In Gerd Korman’s work — and, more tragically, his life — two documents will always be grimly lashed by the bloody bottom line.
One is a mid-19th century bill of sale from a New England slave ship.
The other is a Nazi accountant’s cost analysis itemizing the profits made from shipping Jews to their incineration.
“I put those documents together side by side and realized that they talked to each other. That fact of commercial capitalism and the recognition of drawing what I’ll call the bottom line — you find yourself crossing a moral abyss of unfathomed dimensions,” said Korman, 79, an emeritus professor of history at Cornell University.”
For Korman, a New Yorker who recently passed through the Bay Area to visit family, the documents are a bitterly personal reminder of his family’s history. Korman’s father was a passenger on the ill-fated St. Louis, a ship packed with Jewish refugees that was refused landing in a series of western nations in 1939, including the United States.
“What rotten merchandise Jews must be if no one is prepared to accept us,” Korman’s father wrote at the time. “The slaves must have been better, at least people paid for them. But here and now, when many wanted to pay for each of us, we are still rejected. Are we really so bad and rotten?”
Korman’s father survived the war — in the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands. Perhaps not surprisingly, Korman went on to devote his academic career to advancing the view that the Holocaust was not simply an isolated European atrocity but what he calls “a Euro-American phenomenon.”
“The preconditions that were necessary for something like the Holocaust were also part of American history,” said Korman, a short, bespectacled man with a kindly smile and a soft voice that belies his Brooklyn upbringing.
“What happened in the United States has always has a powerful impact on European history,” he said. “So while the United States wasn’t an active perpetrator in any sense of the word, during the 1920s and ’30s it had policies that dovetailed” with the eventual extermination of the Jews.
Korman cites xenophobic, anti-Jewish immigration limits put in place following the flawed application of intelligence tests in 1924, and the cozy relationship of American businesses with Hitler’s Germany prior to the war.
The professor recalled his family’s expulsion from Germany to Poland and his Kindertransport voyage to the United States in a 2005 memoir, “Nightmare’s Fairy Tale.” It’s a paradoxical title for a paradoxical life: If his family had not been traumatically expelled from Germany, the chances of everyone eventually prospering in Brooklyn, instead of ending up in a Nazi accountant’s ledger book, would have been slim.
Korman insists his past didn’t unduly influence his choice to become a historian. Indeed, when it comes to his personal history, he admits that he can’t remember much of anything prior to his deportation in 1938 as a 10-year-old.
“I was born between 1938 and 1948,” he said. Then he smiled.
“Not literally, of course.”