by Primo Levi
From his starving subjects, Rumkowski aspired to gain not only obedience and respect but also love: in this regard modern dictatorships are different from ancient ones. Since he had available an army of excellent artists and craftsmen, who were at his command for a slab of bread, he had stamps designed and printed that bore his effigy, with his white hair and beard illuminated by the rays of Hope and Faith. He had a carriage, drawn by a broken-down nag, in which he traveled through the streets of his tiny kingdom, which were teeming with beggars and petitioners. He wore a regal mantle and surrounded himself with a court of flatterers and assassins. From his courtier poets he commissioned anthems that celebrated his “firm and powerful hand,” and the peace and order that by his virtue reigned in the ghetto. He ordered that the children in the appalling schools, every day ravaged by epidemics, malnutrition, and German roundups, be assigned compositions praising “our beloved and provident president.” Like all autocrats, he promptly organized an efficient police force, nominally to maintain order but actually to protect his person and impose discipline: it consisted of six hundred guards armed with truncheons, and an unspecified number of informers. He gave many speeches in an unmistakable style, some of which have been preserved: he adopted the oratorical technique of Mussolini and Hitler, consisting of an inspired delivery, a pseudo-conversation with the crowd, and the creation of consensus through praise and blame. His mimicry may have been deliberate, or it may instead have been an unconscious identification with the model of the “necessary hero,” which, declaimed by D’Annunzio, dominated Europe in those years.8 But his attitude was most likely provoked by his status as a petty tyrant, impotent before those above him and omnipotent toward those below. He spoke like a man with a throne and scepter, unafraid of being contradicted or derided.
Yet he is a much more complex character than all this would suggest. Rumkowski was not only a renegade and an accomplice; to some extent, he must have gradually convinced not only others but also himself that he was a messiah, a saviour of his people, whose good he must have wanted, at least intermittently. To feel beneficent one has to benefit, and even a corrupt despot likes to feel beneficent. Paradoxically, his identification with the oppressors alternates or is coupled with an identification with the oppressed, since man, as Thomas Mann says, is a confused creature. And he becomes even more confused, we might add, the more subject he is to tensions. Then he escapes our judgment, just as the needle of a compass goes wild at the magnetic pole.
Although he was despised and derided by the Germans, Rumkowski probably thought of himself not as a servant but as a master. He must have taken his own authority seriously: when the Gestapo seized “his” advisors without warning, he courageously rushed to their assistance, exposing himself to mockery and beatings that he managed to bear with dignity. On other occasions, he tried to haggle with the Germans, who were demanding from Lodz more and more cloth, and from him larger and larger contingents of useless mouths (the elderly, children, the sick) to send to the gas chambers of Treblinka and, later, of Auschwitz. He was quick to harshly repress the uprising of his subjects (in Lodz, as in other ghettos, there were daring pockets of political resistance, with Zionist, Bund, or Communist origins), but his harshness derived not so much from servility toward the Germans as from lèse-majesté, indignation at the outrage inflicted on his royal person.
In September 1944, with the approach of the Russian front, the Nazis began liquidating the Lodz Ghetto. Tens of thousands of men and women were deported to Auschwitz, anus mundi, the final sinkhole of the German universe; given their exhausted state, almost all of them were immediately slaughtered. About a thousand men remained in the ghetto to dismantle the machinery in the factories and erase the traces of the massacre; not long afterward, they were liberated by the Red Army, and it is to them that we owe the information reported here.
There are two versions of Chaim Rumkowski’s final destination, as if the ambiguity under whose sign he lived had gone on to envelop his death. According to the first version, during the liquidation of the ghetto he tried to oppose the deportation of his brother, from whom he did not want to be separated. A German officer proposed that he depart with him, voluntarily, and Rumkowski is supposed to have accepted. According to the second version, Hans Biebow, another character cloaked in duplicity, attempted to save Rumkowski. This shady German industrialist was the official in charge of the ghetto’s administration, and at the same time he was its contractor: he thus had a delicate job, because the Lodz textile factories supplied the armed forces. Biebow was not a brute: he was not interested in causing useless suffering or in punishing the Jews for the crime of being Jews. He was interested in making money on provisioning, legally or otherwise. He was moved by the torment of the ghetto, but only indirectly. He wanted the slave laborers to work, so he did not want them to die of starvation; that was as far as his moral sense extended. In fact, he was the true master of the ghetto, and he was tied to Rumkowski by the type of customer-supplier relationship that often blossoms into a gruff friendship. Biebow, a petty profiteer too cynical to take seriously the demonology of race, would have preferred to postpone to the bitter end the liquidation of the ghetto, which was good business for him, and protect Rumkowski from deportation, trusting in his complicity, and this goes to show, objectively speaking, that a realist is often better than a theorist. But the theorists of the SS were of the opposite opinion, and they had the upper hand. They were gründlich, thorough. Out with the ghetto and out with Rumkowski.
Unable to make any other arrangements, Biebow, who had good connections, handed Rumkowski a sealed letter addressed to the commander of the camp he was assigned to, and assured him that it would protect him and guarantee favorable treatment. Rumkowski obtained permission from Biebow to travel to Auschwitz with the dignity suited to his rank, that is, in a special car, attached to the end of the convoy of freight cars crammed with deportees who had no privileges; but a single fate awaited Jews in German hands, whether they were cowards or heroes, humble or proud. Neither the letter nor the car could save Chaim Rumkowski, king of the Jews, from the gas.
A story like this is not self-contained. It overflows. It raises more questions than it can satisfy, encapsulating the whole issue of the gray zone, and leaves us hanging. It cries out to be understood, to be seen as a symbol, as in dreams or heavenly signs.
Who is Rumkowski? He is neither a monster nor an ordinary man, yet many people around us are similar to him. The failures that preceded his “career” are significant: few men can draw moral strength from failure. To me his story seems to exemplify the almost physical necessity by which political duress gives rise to the undefined area of ambiguity and compromise. Men like him crowd around the foot of every absolute throne, trying to grab their tiny portion of power: it is a recurrent spectacle, reminiscent of the deadly infighting during the final months of the Second World War at Hitler’s court and between the ministers of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. They, too, were gray men, more blind than criminal, ruthlessly dividing up the wreckage of an evil and moribund authority. Power is like a drug: the need for one and the other is a mystery to anyone who has never tried them, but, after the initiation, even if it was accidental (as it was for Rumkowsi), addiction kicks in, along with the need for higher and higher doses. And so does a rejection of reality and a return to childhood dreams of omnipotence. If it is true that Rumkowski was intoxicated by power, we have to admit that the intoxication was not because of but, rather, in spite of the ghetto environment. In other words, the intoxication was so powerful that it prevailed even in conditions that would seem to extinguish individual will. In fact, the syndrome of prolonged and uncontested power was clearly visible in him, as it was in his most famous models: the distorted vision of the world, the dogmatic arrogance, the need for adulation, the convulsive clinging to the levers of command, and the contempt for law.
None of this exonerates Rumkowski from his responsibility. It grieves and pains us that a man like Rumkowski could
emerge from the affliction of Lodz. If he had survived his own tragedy, as well as the tragedy of the ghetto he defiled by superimposing his histrionic image on it, no court would have acquitted him, nor can we absolve him on a moral level. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal system, such as National Socialism, exercises a shocking power of corruption from which it is hard to shield oneself. It degrades its victims and assimilates them, because it requires major and minor complicity. You need a solid moral backbone to resist it, and Chaim Rumkowski, merchant of Lodz, together with his entire generation, had only a frail one at his disposal. But are we Europeans today any stronger? How would any of us behave if we were to be driven by necessity and at the same time tempted by something seductive?
Rumkowski’s story is the unpleasant, disquieting story of the Kapos and the Lager officials; of the petty hierarchs who serve a regime to whose faults they are willfully blind; of subordinates who sign everything, because a signature costs so little; of people who shake their heads yet assent; of people who say, “If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have, someone worse than me.”
In this strip of half-consciences Rumkowski, a symbolic, emblematic figure, should be placed. It is hard to know whether he should be at the top or the bottom. He alone could say, if he could speak to us—lying, perhaps, as he may always have lied, even to himself. Yet he would help us to understand all the same, the way every defendant helps his judge, even when he doesn’t want to, even when he is lying, because man’s capacity to play a role is not unlimited.
None of this is enough, however, to explain the sense of urgency and menace that emanates from this story. Perhaps it has a larger meaning: in Rumkowski we see a reflection of ourselves. His ambiguity is ours, the innate ambiguity of hybrids kneaded out of clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization that “descends into hell with trumpets and drums.”9 His shabby masquerade is the distorted image of our symbols of social prestige. His folly is the folly of the proud man described by Isabella in Measure for Measure, the man who:
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
Like Rumkowski, we, too, are so blinded by power and prestige that we forget our basic fragility. We make our deals with power, willingly or not, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the wall are the lords of death, and that not far away the train is waiting.
5. From chapter 2 of The Betrothed (1842), by Alessandro Manzoni.
6. From the introduction to the screenplay of The Night Porter.
7. This story was first published, in very similar form, as a newspaper article, “Il re dei giudei” (“The King of the Jews”), in the November 20, 1977, issue of the Turin newspaper La Stampa and, later, in Levi’s 1981 short story collection Lilith and Other Stories (see volume 2, page 1409).
8. The expression the “necessary hero” is from the introductory poem in the sequence “Canti della ricordanza e dell’aspettazione” (“Songs of Remembrance and Awaiting”) by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), in his book of poems Elettra (1903), dedicated to the myth of the superman.
9. The expression “hell with trumpets and drums” is taken from Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
3
Shame
In a stereotypical image that is endlessly proposed, consecrated by literature and poetry, and exploited by cinema, at the end of the tempest comes “the calm after the storm” and every heart rejoices. “Surcease from suffering / is happiness for us.”10 After an illness, good health returns; the prison is breached by the arrival of our side, the liberators, flags unfurled. The soldier returns, and finds his family and peace again.
To judge from the stories told by many survivors, and from my own recollections, the pessimist Leopardi was stretching the truth in this description: he proved to be an optimist despite himself. In most cases, the hour of liberation was neither joyous nor exhilarating. It usually struck against a tragic backdrop of destruction, slaughter, and suffering. At that moment, when you felt human again—responsible, in other words—human despair returned: despair over a family that had been scattered or lost; despair at the universal suffering all around; at an exhaustion that felt incurable, permanent; at having to start life over again, amid the ruins, often alone. “Pleasure, child of suffering”—piacer figlio d’affanno—Leopardi writes. No, suffering is the child of suffering. Being released from despair was joyous only for the lucky few, or only for a few moments, or for very simple souls; it almost always coincided with a period of anguish.
Anguish is familiar to everyone, starting in childhood, and everyone knows it is often blank and indistinct. Rarely does it bear a plainly written label, indicating its cause; when it does, the label is often a lie. People can believe or say they are in anguish for one reason, and be so for another reason entirely: believe they are suffering at the thought of the future, and be suffering instead because of their past; believe they are suffering for others, out of pity, out of compassion, and be suffering instead for reasons of their own that to varying degrees are deep, to varying degrees admissible and admitted, and sometimes so deep that only the specialist, the analyst of souls, can disinter them.
Of course, I would not go so far as to say that the scenario I have described is never true. Many liberations were experienced with full, genuine joy: especially by the combatants, both military and political, who saw the aspirations of their militancy and their lives fulfilled in that moment; and also by those who had suffered less, or for less time, or only themselves and not for family members, friends, or loved ones. Fortunately, not all human beings are the same, of course: there are some among us who have the virtue and the privilege of enucleating, isolating, those moments of happiness, of fully enjoying them, like those who extract native gold from gangue. And, finally, testimonies I have read or heard include some that are unconsciously stylized, in which convention prevails over genuine memory: “He who is liberated from slavery rejoices, I was liberated, so I, too, rejoiced. In every film, in every novel, as in the opera Fidelio, the breaking of chains is a moment of solemn or fervid delight, and so mine was, too.” This is a special case of the drifting of memory I mentioned in the first chapter, accentuated by the passage of time and the piling up of other people’s experiences, real or alleged, on one’s own. But he who shuns rhetoric, deliberately or by temperament, usually speaks in a different voice. This, for example, is how the above-mentioned Filip Müller, whose experience was actually much worse than mine, describes his liberation on the last page of his memoir, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers:
It was, incredibly, a complete anticlimax. This moment, on which all my thoughts and secret wishes had been concentrated for three years, evoked neither gladness nor, for that matter, any other feelings inside me. I let myself drop down from my rafter and crawled on all fours to the door. Outside I struggled along a little further, but then I simply stretched out on a woodland ground and fell fast asleep.
Let me reread a passage from The Truce. Although the book was published only in 1963, I had already written these words in 1947. This paragraph describes the first Russian soldiers when they came upon the sight of our Lager, piled high with the bodies of the dying and the dead:
They didn’t greet us, they didn’t smile; they appeared oppressed, not only by pity but by a confused restraint, which sealed their mouths, and riveted their eyes to the mournful scene. It was a shame well-known to us, the shame that inundated us after the selections and every time we had to witness or submit to an outrage: the shame that the Germans didn’t know, and which the just man feels before a sin committed by another. It troubles him that it exists, that it has been irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist, and that his goodwill availed nothing, or little, and w
as powerless to defend against it.
I don’t believe I have anything to delete or correct but, rather, to add. Many people (and I myself) felt “shame”—that is, a sense of guilt—both during and after imprisonment, as numerous witnesses have verified and confirmed. Absurd though this may sound, it exists. I will try to interpret this phenomenon and to comment on the interpretations of others.
As I mentioned at the start, the vague uneasiness that accompanied the liberation may not have been shame, exactly, but that is how it was perceived. Why? Various explanations can be attempted.
From this analysis I will exclude exceptional cases: the prisoners, almost all of them political, who had the force and the opportunity within the Lager to act in defense and for the benefit of their fellow captives. We common prisoners, practically the whole of the camp, did not know of or even suspect their existence. This was only logical, since, out of obvious political and policing necessity (the Political Department at Auschwitz was little more than a branch of the Gestapo), they had to carry out their operations in secret, not only from the Germans but also from everyone else. In Auschwitz, a concentration-camp empire that was more than 95 percent Jewish during my time there, this political network was rudimentary. I witnessed only a single episode that should have led me to guess something, if I had not been so overwhelmed by my daily travails.