by Primo Levi
Suppression is an extreme case of distorting the memory of a wrong committed. Here, too, the border between good and bad faith can be vague. Sometimes the “I don’t knows” and “I don’t remembers” that are heard in court conceal a specific intention to lie, but sometimes the lie is fossilized, hardened into a formula. The person who remembers wanted to become the person who forgets and has succeeded: by persistently denying its existence, he has expelled the harmful memory as one expels an excretion or a parasite. Defense lawyers are well aware that the memory lapses or putative truths they suggest to their clients tend to become actual lapses or truths. There is no need to stray into mental pathologies to find human specimens whose statements leave us perplexed: they are certainly false, but we cannot tell whether the speaker realizes he is lying or not. Absurd though it may seem, let us suppose that the liar becomes truthful for an instant: he himself would not know how to respond to the dilemma. In the act of lying he is an actor completely at one with his character; he can no longer be distinguished from it. A glaring example of this, at the time I am writing, is the courtroom behavior of Ali Agca, who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
The best defense against the invasion of oppressive memories is to bar their entry, to draw a quarantine line along the border. It’s easier to forbid entry to a memory than to be rid of it once it has been registered. This was the basic purpose of many of the stratagems contrived by the Nazi command to protect the consciences of the men assigned to the dirty work and to secure their services, which even the most hardened thugs found repugnant. The Einsatzkommandos, who behind the lines of the Russian front machine-gunned civilians on the edges of common graves that the victims themselves had been forced to dig, were given unlimited rations of vodka so that the massacre was clouded by drunkenness. The well-known euphemisms (“final solution,” “special treatment,” even “Einsatzkommando,” which literally means “Ready Deployment Unit” but which disguised an atrocious reality) served not only to deceive the victims and prevent them from defending themselves; they also served, within the realm of the possible, to prevent public opinion, and even the divisions of the armed forces not directly involved, from finding out what was happening throughout the territories occupied by the Third Reich.
For that matter, the whole history of the brief “Thousand Year Reich” could be reinterpreted as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, a falsification of reality, a denial of reality, ending in the final flight from reality itself. Hitler’s biographers, who disagree on how to interpret the life of this elusive man, all agree that his last years were characterized by a flight from reality, particularly after the catastrophe of the first Russian winter. He had forbidden and denied his subjects access to the truth, debasing their morals and their memories; but by degrees, culminating in the paranoia of the Bunker, he had closed off the road of truth to himself as well. Like all gamblers, he had constructed a scenario spun from superstitious lies that he ended up believing with the same fanatical faith he demanded from every German. His downfall was not only a deliverance for the human race but a demonstration of the price to be paid when you falsify the truth.
The drifting of memory can also be observed among the much larger ranks of the victims, where it is obviously unintentional. Those who suffer an injustice or an offense have no need to concoct lies to absolve themselves of a guilt they do not feel (although they may feel shame, because of a paradoxical mechanism that I will discuss later); but this does not mean that their memories have not been altered as well. It has been remarked, for example, that many survivors of wars or other complex and traumatic experiences tend to filter their memories unconsciously: when they recollect them to one another or relate them to other people, they prefer to dwell on the truces, the moments of reprieve, on the grotesque, odd, or relaxing interludes, and skip the more painful episodes. Such moments are not willingly retrieved from the reservoirs of memory, so they tend to become dim with time and lose their contours. In the Inferno, Count Ugolino is psychologically credible when he expresses his reluctance to describe his ghastly death to Dante, and is led to do so not out of a desire to please but out of a will for posthumous revenge against his eternal enemy.4 We are being rash when we say “I will never forget” regarding an event that hurt us deeply but left no material trace or permanent absence in or around us; even in “civilian” life we are only too happy to forget the details of a serious illness from which we have recovered or a surgery that has been successful.
For the purpose of self-defense, reality can be distorted not only in memory but also at the very moment it takes place. During the entire year of my imprisonment in Auschwitz, I had a close friend, Alberto D., who was like a brother. He was a healthy and courageous youth, more perceptive than the average prisoner, and thus quite critical of the many who consoled themselves by fabricating illusions and feeding them to one another. (“The war will end in two weeks”; “There will be no more selections”; “The English have landed in Greece”; “The Polish partisans are about to liberate the camp”; and so on. Such rumors circulated almost every day, and were promptly disproved by reality.) Alberto had been deported together with his forty-five-year-old father. As the great selection of October 1944 approached, Alberto and I remarked on it with horror, impotent rage, rebelliousness, and resignation, but without seeking solace in convenient truths. The selection came, Alberto’s “elderly” father was chosen for the gas chamber, and in the space of a few hours Alberto was a changed man. He heard rumors that sounded reliable to him: the Russians were near; the Germans wouldn’t dare persist with the massacres; this last selection wasn’t like the others—it wasn’t for the gas chamber but for prisoners who were debilitated but would recover, just like his father, who was exhausted but not sick. As a matter of fact, he even knew where they would be sent, to Jaworzno, not far away, to a special camp for convalescents who could do only light work.
Of course, his father was never seen again, and Alberto himself died during the march by which the camp was evacuated, in January 1945. Oddly, without knowing about Alberto’s behavior, his relatives who had remained in hiding in Italy, and escaped capture, acted just like him, rejecting an unbearable truth and constructing for themselves another. As soon as I returned home, I felt it was my duty to go immediately to Alberto’s city, to tell his mother and his brother what I knew. I was welcomed with polite affection, but no sooner had I started to tell my story than his mother asked me to stop: she already knew everything, at least about Alberto, and there was no sense in my repeating the usual horror stories. She knew that her son, and he alone, had managed to escape from the column without being shot by the SS, had hidden in the woods, and was safe in Russian hands. He wasn’t able to send news yet, but he would as soon as he was able, she was sure, and now could I please change the subject and tell her how I myself had survived. A year later I found myself passing through that city by chance, and I visited the family again. The truth had changed slightly: Alberto was in a Soviet clinic: he was fine, but he had lost his memory, he couldn’t even remember his name. But he was improving and would return home soon, she had it from a reliable source.
Alberto never returned. More than forty years have gone by; I didn’t have the courage to present myself again and compare my painful truth to the consolatory “truth” that Alberto’s relatives had fabricated to help one another out.
An apology is in order. This book, too, is steeped in memory, and in fact a distant memory. So it draws on a questionable source and has to be protected from itself. Consequently, it contains more reflections than memories; it dwells more readily on the state of things today than on a retrospective account. Moreover, the data it contains are heavily substantiated by the vast literature that has developed on the theme of the drowned (or “saved”) man, to which the guilty parties of those years have contributed, intentionally or not. In this body of literature there is abundant agreement and negligible disagreement. As for my own personal memories and
the handful of unpublished anecdotes I have mentioned or will mention, I have diligently sifted them all: time has discolored them slightly, but they concur by and large with this background, and to me they seem untainted by the drifting I have described.
3. Both Wilhelm Boger and Oswald Kaduk were SS guards at Auschwitz. Boger developed the “Boger swing,” an iron bar hung from the ceiling, from which prisoners were suspended and tortured. Kaduk broke the rib cages of prisoners late for evening roll call by stomping on them.
4. Dante places Count Ugolino della Gherardesca in the ninth circle of hell, among the traitors, next to his archenemy, Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. In Cantos XXXII and XXXIII of the Inferno, he depicts him devouring his own children, with whom he had been locked up without food by the archbishop.
2
The Gray Zone
Have we survivors succeeded in understanding and making other people understand our experience? What we commonly mean by the verb “to understand” coincides with “to simplify”: without a profound simplification, the world around us would be an endless and undefined tangle that defies our ability to find our bearings and decide our actions. So we are forced to reduce the knowable to an outline: this is the purpose of language and conceptual thought, the wonderful tools that we have built over the course of evolution and which are specific to the human species.
We tend to simplify history, too, although we cannot always agree on the outline within which to organize facts, and consequently different historians may understand and construct history in incompatible ways. But our need to divide the field between “us” and “them” is so strong—perhaps for reasons rooted in our origins as social animals—that this one scheme, the friend-enemy dichotomy, prevails over all others. Popular history, and even history as it is traditionally taught in schools, reflects this Manichean tendency to shun nuance and complexity, and to reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duels, us and them, the Athenians and the Spartans, the Romans and the Carthaginians. This is surely the reason for the huge popularity of spectator sports, such as soccer, baseball, and boxing, in which the contenders are two teams or two individuals, distinct and identifiable, and at the end of the game there is a loser and a winner. If the result is a tie, the spectator feels cheated and disappointed; at a more or less unconscious level, he wanted a winner and a loser, identified respectively with the good guys and the bad guys, since the good guys are the ones who should win, otherwise the world would be turned upside down.
The desire for simplification is justified; simplification itself is not always. It is a working hypothesis that is useful as long as it is recognized for what it is, and not confused with reality. Most historical and natural phenomena are not simple, or, rather, not simple in the way we would like. The network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: it could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors. People who read (or write) the history of the camps nowadays have a tendency, indeed a need, to separate evil from good, to take sides, to reenact the gesture of Christ on Judgment Day: over here go the righteous, over there the wicked. Young people in particular demand clarity and sharp distinctions. Since their experience of the world is limited, they are not fond of ambiguity. Their expectations, for that matter, reproduce exactly the expectations of the new arrivals in the camps, young and old. Everyone, with the exception of those who had already lived through similar experiences, expected to find a world that was terrible but decipherable, resembling the simple model that we carry within ourselves atavistically, “us” on the inside and the enemy on the outside, separated by a sharp geographic border.
What made the entry into the camps such a shock was, instead, the surprise that came with it. The world into which you felt you had fallen was indeed harrowing, but it was also indecipherable. It did not resemble any model. The enemy was outside but also inside. There was no clearly defined “us.” There were more than two contenders, and, rather than one border, there were many blurred borders, perhaps countless, one between every person and every other. You entered hoping for at least the solidarity of your fellows in misfortune, but, except in special cases, the hoped-for allies were nowhere to be found. Instead there were a thousand impenetrable monads and, among them, a desperate, covert, and constant struggle. This rude revelation came in the first hours of imprisonment, often in the immediate form of concentric aggression at the hands of the very persons in whom you had hoped to find future allies. It was so brutal that it immediately crushed the ability to resist. For many, it was fatal, indirectly or directly: it is hard to defend yourself against an unexpected blow.
Various aspects of this aggression can be identified. Remember that the main purpose of the concentration-camp system, from the start (coinciding with the rise of Nazism in Germany), was to break the resistance of its adversaries. For the camp leadership, the new arrival was by definition an adversary—regardless of the label attached to him—and had to be destroyed immediately, so that he would not become an example or a germ of organized resistance. On this point, the SS had clear ideas, providing us with a key to interpreting the whole sinister ritual—differing from camp to camp but uniform in substance—that accompanied entry: the immediate kicks and punches, often to the face; the riot of orders shouted with real or simulated rage; complete denuding; the shaving of the head; the ragged clothing. It is hard to say whether all these particulars were fine-tuned by an expert or perfected methodically on the basis of experience, but certainly they were deliberate and not accidental: there was a master plan, and it was obvious.
At the same time, the other inhabitants of the concentration-camp world—both the ordinary prisoners and the privileged ones—contributed more or less knowingly to the entry ritual and to the moral collapse it brought about. Rarely was the newcomer welcomed not I would say as a friend but even as a fellow in misfortune. In most cases, the old-timers (and you became an old-timer in three or four months; the rotation was fast) expressed annoyance or even hostility. They envied the “newcomer” (Zugang: the German is an abstract, bureaucratic term meaning “entrance”) because he still seemed to be wearing on his person the scent of home: an absurd envy, since you actually suffered far more in the first few days of imprisonment than later on, when habituation and experience enabled you to construct a shelter for yourself. The newcomer was derided and subjected to cruel jokes, as is the case in every community with “conscripts” and “novices,” as well as in the initiation ceremonies of primitive peoples. There is no doubt that life in the camps involved a regression, a return to behavior that was indeed primitive.
The basic motivation for hostility toward the Zugang was probably the same as for every other form of intolerance. It was an unconscious attempt to consolidate the “us” at the expense of the “others,” to create a solidarity among the oppressed without which their suffering would be worse, even if it was not openly perceived. The desire for prestige, which seems to be an irrepressible need in our civilization, also came into play: the despised masses of the old-timers tended to treat the newcomers as scapegoats for their own humiliation, to use them as a form of reparation, to view them as underlings upon whom to displace the burden of offenses they had received from above.
The question of the privileged prisoners is both more complex and more important: I consider it fundamental. It is disingenuous, absurd, and historically false to argue that a hellish system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims. It does not. It degrades and assimilates them, especially those who are more willing, more neutral, and without political or moral backbone. Many signs indicate that the time has come to explore the space that separates the victims from the tormentors (and not only in the Nazi Lagers), and to do so with a lighter touch and a less troubled spirit than has been the case, for example, in certain movies. It would be schematic and rhetorical to claim that this space is empty: it never is. It is populated by figures who are contemptible or pathetic (or sometimes both), and whom it is
indispensable to know if we wish to understand the human species, if we wish to know how to defend our souls should a similar ordeal ever occur, or even if we simply wish to understand what happens in a large industrial compound.
The privileged prisoners were a small minority of the camp population, but they represent a large majority of the survivors. In fact, even without taking into account the hard labor, the beatings, the cold, and the diseases, we should remember that the food rations were decidedly insufficient for even the most abstemious prisoner. Since the body’s physiological reserves were exhausted after two or three months, death from starvation or from starvation-related illnesses was the normal fate of a prisoner. The only way to avoid it was an extra food ration, and, to obtain that, a privilege, large or small, was needed: in other words, a means—granted or hard won, cunning or violent, licit or illicit—to raise yourself above the norm.
Let us not forget how most of the survivors’ memories, oral or written, begin: the impact with the concentration-camp reality coincides with an act of aggression, neither expected nor understood, on the part of a strange new enemy, the inmate-functionary, who, rather than take you by the hand, reassure you, and teach you the ropes, comes rushing at you, shouting in a language you don’t know, and punches you in the face. He wants to subdue you, to extinguish the spark of dignity that you may still preserve and that he has lost. But woe to you if your dignity impels you to react. There is an unwritten but ironclad rule: zurückschlagen, to answer a blow with a blow, is an intolerable transgression that only a “newcomer” might consider. Anyone who strikes back must be made an example of: other functionaries rush to the defense of the threatened order and the perpetrator is beaten furiously and methodically until he is subdued or dead. Privilege, by definition, defends and protects privilege. I am reminded that the local term to indicate the privilege, in Yiddish and Polish, was protekcja, pronounced “protekzia,” and is of clear Italian and Latin origin. I heard the story of an Italian newcomer, a partisan, who was labeled a political prisoner and thrown into a labor camp while he was still at the peak of his strength. During the distribution of the soup, he was roughed up by the inmate-functionary ladling out the soup and he dared to shove him back. The functionary’s colleagues came running and made an example out of the offender, drowning him by holding his head down in the vat of soup.