by Primo Levi
Lidia Rolfi isn’t Jewish, but as a woman and as a political prisoner she, too, was “twice guilty.” She shared her experience as a deportee, which was already known to many, through her recent book Le donne di Ravensbrück (The Women of Ravensbrück). Edith Bruck, a Hungarian Jew, has for many years been a full-fledged Italian and sees herself as such. She has written all her books in Italian, and in them, as she herself says, she always tells the same story in different ways: the wound of a twelve-year-old girl suddenly plunged into the nightmare of the Lager. After her, the survivors Mario Spizzichino, from Rome, and Regina Lichter, from Kraków, spoke about the difficulties of reintegration and the wounds that are still open.
In the afternoon, a round table was held that included Lidia Rolfi, Professor Silvestri, the young journalist Accardi, and me. Against the background of our shared indignation, fairly similar assessments emerged: according to Silvestri, the above episodes must be seen in the much wider framework of a denial of history and a rejection of reality, so that labeling them anti-Semitic would be simplistic. Similarly, the TV show Holocaust has been successful in Germany because it turns reality into myth. Accardi, too, emphasizes this dangerous rejection of testimony, especially in written form: what will happen in a few decades when there are no longer any eyewitnesses?
Lidia Rolfi and I, in agreement because our paths have been parallel, said that substantially pessimistic opinions can and must be accompanied by optimistic actions, that is, in one’s daily conduct. We maintained that to wish the Israeli athletes “ten, a hundred, a thousand Mauthausens” (as occurred in Varese) is in itself comforting evidence of the fact that today’s neo-Nazism, or neo-anti-Semitism, for reasons difficult to fathom, seems inclined to seek its new recruits among the ignorant. Finally, we said that we feel reaffirmed in the duty we have chosen for ourselves: to repeat our testimony over the decades and the generations, as long as our voices last.
La Stampa, March 13, 1979
A Secret Defense Committee in Auschwitz
Many years ago, when I was a prisoner in Auschwitz, I witnessed an event that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Around May 1944, a new Kapo was assigned to our work team. A Polish Jew of about thirty, he was frowning, taciturn, patently neurotic. He would beat us for no reason. To tell the truth, everybody beat us, for in that Babel beatings were the easiest way of communicating, the “language” understood by everybody, including the new arrivals. But this Kapo would beat people deliberately, in cold blood, to cause pain, and with a subtle cruelty intended to provoke suffering and humiliation. I commented on this behavior to a fellow prisoner from Yugoslavia, and he told me with a strange smile: “You’re right, but you’ll see—he won’t last long.” Indeed, a few days later the thug had disappeared; nobody knew what had happened to him, he had ceased to exist, or, rather, everything continued as if he had never existed. But in the Lager many things happened that couldn’t be understood, the very fabric of the Lager was incomprehensible, and I soon forgot the episode.
The following December, when the thunder of the Soviet artillery could be heard nearby, I ran into a friend, the engineer Aldo Levi, from Milan, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. He was in a hurry, I don’t remember why, and I was in a hurry, too. He greeted me and said, “Something may happen soon; if it does, look for me.”
This encounter was also forgotten in the dramatic events of the liberation of the camp. I remembered it much later, along with the previous one, on the “civilian,” in fact festive, occasion of a reunion of former deportees in Rome. There was a lunch, and I was sitting across from a French survivor. He had been in my camp, but neither he nor I remembered having met. We exchanged the usual jokes about the fact that getting food is easy today, while it was so difficult back then. We both had been drinking a bit, and this made us inclined to open up. H. told me that at Auschwitz-Monowitz he had been a member of a secret defense committee, that many critical elements in the life of the Lager derived from its deliberations, and that, as a member of the French Communist Party, he had been assigned by the committee to work as a copyist in the Political Department, that is, the Gestapo department that dealt with political matters within the Lager. I asked him whether Engineer Levi’s hurried words might have indicated that he also was a member of this clandestine organization, and H. answered that that was probably the case, but that, for the sake of secrecy, each member knew only a very few of the others.
I also asked if he could explain the story of the Kapo who disappeared, and H. gave me a smile that closely resembled the smile of my fellow prisoner from Yugoslavia. He answered that yes, in some particularly serious cases, and at great risk, they could delete a name from the list of those to be sent to the gas chamber at Birkenau and replace it with another name. No, he didn’t remember the case of our Kapo, but the possibility sounded credible: on other occasions they had caused a spy or someone who stole bread to disappear in this way, or had saved a member of the committee. I knew that the laws of conspiracy are harsh, but it had never occurred to me that any random name, for instance mine, might be used to preserve a life more politically valuable than mine. I asked H. if, indeed, among the many risks that I knew I had run, there was also this unknown risk. H. answered, “Évidemment.”
Ha Keillah, April 1979
A Holocaust That Still Weighs
on the World’s Conscience
Holocaust, by Gerald Green, is a book that has been overwhelmingly successful. Written in the United States,1 it has been translated, or is to be translated, in about twenty other countries, to accompany the TV series that bears that name, and for which the book is basically the script. It’s therefore destined to commercial success “by hereditary right,” just as, once upon a time, a king’s son was destined to the crown.
The book consists of the counterpoint, or, rather, the constant alternation, between two diaries and two human journeys. One is that of the young German Jew Rudi Weiss, driven (and at the end saved) by a longing for freedom and a determination to redeem, through a reckless and individualistic struggle, the inertia of his people in the face of the Nazi slaughter. The other character is Erik Dorf, an ambitious German lawyer almost the same age as Weiss, who is goaded by his even more ambitious wife, Marta.
Having joined the SS as one of Heydrich’s henchmen, Erik, first as a lieutenant, then a captain, and finally a major, becomes in the novel, step by step, one of the evil geniuses who guide Hitler’s Germany from the secrecy of their offices. He rarely takes initiatives, but he is a loyal and hardworking functionary. Until the end, he has no doubts: to him, the ultimate and essential purpose of the war that is being fought is not so much German victory, which is expected and certain, but the extermination of the Jews, whom he doesn’t hate as individuals but whom he considers intrinsically harmful, noxious insects. Any humanitarian hesitation over their elimination would be out of place.
Erik is both a character and a symbol, and his symbolism, as is always the case, doesn’t help the character’s concreteness and credibility. He is omnipresent, he is wherever the Holocaust plot is being planned: he is the diabolical advisor when it comes to Kristallnacht; it’s to him, somewhat arbitrarily, that the invention of the well-known euphemistic periphrases—“resettlement” for deportation, “final solution” for extermination, “special treatment” for gassing—is attributed; his is the suggestion to use hydrogen cyanide rather than carbon monoxide in the gas chambers. Rudi, after hundreds of escapes, ambushes, desperate and daring fights, will end up, at last, in Palestine, and there he will learn, and talk, about the martyrdom of his brother, Karl, in the Lager, the death of his sister, Anna, who was raped and then executed as mentally handicapped, the heroic participation of his parents and his uncle Moses in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Erik, overwhelmed by the collapse of Germany and the desertion of his superiors, will kill himself.
Holocaust is a curious book, because it’s both naïve and clever: more precisely, it’s clever because it’s deliberately naïve. It has the tone, and the size, of a
popular saga and uses the language of Western movies. It’s very easy to read, accessible, taut, without pauses. It depicts stock characters with simplistic mental functioning. It describes love and hatred, cowardice and courage, generosity and abjection. It feeds on the most heartbreaking episodes—the euthanasia program, the ghetto children, the naked women waiting to be gassed, the mass graves, the butchery of Babi Yar—and each episode is seen from the two perspectives: through Erik’s icy eyes and through the eyes of Rudi, in whom compassion merges with the desire for revenge. However, the retrospective compassion that the author, too, must have felt, seems to compete on every page with the aim of writing a best seller and supporting a thesis, albeit a noble one.
It’s really like reading a novel, and so an observation is necessary. The monstrous events described in the book are all true: the author didn’t need to use his imagination; the history of that decade provided him with a dreadful abundance of material. Not just the facts; a good part of the dialogue, the secret orders, the public declarations, and the biographical details is taken from historical documents. Surprisingly, some of the details that appear to be most natural and humane are the ones that are less truthful, and it’s here that the author displays an authentic, unintended naïveté.
That Inga, Karl’s “Aryan” wife, decides to request, and is granted, deportation to Theresienstadt to be reunited with her Jewish husband is naïve; the episode of the infirmary that Rudi’s father, a doctor, opens illegally on the station square in the ghetto is naïve; to write that the latter, deported to Auschwitz, and, visiting his gassed wife’s bunk, “went through her valise, touched her meager belongings, and took from it a folder of piano music—her old, yellowed, fraying music,” is naïve, and grimly humorous. No, one entered Auschwitz naked, without a valise, and without musical scores. And the insistence on the theme of the Jews “who wouldn’t revolt” is annoying, and ahistorical: Jews revolted when they could, physically and psychologically, and not just in the Warsaw Ghetto. They didn’t revolt when hunger, exhaustion, and demoralization exceeded all limits, but under those conditions no one revolts. Did the millions of Soviet war prisoners, or the six hundred thousand Italian military internees, or the political detainees of Buchenwald and Mauthausen revolt?
But it would be pointless to hunt for oversights, inaccuracies, and anachronisms. As I said, the basic facts are true. If at times they don’t seem true, this is not the author’s fault; it’s the fault of the facts themselves, or, rather, of those responsible for them. It’s the fault of the enormity of the facts, which makes them unbelievable, and, to this day, there are ignorant and cynical individuals who try to take advantage of this unbelievability. This observation is attributed to Rudi at the end of the book: “The crime is so enormous, they won’t believe it. That’s what the Germans are counting on.” This is exactly what happened, and still happens: we believe in the lesser crimes, but, confronted with millions of dead, we defend ourselves, saying, “It can’t be, it couldn’t have happened.” All of us: the perpetrators, lying to avoid punishment; the victims, to regain a livable world, without ghosts; and those who are indifferent, to safeguard their right to indifference.
But the millions of dead are real and they still haunt the world, as shown by the resonance the TV series had in Germany, and by the fact that some countries—countries that have something to hide—refused to broadcast it. So it’s useful to tell the younger generations about the Holocaust, and to do so in simple and understandable terms. It’s a terrible task to recall that, in Europe only forty years ago, a people and a civilization were killed, but it happened, and the fact that it did places the horrible event among possible events, events that are still possible.
This book, together with the television series that it introduces, is intended to fulfill this purpose. It may help, as it did in Germany, to rouse the curiosity of those who don’t know and have a clear conscience, and maybe also (but this is less likely) to persuade those who don’t have a clear conscience. In other words, this book is an ally. We might have preferred one less loquacious, of greater historical accuracy, better suited to the purpose, but, even in this form, it is still an ally.
Tuttolibri 5, no. 16 (April 28, 1979)
1. It was originally published there in 1978 by Bantam.
So That Yesterday’s Holocausts Will Never Return
(The Nazi Slaughters, the Masses, and TV)
I wasn’t able to see the entire TV series Holocaust; I saw only a few episodes, and that was before it was dubbed. I watched it with suspicion, the same suspicion roused in all witnesses of that time by the many attempts, recent and less recent, to “use” their experience. That experience was unique, beyond any human measure, and so constitutes a dangerous enticement for authors seeking raw material for literature or the theater, or, worse, to turn into a horror show. These are our own, intimate memories and it troubles us to see them misused.
I also found it difficult to overcome my specific reactions to several naïvetés and inaccuracies. It wasn’t like this down there: the striped outfits were not clean but filthy, the crowding was always frightening, at every moment of the day and night, and left little space for feelings and reflection; the prisoners’ cheeks weren’t shaved so well, nor were the women lining up for the gas chamber so well nourished.
Anyway, these observations aren’t important. The series, even if it was conceived as a business, with a dizzying budget, shows a basic good faith, a decency of intentions and results, a reasonable respect for history, and a simple (or simplifying, if you wish) approach that at times recalls Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and guarantees popular success. One shouldn’t expect subtlety of feelings or psychological nuances; the show didn’t intend to dwell on them and didn’t.
As we know, Holocaust has had extraordinary success in the countries where it has been broadcast, first of all the United States, West Germany, France, and Israel, and is already a topic of discussion among sociologists. In part, this success can be attributed, in an obvious and general way, to the unique and ruthless nature of the persecution of the Jews, its vast extent, its brutish stupidity, its unnecessary fanaticism; and in part to the specific way that each country experienced, at the time, the events described by the series.
Today the United States is the cultural center of Judaism. Moreover, Operation Holocaust was conceived and realized according to traditional American models and using a television language that is perhaps too American. Israel is the direct heir of the Eastern European Judaism that survived the slaughter; it came into being to redeem the exile and long enslavement of the Jewish people, and its younger generations harbor a deep sense of shame and disbelief at how easily the slaughter was perpetrated. France is a separate case, a country divided today as it was divided then: divided between the hurt of the lost war and submission to the occupying Germans, pride in the freedoms won by the Revolution, and the persistent stirring of a petty and xenophobic nationalism, of the sort that produced the Dreyfus case. It’s no accident that, today, the most alarming signs of a new wave of anti-Semitism come from France.
As for Germany, the impact of the series should be obvious in a country where, to this day, thousands of the former bureaucrat-murderers live, unpunished and protected by a widespread complicity, along with hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens (abiding by the laws of today as they did by the laws of that time!) who saved their souls by stubbornly refusing to know and understand what was happening around them, and by just as stubbornly remaining silent, even with their children, about what they might accidentally have learned or understood. Had this film been broadcast in Germany fifteen years ago instead of today, it would probably have bounced off the thick wall of deliberate deafness that shelters the generation of the guilty, and its success would have been much smaller.
It’s hard to predict how our country will react to Holocaust. Although the Fascist intention to hunt for Jews here was supposed to be no less determined than it was for our German allies, this expe
ctation was largely undermined by the humane sensitivity of the Italians, by the political indifference of the time, and by the disrepute that fascism had fallen into by then.
Two observations should be made concerning the varied, at times polemical, but always profound interest stirred up by Holocaust. First: anti-Semitism is an old and complex phenomenon, with barbarian or even pre-human roots (there is a well-known zoological racism, peculiar to social animals). However, it is periodically revived for cynical purposes when, in times of instability and political difficulty, it is useful to find or invent a scapegoat that is responsible for all past, present, and future troubles, and on which to unload the aggression and vindictiveness of the people. Scattered and defenseless after the Diaspora, the Jews were ideal victims and were treated as such in many countries and throughout the centuries. Weimar Germany was unstable and tormented, and needed a scapegoat; today’s Italy is unstable and tormented, too.
Second: in all countries, the series was seen by tens of millions of people, not in spite of being a story, a fictionalized tale, but because it is a story. Hundreds of books have been published and hundreds of documentaries have been shown on the topic of Hitler’s genocide. Yet none of them have reached an audience equivalent to 1 percent of those who watched Holocaust on TV. The two factors combined—the form of the novel and the medium of television—fully demonstrated their extraordinary power of penetration.
In this case, the phenomenon is positive, because it helped expose facts that have been passed over in silence deliberately and for too long. It also exposed a tragedy that so far—and, let us hope, forever—is unique in the bloody history of mankind. Thus, Holocaust has lent further weight to the argument of those who, in Germany and elsewhere, consider it unjust that the crimes of the Nazis should be invalidated by a statute of limitations. This is reason to rejoice. But one can’t avoid a shudder of alarm at the thought of what might happen if a different or opposite topic were to be chosen, in a country where television is a state monopoly that has no democratic controls and is impervious to public criticism.