by Primo Levi
For all these reasons, the truth about the concentration camps came to light by a long road and through a narrow gate, and many aspects of the univers concentrationnaire have not yet been studied in depth. More than forty years have gone by since the liberation of the Nazi Lagers; this respectable interval has led, in the attempts at clarification, to contradictory results that I will try to list.
First came sedimentation, a normal and desirable process through which historical events gain perspective and nuance, but not until a few decades after their conclusion. At the end of the Second World War, we had not yet acquired quantitative data on the deportations and the Nazi massacres in the concentration camps and elsewhere, nor was it easy to understand their magnitude and specificity. Only recently have we begun to realize that the Nazi slaughter was tremendously “exemplary,” and that, unless something worse happens in the next few years, it will be remembered as the central event of, the stain on, the twentieth century.
On the other hand, the passage of time is affecting history in other negative ways. Most of the witnesses for the defense and the prosecution have died by now, and those who remain, and who still agree to bear witness (overcoming their remorse or their wounds, respectively), have memories that are increasingly faded and stylized, and are often influenced unconsciously by things learned later, by readings, or by the accounts of other people. In some cases, of course, forgetfulness is feigned, but it has become credible, even at trial, because of the many years gone by: the “I don’t knows” or “I didn’t knows” uttered by many Germans today no longer scandalize us, but they did scandalize us, or should have, when the events were still recent.
Another stylization is the fault of us survivors, or, to be more exact, of those of us who have agreed to live our condition as survivors in the simplest and least critical way. It is not that the ceremonies and celebrations, the monuments and flags, should be deplored always and everywhere. A certain dose of rhetoric can be indispensable in assuring that a memory lasts. It was true in the time of Ugo Foscolo and it is true today that funerary monuments, “the tombs of great men,” inspire souls to heroic deeds, or at least preserve the memory of their achievement; but we must beware of oversimplification.2 Every victim should be mourned, and every survivor should receive assistance and compassion, but not all their behavior can be held up as an example. Inside, the camps were a tangled and multilayered microcosm. There was nothing subtle about the “gray zone,” which I shall discuss further on, the zone of prisoners who, to some extent, maybe for worthy purposes, had collaborated with the authorities; indeed, it represented a phenomenon of fundamental importance to the historian, the psychologist, and the sociologist. There is no prisoner who does not remember it, who does not remember the shock he felt when the first threats, the first insults, the first blows came not from the SS soldiers but from other prisoners, “colleagues,” mysterious characters who were wearing the same black-and-white striped pajamas that they, the new arrivals, had just put on.
This book seeks to help clarify aspects of the concentration-camp phenomenon that still appear obscure. It also has a more ambitious goal. It would like to answer the most urgent question, the question that distresses everyone who has had the opportunity to read our stories: How much of the concentration-camp world is gone and will never return, like slavery and the duel? How much has returned or is returning? In a world teeming with threats, what can each of us do to make sure that at least this threat will be neutralized?
It was not my intention, nor would I be able, to write a historical work that thoroughly examines the sources. I have limited myself almost exclusively to the National Socialist camps, because they are the only ones I have direct experience of. I also have abundant indirect experience, through the books I have read, stories I have heard, and encounters I have had with the readers of my first two books. Moreover, up to the moment at which I am writing, despite the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shamefulness of the Gulags, the useless and bloody Vietnam War, the Cambodian autogenocide, the desaparecidos of Argentina, and the many stupid and atrocious wars we have subsequently witnessed, the Nazi concentration-camp system remains unique in both magnitude and quality. In no other time and place have we witnessed such an unexpected and complex phenomenon: never have so many human lives been extinguished in such a short time, and with such a shining combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty. No one would absolve the Spanish conquistadores of the massacres they perpetrated in the Americas throughout the sixteenth century. They apparently caused the deaths of at least sixty million Indios. But they were acting independently, either without or in violation of their government’s instructions; their criminal acts, which were in fact “unpremeditated,” were spread over a hundred-year period; and they were aided by the epidemics that they inadvertently brought with them. And did we not, ultimately, try to wash our hands of such things, by ruling that they belonged to times gone by?
1. L’Univers concentrationnaire is the title of one of the first memoirs of the Lagers. Translated as The Other Kingdom, bibliographic information for this book by David Rousset and other books mentioned in The Drowned and the Saved can be found on page 2569.
2. Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) wrote the long poem titled “Dei sepolcri” (“Of the Sepulchres”), inspired by the tombs of eminent Italians in the Santa Croce church in Florence. Here Levi quotes directly and indirectly one of the most famous verses, “A egregie cose il forte animo accendono / l’urne de’ forti” (ll. 151–52).
1
The Memory of the Offense
Human memory is a wonderful but fallible instrument. This hackneyed truth is known not only to psychologists but also to anyone who has paid attention to his own behavior or that of the people around him. The memories residing within us are not engraved in stone. Not only do they tend to fade over the years; they often change or even grow to incorporate extraneous features. Prosecutors are quite familiar with this phenomenon: two eyewitnesses to the same deed almost never describe it in the same way and in the same words, even if the deed is recent and neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it. The limited reliability of our memories will be explained satisfactorily only once we know in what language and in what alphabet they are written, on what material and with what type of pen; this goal is still distant today. There are some mechanisms we know that falsify memory in particular conditions: trauma, and not only to the brain; the interference of other, “competing” memories; abnormal states of consciousness; suppression; repression. Even in normal conditions, however, a slow decay is at work, a blurring of outlines, a physiological oblivion, so to speak, that few memories can withstand. Here we can probably recognize one of the great forces of nature, the same force that reduces order to disorder, youth to old age, and extinguishes life in death. Exercise (in this case, frequent recollection) definitely keeps a memory fresh and alive, the way a frequently exercised muscle stays in working order. But a memory that is recollected too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to harden into a stereotype, a tried-and-true formula, crystallized, perfected, adorned, that installs itself in the place of the raw memory and grows at its expense.
In this chapter I wish to examine memories of extreme experiences, of offenses suffered or inflicted. In such cases all or almost all the factors that can obliterate or distort mnemonic recall come into play: the memory of a trauma, suffered or inflicted, is itself traumatic, because it is disturbing, if not painful, to recall. People who have been hurt tend to repress the memory to avoid renewing the pain; people who have done the hurting push the memory into the depths to be rid of it, to alleviate their sense of guilt.
As with other phenomena, we are dealing here with a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor, and it’s important to be clear: both are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who laid the trap and sprang it, and if he suffers it is only fair; and it is unfair that the victim should suffer, as instead he suffers, even a
fter decades have passed. Once again, we have to recognize, sadly, that the offense is irreparable: it is protracted in time, and the Furies, in whom we are forced to believe, not only harass the tormentor (if they do harass him, with or without the aid of human punishment) but also perpetuate his work by denying peace to the tormented. It is impossible to read without a shudder the words left behind by Jean Améry, the Austrian philosopher tortured by the Gestapo for his activity in the Belgian resistance, and later deported to Auschwitz as a Jew:
Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. . . . 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, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained.
Torture was for Améry an endless death. I will speak of him again in chapter 6; he took his life in 1978.
Let us not indulge in confusion, armchair psychoanalysis, morbidity, or leniency. The oppressor continues to be what he is, as does the victim: the two are not interchangeable. The oppressor should be punished and abhorred (but also understood, if possible); the oppressed should be pitied and helped. But, given the indecency of the deed that was irrevocably committed, both are in need of shelter and defense, and they search for it instinctively. Not all of them, but most; and often for their whole life.
Today we have at our disposal numerous confessions, depositions, and admissions by the oppressors (I speak not only of the German National Socialists but of all those who commit multiple horrendous crimes out of obedience to a regime): some were made at trial, others in interviews, still others are contained in books or memoirs. In my opinion, they are extremely important documents. The descriptions of things seen or acts performed are generally of little interest: they coincide roughly with the victims’ accounts, are rarely disputed, and have been adjudicated and consigned to history. They are often cited in footnotes. Far more important are the motivations and justifications: Why did you do it? Did you realize you were committing a crime?
The answers to these two questions, and others along the same lines, are very similar, regardless of the personality of the individual who is questioned, whether an intelligent, ambitious professional like Albert Speer, an icy fanatic like Adolf Eichmann, a shortsighted functionary like Franz Stangl, at Treblinka, or Rudolf Höss, at Auschwitz, or an obtuse brute like Wilhelm Boger and Oswald Kaduk, inventors of new forms of torture.3 Using different formulations, and with greater or less insolence, depending on their mental and educational level, they all end up saying basically the same thing: I did it because I was ordered to; other people, my superiors, committed deeds that were worse than mine; considering the upbringing I had and the environment I lived in, I could not have behaved otherwise; if I hadn’t done these things, someone else would have, and more brutally. The first impulse of anyone who reads these justifications is revulsion: they’re lying, they can’t think anyone would believe them, they can’t not see the disproportion between their excuses and the vast suffering and death they caused. They lie knowing that they’re lying: they do so in bad faith.
Anyone with sufficient experience of human affairs knows that the distinction (which a linguist would call the opposition) between good and bad faith is optimistic and enlightened, especially, and more justifiably, when applied to men like the ones I have just mentioned. The distinction presumes a clarity that few people have, and which even those few lose immediately when, for any reason, past or present reality makes them feel anxious or ill at ease. In such conditions, there are, in fact, people who lie consciously, coldly falsifying reality itself, but they are outnumbered by those who weigh anchor, distance themselves from genuine memories, temporarily or permanently, and fabricate a convenient reality. For them the past is a burden; they feel revulsion at what they did or what was done to them, and tend to replace it with something different. The replacement may begin consciously, with a scenario that is invented, mendacious, and re-created, but less painful than the real memory. As this account is repeated to others but also to oneself, the distinction between true and false gradually loses its contours, and the person ends up fully believing the tale he has told so often and continues to tell, occasionally polishing and touching up the less plausible details, or the ones that are less consistent with one another or incompatible with the picture of “established” events: what started out as bad faith has turned into good faith. The silent transition from lie to self-deception is useful: he who lies in good faith lies better, plays his part better, and is more readily believed by the judge, the historian, the reader, the wife, the children.
The more distant the events become, the greater and more perfect the construction of a convenient truth. This mental process is the only way to interpret, for example, the statements made to L’Express in 1978 by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy government in 1942, and as such personally responsible for the deportation of seventy thousand Jews. Darquier denies everything: the photographs of piled-up corpses are doctored; the statistics about millions of dead are fabricated by the Jews, who are always greedy for publicity, pity, and restitution; the deportations may well have taken place (he could hardly deny them, considering the appearance of his signature at the bottom of so many letters containing orders for deportation, even of children), but he didn’t know where the deportees were being sent or what end they would meet; at Auschwitz there were indeed gas chambers, but they were used only for killing lice, and anyway (notice his consistency!) they were built after the war, for propaganda purposes. I have no wish to justify this loathsome and foolish man, and I am offended to learn that he lived in Spain undisturbed for many years, but in him I think I can identify the typical case of someone so used to lying in public that he ends up lying in private—and to himself—and fabricating a convenient truth that allows him to live in peace. It is not easy to maintain the distinction between good and bad faith: it requires profound honesty with oneself, and demands a constant intellectual and moral effort. How can one expect such an effort from men like Darquier?
If you read the statements made by Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem, and by Höss (the next-to-last commander of Auschwitz, and the inventor of the hydrogen-cyanide gas chamber) in his memoirs, you can detect a more subtle process of elaborating the past than the one I am describing. These two men basically defended themselves in the classic manner of the Nazi underlings, or rather of underlings everywhere: we were trained to be absolutely obedient, to respect hierarchy and nationalism; we were brainwashed with slogans, intoxicated by ceremonies and rallies; they taught us that the only justice was the justice that was good for our people, the only truth the words of the Führer. What do you want from us? Now that what’s done is done, what makes you think that we or all those like us could have behaved any differently? We were diligent executors, and for our diligence we were praised and promoted. We did not make the decisions, because the regime in which we grew up did not allow us to make independent decisions; others decided for us, and it could not have been otherwise, since our ability to decide had been amputated. Not only were we forbidden to make decisions; we had become incapable of making them. Therefore we are not responsible and should not be punished.
Even if this argument is projected against the background of the Birkenau chimneys, it cannot be interpreted as the product of sheer impudence. The pressure that a modern totalitarian state can exert on the individual is terrifying. It has three basic weapons: straight propaganda or propaganda masquerading as culture, schooling, or folklore; a ban on a pluralistic press; and terror. It is unacceptable to concede, however, that this pressure could not be resisted, especially in the twelve short years of the Third Reich: the exaggeration is blatant in the statements and excuses of the men with the heaviest responsibilities, such as Höss and Eichmann, and even more in the manipulation of their memories. Both were born and grew up long before the Reich became truly “totalitarian,” and they joined it by
choice, a choice dictated more by opportunism than by enthusiasm. Their rewriting of the past was a retrospective operation, slow and (probably) not methodical. It is naïve to ask whether they acted in good or bad faith. When fate placed them before the judges and the death they deserved, even they, who had been so harsh in the face of the suffering of others, fabricated a convenient past for themselves and ended up believing it: particularly Höss, who was not a subtle man. His writings show him to be so little disposed to self-control and introspection that he doesn’t realize he is confirming his coarse anti-Semitism in the very act of recanting and denying it. Nor does he notice how unctuous he appears in his self-portrait as a good functionary, father, and husband.
In commenting on these reconstructions of the past (although this observation applies to all memories), I have to point out that the distortion of events is often limited by the objective fact of the events themselves, about which there is the testimony of third parties, documents, “material evidence,” and historically established contexts. It is generally difficult to deny having committed a given act, or to deny that an act was committed. On the other hand, it is very easy to alter the motivations that led us to commit an act, and the passions within us that accompanied the act. This is extremely fluid matter that can be distorted even by very weak forces. There are no reliable answers to the questions “Why did you do it?” and “What were you thinking while you were doing it?” because states of mind are ephemeral by nature, and the memory of them is even more so.