The Complete Works of Primo Levi
Page 136
Freed in 1945, Jean returns to Belgium and settles there, but he no longer has a homeland and he is oppressed by his past. He writes bitter and chilling essays entitled “How Much Home Does a Person Need,” “The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” “Torture,” “At the Mind’s Limits.” This last essay is a mournful and desperate meditation on “how useful was it” to be an intellectual in the Lager. According to Améry, it wasn’t very useful at all; on the contrary, it was damaging. The intellectual found it difficult to adjust, to accept that impossible reality, and, at the same time, he didn’t possess the strength, which people of faith had, to oppose it openly or within himself. One reads these pages with almost physical pain, the testimony of a shipwreck protracted over decades, until its stoical conclusion.
Elsewhere, Améry wrote: “‘Listen, Israel’ doesn’t interest me: only ‘Listen world,’ only this warning could I utter with passionate anger.” But also: “As a Jew, I go through life like a sick person with one of those ailments that cause no great hardships but are certain to end fatally.” And finally, with lapidary precision: “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, and in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained.”
No, Jean Améry’s end is not surprising, and it’s sad to think that torture, which disappeared centuries ago from Europe, has returned in this century and is gaining ground in many countries; maybe “to a good end,” as if anything good could come from pain deliberately inflicted. It’s unbearable to think that, while the torture Améry suffered burdened him until his death—in fact, was for him an endless death—in all likelihood his torturers are sitting in an office or enjoying their pensions. If questioned (but who is going to question them?), they would answer as usual, and with a clean conscience, that they were just following orders.
La Stampa, December 7, 1978
But We Were There
Well, the operation has finally succeeded. Darquier de Pellepoix’s nonsense1 in the November edition of L’Express wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough to give space and a voice in respectable magazines to the murderers of that time so that they could preach their truth with impunity: that the millions of dead in the Lagers never died, that the Holocaust is a fairy tale, that at Auschwitz only lice were killed with gas. All this wasn’t enough. Evidently the time is favorable, and from his university lectern Professor Robert Faurisson reassures the world: No, fascism and Nazism have been disparaged, poisoned, defamed. We mustn’t talk about Auschwitz anymore; it was all a mise-en-scène—we must talk about the big lie of Auschwitz. Jews are cunning, they have always been cunning, so cunning that, in order to slander the innocent Nazis, they made up a slaughter that never was, and they themselves built, after the event, the gas chambers of the Lagers and the crematoriums.
I don’t know Professor Faurisson. Maybe he is simply insane; there are a few such people even in academia. However, another hypothesis is more likely. Either Faurisson is, like Darquier, one of those responsible for what happened or he is the son, friend, or supporter of those responsible and he is trying to exorcise a past that, in spite of today’s laxity, burdens him. We are well acquainted with certain mental mechanisms: guilt is troublesome, or at least inconvenient; in times long past, in Italy and France, it was also dangerous. One begins by denying it in court; it is denied for decades in public, then in private, then to oneself. Finally it’s done: the spell has worked, black has become white, wrong right, the dead aren’t dead, there is no murderer, there’s no more guilt, or, rather, there never was any. It’s not just that I haven’t committed a crime; the crime itself doesn’t exist.
No, professor, this is not the way. There were dead men, and women, and children, too. Tens of thousands in Italy and in France, millions in Poland and in the Soviet Union: it’s not so easy to get rid of them. Gathering the evidence wouldn’t be hard, if it’s evidence you want. Ask the survivors, there are survivors in France, too, let them tell you what it was like to see their companions die around them, one by one, to feel themselves dying day by day for one, two years, to live without hope in the shadow of the chimneys of the crematoriums, to return (those who returned) to find their family destroyed. This is no way to cleanse oneself of guilt, professor: even for those who speak from the lectern, facts are stubborn adversaries. If you deny the slaughter committed by your old friends, you must explain to us why 17 million Jews in 1939 were reduced to 11 million in 1945. You must contradict hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans. You must contradict each of us survivors. Come, professor, talk to each one of us: you’ll find it more difficult than feeding nonsense to your naïve pupils. Naïve to the point of believing you? None of them raised a hand in protest? And what did the French school authorities and the judiciary do? Did they allow you, by denying the dead, to kill them a second time?
Corriere della Sera, January 3, 1979
1. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, commissioner for Jewish affairs during the Vichy regime, had been interviewed by the French magazine L’Express.
A Lager at Italy’s Gates
Mondadori is about to publish a book filled with shame and suffering. Its author, Ferruccio Fölkel, is from Trieste, and the book is entitled La risiera di San Sabba: Trieste e il litorale Adriatico durante l’occupazione nazista (The Rice Mill of San Sabba: Trieste and the Adriatic Littoral During the Nazi Occupation). In the fall of 1943, a detachment of highly specialized SS officers and noncommissioned officers was quartered in this rice mill, an old plant formerly used to husk and dry rice. They were trained in the craft of collective and secret murder, first in the German centers where the mentally disabled were euthanized, and later in the Polish total extermination camps.
For instance, among them was Franz Stangl, who was personally (and avowedly) responsible for the deaths of 600,000 people, and whose chilling deposition can be read in Gitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness. They had successfully accomplished their mission in Eastern Europe, but on the recently occupied Adriatic coast there was a good job waiting for them: a growing number of partisans from Istria, Slovenia, and Croatia and a few thousand Jews. Besides, their presence in the German motherland was not welcome, because they were a band of corrupt and treacherous schemers, but most of all because they knew a secret that, in the ever more likely possibility of a military defeat, could become inconvenient for many Nazi leaders who were ready to offer themselves to the English and the Americans as anti-Soviet mercenaries, in a hoped-for reversal of alliances. This was the secret of the gas chambers and crematoriums of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.
However, if they operated in a peripheral region like the Adriatisches Kustenland, the Adriatic coastland belonging to the Reich, and used the well-tested technique of spreading terror while keeping secret the most sinister details, their work could still prove valuable. Thus, with the help of Ukrainian and Italian auxiliaries, a storage room of the rice mill was turned into a gas chamber, and the drying room into a crematorium. This small Italian extermination camp, rudimentary but merciless, was active for more than a year and killed an undetermined number of victims: probably around five thousand.
It’s not the first time we’ve heard about this rice mill, but in the past the talk was timid. Thanks to a prosecutor’s diligence, those responsible were brought to trial in Trieste in 1976, but this legal action, including an appeal in early 1978, proved inconclusive (and how could it have been otherwise, since the events to be judged had occurred thirty years earlier?), and it took place in almost total silence: the same silence that had shrouded the slaughter.
Why this silence, then and now? There are several, interconnected reasons. In San Sabba, as elsewhere, the Nazis, before they fled, destroyed the mass death apparatus, trying hard to make it unrecognizable. The victims of the rice mill were mostly Slav partisans, and Tito’s fighters were not liked by the temporary English and American administrators of
Trieste, and for many years, after the Tito-Stalin split, they weren’t popular with the Soviets or the Italian Communists, either. Also, local Fascist officials had been involved in running the rice mill.
Yet unifying all these reasons for silence is another, more general one: the feeling of guilt of an entire generation. Guilt is troublesome, and it rarely leads to atonement. Those burdened by guilt tend to get rid of it by various means: by forgetting, by denying, by falsifying, by lying to others and to themselves. It is fitting that this book, the result of a personal investigation by the author, should be read now; it can act as an antidote. Just in the past few months, and with surprising simultaneity, quite different “testimony” has been published. David Irving, a British historian, proposes the insane thesis that Hitler didn’t order the holocaust of European Jews, and didn’t even learn about it until 1943. As if Hitler had never read the Stürmer, which in every issue incited readers to the purifying massacre.
Other voices, from France, also expound a strange new thesis. In all the trials held so far (the Nuremberg trial; the Auschwitz trial, held in 1965 in Frankfurt; the Eichmann trial, held in Jerusalem), the few perpetrators dragged to judgment justified themselves with the usual arguments. They did not personally commit the crime; they were acting under duress; they were bound by their oath of allegiance, their duty as soldiers, and their loyalty to their superiors. However, they never dared to deny the reality of the mass exterminations. It is two Frenchmen who have demonstrated this audacity: maybe they counted on memories fading after thirty-five years, maybe they hoped that in the meantime the survivors and the few but inconvenient witnesses would have disappeared from the scene.
Not much needs to be said about the first man. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, formerly in charge of the Jewish question in the Vichy government and, as such, directly responsible for the deportation of seventy thousand Jews, is now eighty-five and visibly growing senile. Interviewed (but why? why do you, my French journalist colleagues, lend yourselves to these ambiguous efforts?) by L’Express, he denies everything. The pictures of heaps of dead bodies are photomontages; the statistics of millions of dead were made up by the Jews, always eager for publicity and pity; deportations did take place, but he didn’t know their destination or outcome; Auschwitz did have gas chambers, but they were meant only for killing lice—anyway (note the consistency!), they were built after the war. It’s not difficult, and it’s charitable, to recognize in Darquier the typical case of someone who, accustomed to lying in public, ends up lying in private as well, and to himself, and constructing a convenient truth that allows him to live in peace.
Faurisson’s case is less clear. Robert Faurisson is fifty years old and teaches French literature at the Second University of Lyon. For eighteen years, he has been cultivating an innocent obsession: he wants to prove that gas chambers never existed in the Nazi Lagers. This is the goal of his life, and in order to achieve it he has compromised (or is compromising) his academic career. Indeed, the chancellor, worried about Faurisson’s extravagant assertions and the reactions that they were causing among the students, has, after some hesitation, temporarily suspended him from teaching, and, further, barred him from the university.
But Faurisson is not giving up. He is flooding Le Monde with letters, he complains because they aren’t published, he accuses the chancellor of having started a campaign against him and denying him a long overdue promotion. Last December 12, he wrote again to Le Monde in a tone of arrogance and ultimatum: he expects “a public debate on a topic that is obviously being avoided: the ‘gas chambers.’ I am asking Le Monde, as I have been doing for the past four years, to publish at long last my two pages on ‘La rumeur d’Auschwitz.’ The moment has come. The time is ripe.”
At this point it should be clear to anyone that this individual is frustrated, affected by a monomania bordering on paranoia. However, on December 29, Le Monde does publish the two pages, promising a rebuttal (which in fact appears the next day), and prefacing them with this curious comment: “However aberrant, M. Faurisson’s thesis has provoked some uneasiness, especially among the young, who are disinclined to accept established views without questioning them.” Faurisson’s arguments are as follows: there were no gas chambers in Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, etc., therefore, there weren’t any anywhere. The chambers described by Höss, the Auschwitz commander, are not credible because Höss testified before “the Polish and Soviet judiciary” (this isn’t true: Höss had earlier testified before an Anglo-American commission). The chambers in Auschwitz were 210 square meters: how could two thousand or more individuals fit inside? They could, savagely packed in; rather, we could: I didn’t go inside the gas chambers (those who entered didn’t come out to tell their story), but, waiting for a selection, to decide who of us were to be gassed, I was crammed, with 250 companions, into a room measuring 7 meters by 4. I described this episode in If This Is a Man.
The poison used in the chambers couldn’t be eliminated so quickly, and it would have killed the “Germans” (thus Faurisson, interviewed by Lugano Radio) in charge of the removal of the corpses. In the eighteen years he has devoted to studying the problem, Faurisson never realized that these individuals were not Germans but other prisoners, whose well-being was of little concern to the Germans. Anyway, the poison, which was hydrogen cyanide, in those conditions was extremely volatile (it boils at 26 degrees centigrade; in the chambers, packed with human beings, the temperature was about 37 degrees centigrade); besides, there were efficient fans, as documented not only by witnesses but by purchase orders and invoices.
Faurisson has no personal guilt: who is behind him and encourages his obsessions? Why does Le Monde publish him after the chancellor of his university suspended him, expressing doubts about his mental health? Maybe precisely to spread “uneasiness” among young people? If this is the case, it is surely successful: the enormity of the genocide induces incredulity, repression, and denial. Maybe what is hiding behind these attempts at “reassessment” is not just the pursuit of a journalistic fracas but the other soul of France, the one that sent Dreyfus to Guyana, accepted Hitler, and followed Pétain.
La Stampa, January 19, 1979
A Monstrous Crime
I am not a jurist and I have never given much thought to the origins and justification of laws, whether ours or somebody else’s. However, the concept of justice, of the necessity to punish those who break the law, of the proportionality between crime and punishment, seems intuitive to me. I also find self-evident the concept of a statute of limitations. When, for whatever reason, a lot of time elapses between the crime and the judgment, the exemplary value of punishment is reduced. Furthermore, it’s likely, or at least possible, that the offender has changed, that he has in some way become a different person. It seems to me that all this is relevant, and admissible, when we are talking about crimes that belong in the current, so to speak historical, image of guilt: an image constructed through the age-old experience of the many ways in which the law can be broken and, indeed, has been broken innumerable times. Well, the case of the Nazi crimes goes beyond this image, surpasses it to an unimaginable and monstrous extent, so that the new term “genocide” had to be coined. The crimes committed by Nazi Germany were such as to shatter the legal system constructed by all civilized countries through the centuries to classify and rank “normal” crimes; for this reason, it would be a grave injustice to rely on normal judicial standards. Whether today or in the conceivable future, to abstain from judging those responsible for thousands, hundreds of thousands, of executions goes against the idea of justice that we all treasure. All the more so when one considers that, in most cases, the enormous delay of German (and not only German) justice was not, so to speak, natural but, rather, the consequence of connivance, acquiescence, complicity, and deceit, which are themselves offenses and crimes. It would be absurd and unjust if an offense could wash away another offense, which remains extremely serious even if it is increasingly remote in time.
Who Is Promoting Anti-Semitic Hatred
Within a few months several events have occurred that are alarming to everyone who remembers the holocaust of European Jewry, which began forty years ago. In November, the French collaborator Darquier de Pellepoix, surprisingly interviewed by L’Express, declared that no one was gassed at Auschwitz but lice.
In December, the authoritative Le Monde agreed to publish a short “study” by the university professor Robert Faurisson, claiming that gas chambers never existed; a few days ago, the Israeli basketball team was booed by a crowd of young people in Varese, who chanted slogans too elaborate to be improvised on the spot and waved a banner that was evidently made in advance. Is there a connection among the three episodes? Apart from sorrow and indignation, what attitude should Italian Jews adopt?
To answer these questions, the Italian Federation of Jewish Youth organized a meeting in Rome last Sunday, in the Sala Borromini. In an opening statement, Senator Umberto Terracini recalled fondly the years of his early childhood and youth in Turin, when, although the echo of the Dreyfus case was still strong, he never witnessed anti-Semitic episodes in spite of his “double fault,” of being both Jewish and Communist. In 1943 he escaped capture by the Germans thanks to a warning from the secretary of the local Fascist Party. However, he stressed that in the current circumstances a return of anti-Semitism is possible, mostly because of the identification of Zionism with Judaism—out of ignorance or bad faith.