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Diary of Bergen-Belsen

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by Hanna Levy-Hass


  A year or two before her death, and several years after a cruel civil war tore apart her Yugoslavia, she summed up her life to me: “All my worlds have been destroyed.”

  She spoke in telegrams, and when these are unraveled, they reveal a considerable piece of the twentieth century, not only of her own lifetime: “the Jewish community, socialism, Yugoslavia, and Israel.” Namely: Jewish life in the diaspora, her own life as a member of the (Sephardic) Jewish minority in Europe, had always seemed natural to her. The Third Reich’s new world order put an end to that life. She, after all, had believed that history, people’s will, and their conscious action would lead to a just social system, socialism. This faith—a world in itself—was shattered long before the breakdown of the USSR. The dismantling of Yugoslavia and the cruel war it experienced were inconceivable to her own humanist rationalism that had survived Bergen-Belsen, to the extent that she could no longer even listen to Balkan folk songs. She would not be interviewed about the Sarajevo of her childhood. And Israel—her home after 1949, although she had never been nor did she become a Zionist—proved true the warnings she had heard in Yugoslavia prior to her emigration. “This is colonialism,” friends told her, trying to disuade her: “What will you do there?”

  She did not commit this telegraphic summary of her life to writing. The latter forty years of her life were wrapped in silence, despite her writing talents. Vain were my attempts—as well as those of a young friend of hers, Tirza Waisel, who adopted her as her mentor—to make her speak, to unfold an orderly biography and record her memoirs.

  She wrote her diary in Bergen-Belsen while she still had hope for a better world, eventually. Her writing had meaning—documenting and memory had a role in building a world “that will be good.” Her silence afterward was an ongoing admission that the postwar world was not new.

  Amira Hass

  Translated by Tal Haran

  Information about Bergen-Belsen was taken from the book Bergen-Belsen, 1943 bis 1945 by Eberhard Kolb (Göttingen: Bergen Sammlung Vandenhoeck, 1985).

  1

  B. B. | August 16, 1944

  My whole being seems paralyzed and with each passing day I feel more apathetic about the world outside, less suited to life as it is now. If our goals and political aims don’t materialize, if the world remains as it is now, if new social relations don’t emerge and substantially change human nature—well, then, I will finally become and forever remain a clumsy, incompetent, damned creature, a failure.

  Up to now I have frequently—even constantly—looked inside myself to find the causes of my misery and unhappiness—in my being, my character, my background. I’ve always struggled to understand the necessity behind human destiny, individual fate, and to explain such things in light of atavism, heredity, education, childhood, and any number of psychological factors. And I’ve done the same to understand and explain my own life. The method is sound, no doubt.

  But recently it’s becoming clearer to me that one’s faults aren’t something to look for solely in oneself or in one’s personal life; they are largely hidden in the world around us. Today, I understand quite well that the endless string of bad days, the dark thoughts, and the extremely difficult situations I’ve lived through in my life were directly caused by none other than external vicissitudes, the absurdity of the current social structure, and human nature as it is today.

  This becomes glaringly obvious today, right here, in this camp, and in the atrocious servitude that binds us to each other. And so I’ve learned to link my own particular destiny closely to the more general question that will determine the outcome to the current social and international upheaval, and I’ve learned to envision the solution to my own personal problems, above and beyond all else, within the context of the solution to global problems. So I’ve decided to stop being the victim of my previous convictions, to free myself from the clutches of individual fatalism that used to throw me defenselessly into an imminent, inevitable, predestined, eternal, and necessarily fatal unhappiness. It goes without saying that in spite of everything, my personal unhappiness flows from these kinds of things, in a sense; but that unhappiness is not a definitive and stable feature, since it must, since it can’t not vary within the general context of the social and global transformations taking place today.

  B. B. | August 19, 1944

  People from different social classes are crammed together here, but it’s the standard petty-bourgeois type that predominates. There are also a few typical capitalist individuals, moderately decadent types. In general, everyone continues to display mean and petty habits, selfishness, and narrow-mindedness. Out of this come endless conflicts of interest, friction, and cases of bigotry on top of it all.

  The atmosphere is suffocating. The fact that we were all deported here from every corner of the world and that you hear no fewer than twenty-five languages being spoken is not the worst of it. If only we were united by one determined, common consciousness! But this is not the case. This human mass is heterogeneous. It is piled together here, by force, by violence, in this small patch of dirty, humid ground, forced to live in the most humiliating conditions and to endure the most brutal deprivations, such that all human passions and weaknesses have unleashed themselves, sometimes taking on beastly forms.

  What a disgrace! What a sad spectacle! A common misery uniting beings who barely tolerate each other and who add their own lack of social consciousness, mental blindness, as well as those incurable ills of isolated souls, to these distressing objective conditions. Certain selfish instincts have found in this place an ideal ground for their own justification to the point of being grotesque. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to generalize all these problems.

  But the high moral values that you can sense in some people, their moral and intellectual honesty, remain in the shadows, powerless.

  B. B. | August 20, 1944

  I feel extremely tired and disconnected from everything around me. My soul moans, aches. Where is beauty hiding? And truth? And love? Oh, how the thought of my life, my whole life, pains me.

  B. B. | August 22, 1944

  The very limited space and the even more limited possibilities of keeping it clean—it’s enough to push anyone to the brink. Rainy days transform the entire space into a mud pit, which further increases the overall level of filth as well as the vermin. And it’s all accompanied by interminable squabbles systematically encouraged by the common enemy, the Nazi. It’s only the first month and already, depressed, we can foresee endless misery.

  I should have gone “up there,” into the mountains, to be with them.a Definitely. Of course, there too, over time, you would have noticed some conflicts, some petty disagreements, some minor inconsistencies in some people, a lack of conviction or principles in others … and it would have been even more painful, more bitter, perhaps. But at least you would feel like a human being, free to think, to express yourself, to act. And you would be surrounded by human beings, by real men, who say human things to you, men who, today, are the only ones who deserve respect and whose words and deeds matter. Only “up there” could I know my reason for being, my true worth, and what I am truly capable of contributing, or not contributing.

  Only there does suffering have meaning. Only there do faults become more obvious and easier to correct. Only there does man learn to know himself and to devote himself. And to the extent that, there too, the verdict would indicate that I am a failure … It would only be for the better. Everything would be clearer: the only thing left for you now is to drop, like an overripe fruit that decomposes of its own accord. Why not? Such is the world. But I suspect vaguely, yet deep within me, that once “up there,” I would not necessarily have been destined to total ruin.

  Maybe it’s precisely this dilemma that landed me here in this wretched camp; it’s been tormenting me for some time. On the other hand, because of it many things within me and in others have been clarified. And today I can state without fear of inaccuracy that I was made—if not absolutely then decisively�
��to be there with them, rather than here. In a sense, this evolution hasn’t been totally worthless to me: I came out of it hardened in my convictions, having gotten to know the enemy better and having learned more thoroughly what we must fight in the future. The knowledge acquired was worth it.

  B. B. | August 23, 1944

  That’s not entirely true. I had this knowledge before, complete and alive in my consciousness. And I didn’t have to wait until my thirties to become “more hardened” at the cost of such infamous ordeals … since so many others were able to resolve this crucial question so much more quickly and positively. That’s what’s hard. That’s what’s behind this dissatisfaction with myself that often, very logically, throws me into despair.

  This struggle between two worlds being waged within me and within many others like me—will it last forever, to mortify us throughout our entire existence? Or is there some hope that it will end favorably? It seems as though it’s inevitable, like a natural phenomenon that occurs in people whose lives have unfolded in circumstances I have known, a phenomenon that most likely will not fail to manifest itself in us again in the future, on the threshold of a new life, like it does in the world described by P. Romanov, Gorki, Gladkov.b These external signs of private battles and moral suffering that destroy and consume. And struggle—the only way of life capable of putting an end to these unhealthy thoughts in an evolving man … struggle, nothing but struggle.

  I’m not writing all this to justify myself. There is no justification for faults that we are the first to become fully conscious of, any more so than for shortcomings that we are the first to condemn.

  B. B. | August 24, 1944

  I am overcome by extreme fatigue and total disinterest. What can I add? A world that is falling apart … A new world, a saner one, will come along and replace it. I shudder with joy at the thought of a new life, one where clarity and truth will triumph. So many things will finally be explained and discovered, in books, in activity, in life.... And everything will be infinitely simpler, fairer, clearer, so there will be no room for this sort of dilemma.

  B. B. | August 26, 1944

  There is one thing that baffles me completely. It’s to see that men are so much weaker, so much less resilient than women. Physically and often morally, too. They don’t know how to get hold of themselves and often display such a lack of courage it’s pitiful. Their hunger shows on their faces and in their gestures in a way that’s alarmingly different from women.

  Many of them either don’t know how to discipline their stomachs or else they don’t want to or are organically incapable of it. The same goes for thirst, fatigue, their physical reactions to any fundamental deprivation. They lack the strength to adapt, to keep pace. There are some who have such a miserable demeanor that their misery is much more painful for those who look at them. And there are some whose lack of discipline goes so far as to border on meanness, on overt greediness, on total disloyalty toward their fellow internees in this dire suffering and ordeal that we all share.

  Is the whole male sex like this? That’s just not possible.… What about those men who are strong in the face of adversity, in the midst of the struggle, who know how to suffer and remain silent with dignity, how to calm and discipline their instincts because they are guided by more humane and lofty impulses than their stomachs or other purely physical needs? This goes without saying: the spectacle before me is nothing other than the natural extension of its protagonists’ pasts. In the majority of cases, it is merely a question of their bodies having been used to satisfy their basest instincts without limits, spoiling and fattening up their stomachs for so long a period of time.

  For too long, personal pleasures and convenience have been at the center of these people’s lives, to the point where privations become unheard-of and tragic things, and self-denial is unthinkable. As for self-discipline, it is an unpleasant novelty that they cannot grasp and that they only accept as necessary for other people. Raising the consciousness of such elements is difficult work, very difficult, nearly impossible; from this perspective they are irresponsible creatures. And this leads to another, much more troubling result: few, very few are those who know how to preserve their dignity before the enemy without cowardice.

  B. B. | August 28, 1944

  I’m in charge of taking care of the children. There are 110 of them in our barracks, all different ages, from three-year-old infants to fourteen–and fifteen-year-old boys and girls. It’s not easy to work without books. I’m forced to write by hand on dozens and dozens of little scraps of paper, filling them with varied content, for the littlest ones who have hardly begun to read and write as well as for the most advanced children. As for paper and pencils, the children manage to acquire them in various ways, by selling their bread rations or engaging in all kinds of transactions, or even stealing them from each other.

  Since we have no books, we often have to resort to oral lessons exclusively, which demands particularly sharp attention from the students. On top of that, our lessons are often interrupted, either by Appelle or by air raid warnings or by inspections—those visits by officials that remind us of ourselves when we used to go to the zoo long ago. Each time there are circumstances beyond our control that disrupt our school work. Or else it’s all the chaos and noise right near our “classroom,” times when they’re hunting for workers, when people are arguing, the commotion when the distribution of soup begins, etc.

  The children are unleashed, wild, famished. They feel that their existence has taken an unusual and abnormal turn and they react brutally and instinctively. Bad habits catch on quickly among children in calamitous times and in an overall atmosphere of distrust and fear. A small minority of them shows a keen interest in studying; the others couldn’t care less. They are not ignorant of the fact that the Germans have forbidden any true teaching in the camp and that serious study must be undertaken in secret. So they escape from it with impunity.

  But it’s out of the question to lecture them about it; that would even be ludicrous. All moral lectures have absolutely no effect. The adults get impatient; the children’s mischief gets on their nerves. So the adults are sometimes quick to treat the children as “criminals” or “punks.” They demand the children be punished in the most severe ways, by making an example of them, taking away their bread rations or whipping them. If for no other reason than to restore some calm! And when they run up against my opposition to such things, they vent their anger against … “such a school and such an education.” As if there really could be any education, and as if you could ask children to be nice and polite in a disastrous human environment where all nerves are on edge, where the adults fight among themselves, insult each other, steal from each other, beat each other up without shame or discretion, where everything is warped and corrupted.

  The men have forgotten that leading by example is by far more important and effective than any lecture, advice, or punishment. Besides, even in normal or quasi-normal circumstances, didn’t teaching and school leave much to be desired in our Slavic homeland? So many things that were absurd, out of step, and poorly adapted to the needs of the people and the times! How often did our work at school seem senseless and useless because of the reactionary nature of the curriculum! We managed with great difficulty to change some aspects of it here and there.… The base remained the same. It’s even more absurd to aspire to an ideal education here, in a concentration camp.

  Nevertheless, we do what we can, and the children’s fundamentally good nature often wins out, and we witness surprising results. Yes, indeed, children have such energy that they can often muster much more than we think them capable of.

  Therefore, it’s ludicrous to rail against the children for the difficulties they cause when they are the least responsible for them. It’s not through beatings and coercion that you extirpate the root causes of difficulties when those root causes are so deeply entrenched that they must be eradicated once and for all. You don’t get rid of evil by attacking its effects, but rathe
r by attacking its cause, by pulling it out by the root.

  That’s why I get overcome with impatience waiting for the new era that will help us to cure this ill by attacking it at its root. It’s with immense joy that I imagine the possibilities that will open up to me in my teaching as well. And if my efforts are successful—what happiness! Will I be successful or not? Or will time have passed me by? Always the same doubts, always the same anguish. Because a large part of our being belongs, alas, to this sick and dying world of today—as well as to its past. To hell with it! It’s this camp that’s depressing me and making me look on things darkly.…

  B. B. | August 29, 1944

  Without books, we are ill. I feel beaten down at the core of my being. So many lost hours, so many vanished, inaccessible riches … What a miserable, sterile existence.… atrophied minds. I spend a lot of time thinking; I’m learning a lot in the midst of this misery; I’m learning how to understand many things in life that escaped me before. But I think about life with regret, real life, the life of free human beings, about so much knowledge not acquired over the past several years, and, right here, about so many gaps in knowledge.

 

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