THE JUSTICE OF THE CALCULATOR

By LANCE MORROW

Is it better to remember or to forget? Forgetting--even without its sainted better half, forgiveness--is sometimes the only route to sanity. If only the Balkans, for example, could be enfogged by a massive forgetting. As it is, every generation of Serbs remembers, as if it were last Saturday, their defeat by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in the year 1389. The result has been centuries of self-renewing reciprocal atrocity between Serbs and Muslims. Massacre is the Balkan national flower.

Among the Irish, a bardic genius for remembering, the grievances singing in the genes, has kept the kettle of sectarian vengeance boiling since the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Israel became a state in 1948, and for 49 years Palestinian children have gone to sleep to stories of the nakba, the disaster, that destroyed the village, the fig, the olive, the Palestinian Eden from which nakba meant exile. Tribal memory is the plutonium of revenge. The mother shows her son the martyr-father's bloody shirt and sings the song of blood feud: Make them pay.

If that is what comes of keeping grievances green, what does one make of the constantly returning memory of the Holocaust, of the refrain "Never forget! Never again!"? Specifically, what does one make now of the Jewish initiative to reopen the Swiss banks' World War II books in order to recover Jewish money deposited there, in the snug, smug, neutral Alps, as Hitler's apocalypse descended?

The range of reactions is interesting. There is the usual rolling of the eyes by the kind of Anti-Semite Lite who regards any mention of the Holocaust ("Not again!") as a bore and a kind of chronic blackmail, a moral collection racket. In an entirely different way, there are also Israelis who object to Holocaust remembering, because they think it a sign of weakness or at least of unproductive obsession. Some Jews who favor pressing the case against Swiss banks recall a bitter joke: in czarist Russia, two Jews are lined up against the wall to be shot; the captain of the firing squad asks if there is a last request. One Jew replies, "I believe I am entitled to a last cigarette"; the second whispers anxiously, "Max, don't make trouble!"

Distinctions are in order--the first being the distinction between the blood feuder's demand for revenge, atrocity for atrocity, and Elie Wiesel's "Remember!" Night and day. The first wants murder. The second seeks to prevent murder.

The case of the Swiss and the Holocaust plays interesting variations on the theme of remembering and forgetting. The Swiss for decades have nestled complacently in the myth of their wartime virtue. They were neutral in their fastness. Their mountains and their citizen army kept the Germans off and preserved their tidy civilization.

But the Swiss--some at least--enjoy the gift of selective forgetting. In fact, the Swiss had a very good war, financially speaking, while all around them the world was coming to an end.

Hitler turned Switzerland's neutrality into a component of the Nazi war machine. Through the transalpine lifeline of Switzerland's St. Gotthard rail tunnel flowed supplies between the Axis partners, Germany and Italy. Switzerland, with its efficient banking system, became a clearinghouse for Germany's external trade, for fuel, food, steel, precision instruments of war and Oerlikon's multibarrel antiaircraft guns. And there was the money--how much, exactly?--that Europe's Jews entrusted to Swiss bankers for safekeeping as the night fell.

More than a half-century later, a symmetrical deal suggests itself: let the Swiss remember. And let them do so with the minute and thorough attention to detail for which they are famous. Then, when the Swiss have repaired this unprofessional untidiness of accounting, the rest of the world can forget the matter, at least in its financial dimensions.

Oddments from that bitter long-ago have surfaced lately. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, raised a Catholic, discovered that her parents were Jewish and had converted to Christianity in the shadow of the Holocaust. Lost gold and recovered gold may be a crude, inadequate metaphor for lost memories and recovered identities, for the millions of dramas of suppression for the sake of survival, or of forgetting or denial or shame, that still reverberate down the generations. Some parents not only chose to forget but also denied their children their memories and knowledge, as if to expunge those memories, fiercely, from the very genes. The Albright case resolved a conflict of remembrance or suppression, at last, with the bittersweet emergence of a complicated truth.

The Swiss case involves emergent truth as well. On the first level, it concerns real money slyly and cravenly looted from the victims of the larger tragedy. On that level, there can be no nebulous moral debate about reparations or about how to calculate the value of a life. The case before us concerns the mere justice of the calculator: add the money up and give it back.

Anxieties fire through the argument. One is the fear that a Jews-and-money linkage will reawaken anti-Semitic stereotypes--"Max, don't..." Well, is there a reverence for money more intense than that of Swiss bankers? A cynic might say it is the only coin of their moral calculations. That reverence, allied with the Swiss banks' cult of secrecy, has produced in sanitary Switzerland an unclean business.

At the deepest level, as Elie Wiesel says, "If all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence."

The Swiss bankers need to consider that there are many forms of bankruptcy. The moral one is worst of all.