way Elliot’s goons exploit Stefan’s status as an undocumented immigrant to coerce him into compliance echoes the Nazis’ exploitation of Jews who were unilaterally denied Reich citizenship. What’s most disturbing, however, is that Liam also exploits Stefan’s tenuous position to obtain information from him. He tells Stefan, “I doubt that’s your legal name. I also doubt you have a green card and the right to work as a super in this building” (92). That Liam—one of the novel’s heroes and ostensibly a man of strong moral character—is so quick to bully Stefan in this respect is a troubling reflection of how easily otherwise good people are tempted to exploit those made vulnerable by their immigration status.

These chapters also hold relevance to another debate that’s recently re-emerged in American discourse: the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. In Chapter 19, when Ben first mentions Belzec, Catherine calls it a “concentration camp.” Ben corrects her, calling it a “death camp” and going on to distinguish the difference between the two:

“Many people lump them together, but the Nazis had two different types of camps. Concentration camps were essentially prison camps. Some, like Dachau and Mauthausen, existed in Germany and Austria before the war. People were sentenced there by courts to serve out their terms, although the conditions were so terrible—malnutrition, disease, brutality, random executions—that most did not survive. While in the concentration camps, prisoners did slave labor for the Reich. During the war, new concentration camps were constructed, like Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. Death camps, or extermination camps, like Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, called the Operation Reinhard camps, were built for the sole purpose of killing as many people as quickly as possible. When the Nazis decreed in 1941 that mass murder, not expulsion, was the solution to the Jewish problem, they began to build death camps” (126).

This passage brings to mind the 2019 debate over US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s characterization of migrant detention facilities as “concentration camps.” Many commentators and fellow lawmakers accused Ocasio-Cortez of debasing the memory of those who perished in death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka by making such a comparison. But while reasonable people may disagree over the appropriateness of Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, it’s relevant to consider the distinction Ben makes between concentration camps and extermination camps because they are quite different.

In other more explicit ways, these chapters place the atrocities of the Holocaust in the context of the United States. In Chapter 20, when Catherine muses on the incomprehensibility of Nazi persecution, Ben replies:

“Incomprehensible because we’re Americans? Land of the free and home of the brave? Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve authored our own chapters in the history of shame, periods where the world looked at us and shook its head. Early America built an economy based on slavery and it was firmly supported by the law. Read the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. We trampled entire cultures of Native Americans. ‘No Irish Need Apply’ was written on factory gates in nineteenth century New York” (133).

This quote highlights the possibility of state-sanctioned dehumanization happening in the United States because it’s happened there before. “Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture,” Ben adds, “to denigrate a people because they’re different, and it’s not such a giant leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter” (133).

Also in Chapter 20, the novel introduces a recurring motif of “God’s work on the third and fourth days” (138), during which, according to the Old Testament, God created the seas, vegetation, and the stars. Ben mentions this when discussing the bucolic beauty of life in Joseph’s mountain cabin. He says to Catherine, “It struck me—the incongruity of it all—that in the most ungodly of times, I was bearing witness to indisputable evidence of God’s work on the third and fourth days, a world he created in perfect balance” (137).

In response to this, Catherine gives voice to another of the novel’s major themes: “With such indisputable evidence of God, how did he let the Holocaust happen? Where was God?” (138). This question spawned a great deal of debate within Judaism in the 20th century and even inspired an entire academic discipline known as Holocaust theology. Opinions on the topic cover a wide range. Some Orthodox Jews view the Holocaust as punishment for a lack of piety among gentiles and non-Orthodox Jews. Other Jewish scholars argue that the only rational response to the Holocaust is to reject God and abandon any pretense of a divine plan or purpose for humanity. Still others argue it is impossible to formulate a rational response to such utter madness. For Ben, the answer is fairly simple: “The Holocaust was not God’s will. It was the will of those who had become infused of the devil” (139). While seemingly straightforward, this response is complicated by the theological tenet that God is a supreme being. Nevertheless, there are instances in the Bible wherein God stands by while an “adversary” suggestive of the devil torments His followers, the most famous of which is found in the Book of Job.