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The Black Hole of Auschwitz

PRIMO LEVI

Edited by Marco Belpoliti

Translated by Sharon Wood











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Through the Looking Glass: Preface to the Italian Edition

In 1955, ten years after the end of the Second World War, Primo Levi wrote a brief piece for a Turin paper on the memory of the concentration camps, called ‘Deportees. Anniversary’. His argument was disheartening: the subject of the extermination camps, far from entering into historical memory, was in the process of becoming completely forgotten. It is a bitter article, but written in Levi’s habitual tone, measured, precise, and always to the point. He never surrenders to rhetoric, to wailing or cursing. The article also includes ideas which anticipate by thirty years parts of his most important, yet still little known, book, one of the most significant works of the twentieth century, The Drowned and the Saved. He speaks here of shame, of the common humanity of victims and torturers, and the contamination which was the lot of both groups in the camps, of European culture, the responsibility it bears, its science; he speaks of ‘a defenceless and naked death, ignominious and vile’, of the ‘unsuspected reserves of viciousness and madness that lie latent in man’.

The writer here is the author of If This is a Man, a book that is much more than an act of witness. A work of clearly literary inspiration, whose models are to be found in the Italian literary tradition and in the great European writers of the nineteenth century, this first book by the young Turinese chemist who survived the extermination camp of Monowitz, is also a treatise on human ethology. The camp, as he writes in the chapter of If This is a Man entitled ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, was ‘a gigantic biological and social experiment’. In the texts on Auschwitz published at intervals by Levi over the next two decades, whether in ex-deportee journals or in the columns of the most important national newspapers, he returns insistently to this experimental aspect, and to the fate that would have befallen the whole of Europe had Hitler’s armies won the war.

Levi feels himself to be, more deeply even than being a Jew, a combatant for liberty, a resistance fighter, and the accent falls not only on the destiny of his people, but on that of all men and women deported to Germany, including the thousands of Italian soldiers who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the fledgling Republic of Salò, over which the post-war period has cast a veil of silence. But across the rest of Europe too, and even in the State of Israel, there was silence on the subject of the death camps. Until the beginning of the sixties, and the trial of Eichmann, people preferred to forget. In these articles, the gaze Levi casts over the entire phenomenon is, as far as is possible, distanced, analytical, scientific almost. The ethologist of Auschwitz sought first of all to call on reason to describe what had happened, although the problem of understanding these dreadful events is from the outset beset with difficulty. Understanding means getting inside the head of the people who planned and carried out these crimes that are beyond all human measure; it means, as the ex-deportee points out several times, justifying something that is beyond human reason itself.

There is clearly no way out: stupidity and lack of reason, he writes, are forces that operate historically, and yet the perpetrators of Auschwitz, as he states in his preface to a book published in 1968 (‘Preface to L. Poliakov: Auschwitz’), are prey neither to delirium nor to anger: ‘they are diligent, calm, vulgar and one-dimensional.’ He goes so far as to hope that no man will appear in the near future who is able to elucidate, to explain why, at the centre of our Europe and of our century, ‘the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has been turned upside down’. The work of banal and ordinary men, Auschwitz is something that plainly belongs to an asymmetry, to something that is human – for they are still men, those who planned and carried out the monstrous extermination – but at the same time, it is no longer human. Men who appear to be measured, grey, colourless – ‘empty, idiotic, placid and diligent’, as he defines them in a 1959 text – have been capable of carrying out acts that go beyond human understanding (‘The Monument at Auschwitz’).

There is something inexplicable, as well as unacceptable. The rational root of man, postulated by the Greek thought that lies behind the anthropological reflections of the ex-Turinese schoolboy, is denied at root; and yet these men, the murderers of Auschwitz, remain nonetheless part of the human species. Incomprehensibility is invoked at various points throughout these writings. There are questions that in a low-key but subtly anguished tone find no answer: why Auschwitz? Will it happen again?

Faced with the collective suicide of the ‘Temple of the People’ in 1978, and the solitary suicide of the philosopher Jean Améry, himself an Auschwitz deportee, Levi writes: ‘Each and every human action contains a kernel of incomprehensibility. If this were not the case, we would be in a position to foresee what our neighbour will do. Clearly we cannot do this, and perhaps it is just as well that we cannot.’ This is the same problem as the camps. There are questions which recur insistently over the course of these pages, which span three decades, some dedicated to the black hole of Auschwitz, others, more curious and extravagant, on science, Judaism and literature; they return insistently and concern themselves precisely with the kernel of ‘incomprehensibility’.

For a man of scientific training, dedicated to a technical trade both practical and theoretical – the chemist works with his hands but also with his brain, he is a detective of matter – it is no minor thing to state that there exists a hard nucleus which, in a moral sense also, can be neither explained nor understood. Besides, it is plain to the ex-deportee there is both method and rationality in the madness and abnormal design of Auschwitz. Madness does not preclude this. Indeed, the very appearance of modesty and banality of the slaughterers fits perfectly with the anonymous and blind rationality of large modern institutions. Höss himself, the petit-bourgeois commandant of Auschwitz, is an inventor in his own way: it was he who solved the problem of extermination by inventing the gas chambers, Levi notes ironically.

Rationality and irrationality are opposed and symmetrical; between the two of them there is a relationship of equality, even in opposition. Auschwitz is asymmetrical with regard to reason, and is its absolute opposite, but at the same time, at Auschwitz, in the anus mundi as Levi defines it in ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, reason dominates: in the organization of the camp, in the management of the prisoners, in the systematic elimination of the ‘Muselmänner’, the ‘drowned’. It is a coherent system, however upside down it may be with regard to normal life.

As an acute observer of human behaviour, of relations and systems of exchange and barter in the extermination camps, the young Turinese chemist never tires of repeating in the pages of If This is a Man that the inverted hierarchy of the camps, as well as its logic, are perfectly clear to him. From what he has seen he draws a lesson on human nature, as a moralist in the manner of Montaigne, on the uncertain boundary that separates not only reason and unreason, but also good and evil. He sees with absolute clarity, as evidenced by the pages in this book, the double root of human behaviour. In human rationality, in civilization itself, we already see the germ that can generate its opposite, the unleashing of irrational and destructive forces. Not only as an act of anger, of which war, as he has learnt from Homer, is an extension, but as an act of cold detachment. It is the very lack of symmetry in reason itself that is incalculable and unpredictable.

In a long conversation, held in the course of a series of lectures in Turin and later transcribed, Levi deals with the question of racism (‘Racial Intolerance’). We are in 1979, right in the middle of a social and political crisis in Italy, just one year after the murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, about which he also wrote. After humbly confessing his lack of expertise, the writer radically differentiates the ethological and even biological problems of racism from the historical and cultural ones. An attentive reader of Konrad Lorenz, he lingers over the problem of aggression within the species, ‘so-called evil’, whose existence he has seen for himself, and whose biological root cannot be eliminated. However shot through with determinism this may be, Levi has no doubts about the matter: there is a pre-human, prehistoric racial intolerance which precedes and justifies (only in part) the historic form of which his people – the Jews – have had dreadful and recurrent experience over the centuries.

Once again, at the heart of the question, why evil and not good, why racism, why the hell of Auschwitz, there is a question of dissymmetry: the root of evil is in human behaviour, in its animality.

The key figure of If This is a Man is the animal-man, Buck, the character created by Jack London, first a peaceful domestic animal and later an innocent victim, then Kapo of the dog pack, ‘primitive dominant beast’. The analogy between the protagonist of The Call of the Wild, translated by Gianni Celati and reviewed by Levi, and the life of the deportee, torn from his tranquil bourgeois home and flung into the inferno of the camps, is very close: in extreme conditions, in concentration camps, at Auschwitz, man is dramatically faced with having to confront his own irrationality, which he cannot shed, neither yesterday nor today. In describing a whole range of questions about racial intolerance, as a self-declared non-expert, the writer and ex-deportee follows the thread of an argument based on a rationalist matrix, on a pessimism of reason which, if it does not succeed in easing the wounds inflicted by man on man, nonetheless appears as a lucid and pitiless description of evil. But the thread of his argument has once more to come to terms with the dissymmetry between reason and non-reason, between explanation and comprehension. And since Primo Levi is fundamentally a Stoic, on both the philosophical and the moral plane, the contradiction does not frighten him; in all probability it causes him suffering, and yet in no way does he abdicate his own rationality which offers itself, despite everything, as a solid bastion against the irruption of the irrational. The problem lies, if anything, elsewhere.

In a text of a scientific flavour, published in 1984 in a popular science and culture journal, the ex-chemist Primo Levi – he retired ten years before in order to dedicate himself to writing – considers the relationship between asymmetry and life. Here he picks up once more the problem he had tackled in his degree thesis, ‘Walden’s inversion’, which the racial laws had forced him to finish in a hurried and incomplete manner. Although it takes the form of an extract and summary, and although the experimental section is missing, this essay is his real thesis, the one drawn up by the writer after passing through the asymmetrical experience of the camps, on which he has reflected over the years both alone and with others. In ‘Asymmetry and Life’, Levi discusses the problem that has long interested him: why all ‘major players in the living world, such as proteins, cellulose, sugars and DNA, are all asymmetrical’. As a scientist he cannot but notice that ‘right–left asymmetry is intrinsic to life; indeed it coincides with life. It is invariably present in all organisms, from viruses to lichen to oak trees, fish and man.’

This is not a negligible fact, but one that has aroused the curiosity of many generations of scientists. The subject, he writes, is that of the ‘final cause’ (Aristotle), or, ‘in modern terms, that of the adaptive utility of asymmetry’. Levi reviews much of his own reading, and revisits the problem addressed for his thesis in the light of developments in physics and chemistry over the past twenty to thirty years. He sketches out five hypotheses to explain the asymmetry he is dealing with, he even hypothesizes the existence of anti-matter, the presence of a symmetry for earthly right- or left-handed lactic acid in ‘the distant world of anti-matter’ (has Levi, like Alice, perhaps passed, however briefly, through the looking glass, into the asymmetrical realm of death?). In the final lines he speaks of the ‘chirality’ of the universe, or just of our galaxy, as a deeply disturbing phenomenon that is both dramatic and enigmatic.

Chirality, scientists tell us, is the condition whereby a molecule cannot be superimposed on its specular image. In other words, it points to a symmetry that is enantiomorphic, like that of the right hand and left hand which are indeed symmetrical, but as a reflection, so that they can be superimposed not by translation but by rotation, in a higher dimension. The theme of symmetry and dissymmetry apparently fascinated Levi, for he returns to it on various occasions, particularly in The Wrench. Why? We can hypothesize that it is not just a matter of science, but a question which recalls the experience in the camps and the relationship between rationality and irrationality so sorely tested in Auschwitz.

Is it not true, perhaps, that in the extermination camp reason and non-reason are enantiomorphic? That the rationality of everyday life is undone by the logic of the camp which, in its turn, contains a clear principle of intrinsic rationality? In the same way, it seemed plain to Levi the scientist from this experience that Western science contained a principle of irrationality, the ever-looming possibility that its potential could be utilized for destructive rather than constructive purposes. There is a chiasmus, a crossroads, a crossed symmetry between rational and irrational. And this, as his fantasy and science fiction stories make clear, regards not only the extreme, extra-territorial place, the concentration camp, but also the daily life of men. The ‘format defect’ (vizio di forma), as one collection of his stories is entitled, is exactly this. This is how we should interpret the adjectives with which, at the end of ‘Asymmetry and Life’, Levi defines the announcement of the non-symmetrical symmetry of the universe. Disturbing, dramatic, enigmatic: these are terms that are perfectly adapted to the description of the incomprehensible event of Auschwitz. Nonetheless asymmetry is also a vital fact, a fundamental part of life itself.

Although there also exist asymmetrical substances that do not belong to the world of the living – quartz crystals, for example – asymmetry, writes Levi, is ‘intrinsic to life; indeed it coincides with life’. Can we hypothesize that for the writer Auschwitz, a world turned upside down, enantiomorphic with regard to civil life, is part of life? Yes. The unresolvable contradiction, eternal source of pain and remembering, is just this. And for more than one reason. Because the experience of Auschwitz is an integral part of his personality, from which, as he repeats in these pages, he received the gift of writing; and this is a source of both joy and torment. Furthermore, the camp at Monowitz has led him to understand the irrational root of the rational behaviour of man, and this is underlined and clarified by his voyage of return to the world of the living, his Odyssey, narrated in The Truce, which is by turns light-hearted and easy-going, and dark and gloomy. The chemistry exam of Dr Pannwitz and the experience of the chemical laboratory of Buna may have saved his life but they have, on the other hand, clarified the evil power implicit in science, in the use to which it is put. More deeply, in this tormented but highly lucid consciousness, which we have come to know through his books, we sense that the asymmetrical symmetry of the concentration camp rests on the asymmetrical coupling of the ‘drowned’ and the ‘saved’. Primo Levi belongs to the second group, and is a witness precisely because he is ‘saved’. The chiasmus is dreadful to bear.

In his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, he writes: ‘The thought that my bearing witness might have granted me alone the privilege of surviving, and living for many years without serious problems, disturbs me, because I see no proportion between the privilege and the result’. It is not a question of a sense of guilt. Levi, as we understand from reading the pieces in this book dedicated to Auschwitz and to the camps in general, has not attempted to forget, to live in the shelter of a more or less successful repression. Rather, he has exposed himself in the role of witness, he has faced the problem of not wishing to forget. He continues to write: ‘But We Were There’. For this reason he has continued to collide with the asymmetrical root of his talent as a writer. Levi is not by mental habit an extremist. Instead, he poses himself problems, he continually interrogates himself, and this does not prevent him from taking up firm, hard, unshakeable positions on Fascism, on Nazism, on the negationism of Robert Faurisson, on historical revisionism (the article, ‘Black Hole of Auschwitz’, is still highly relevant today) and on the Soviet Union.

In If This is a Man there is a precise point at which this aspect of his human and intellectual personality emerges. It is in the chapter called ‘Initiation’, which the writer added in 1958, ten years after the book’s publication, when the second revised and updated edition came out with Einaudi. Here the figure of Steinlauf appears, a former sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army, decorated with the Iron Cross in the 1914–18 war. A soldier who has fallen into the bottomless pit of the concentration camp, Steinlauf teaches the Jewish Italian prisoner the harsh law of the camp: ‘precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.’ This is followed by a series of practical lessons handed on by the Austrian sergeant to his pupil: wash your face without soap, polish your shoes, walk with your head held high. It is a paradox, one of the many imposed by the camp: to oppose the formlessness of the camp with the form of civilized life. The formality of behaviour is as important as the merciless struggle to get bread, like the character in Lilìt who maintains his dignity by refusing to scratch in public the scab that torments him. The strategies of survival undo the habitual relationship between what it is logical and what it is illogical to do, between the rational and the irrational. But this is not to say that this is how the Italian Jew, Primo Levi, thinks.

Once more he has a surprise in store for us. The words of Steinlauf are not enough for him, and not only because of the Italian custom of mitigating everything, of rendering every doctrine bland and malleable, as he writes, but because the wisdom and virtue of the exsoldier are not enough for the young chemist: ‘In the face of this complicated world of damnation my ideas are confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?’

These short pieces show that the greatness of Primo Levi lies not so much in the act of denunciation or of witness, although it is also, of course in this. Rather it is his persistence in asking himself questions that have no certain answers or which, if they have them, undermine received opinion, whether of individuals or groups of people. We glimpse the white-hot anger beneath his marble prose, beneath the reasonable and calm tone with which he enunciates his accusations against all professional liars, hypocrites, falsifiers (‘Seekers of Lies to Deny the Holocaust’), against those who use the terrible event of Auschwitz to pass off facile truths or cheap sordidness (‘Film and Swastikas’). We see the same attitude when he examines the media event of Holocaust (‘Images of Holocaust’), or when he shows an excessive optimism in modern science (‘Let’s See How Much has Come True’ and ‘What was it that Burned Up in Space?’), or when he touches on the problem of the end of ideologies: ‘Many tears are shed these days over the end of ideologies, but this book seems to me to show in exemplary fashion where an ideology can lead when it is accepted as radically as it was by Hitler’s Germans, and by extremists in general. Ideologies can be good or bad; it is good to know them, to compare them and attempt to evaluate them; it is always bad to take one on completely, even when it is decked out with respectable words such as Fatherland and Duty’ (Preface to R. Höss: Commandant of Auschwitz).

All of Primo Levi’s work, whether as witness or as writer, whether as chemist or narrator, exists under the sign of an asymmetrical symmetry, which seeks, with difficulty but with great intelligence and honesty, to give a reasoned account of the disturbing, dramatic and enigmatic event that was Auschwitz. The impossibility of forgetting follows not so much, or not only, from the incalculable scale of the tragedy, but from the fact that tangled within it are questions that are difficult to unravel and which right up to the present day have repeated themselves in the grievous history of humanity, in Cambodia as in Bosnia, in Uganda as in Afghanistan. And that is why we still need the writing of Primo Levi.

Marco Belpoliti

Note to the Texts

This collection of newspaper articles and essays by Primo Levi is drawn from the edition of the Opere (Collected Works), published in two volumes in the Nuova Universale Einaudi series, 1997, edited by Marco Belpoliti. It amounts overall to 450 pages from various parts of the two volumes, which had been gathered from daily newspapers, journals, news sheets and annuals. Another recently discovered text was added to these writings, ‘The Community of Venice and its Ancient Cemetery’, drafted in 1985 as a preface and unpublished until 2000. The choice of pieces to be included has followed two main lines: the theme of the concentration camp on the one hand, and on the other a range of writings displaying Levi’s interest in scientific, historical or literary matters, including the history of Italian and European Jews. The first group of writings was given the title of the well-known article, ‘The Black Hole of Auschwitz’ and the second, echoing the title of a volume put together by Levi himself, ‘Other People’s Trades’. Arranged in chronological order, the two sections shed light on Levi’s double trade, that of witness and writer, as well as that of chemist and assiduous contributor to newspapers. The article which in 1959 marked the beginning of his collaboration with the newspaper La Stampa, ‘The Monument at Auschwitz’, is included here. For further information about the different texts, about their publication or editorial history, the reader should consult the notes in the Appendix to the volume of the Opere previously cited, pp. 1458–69 of Volume I and pp. 1571–75 of Volume II.

The aim of this book is to make accessible to the non-specialist reader the journalistic and essayistic writings of Primo Levi that have remained largely unknown (for nothing is more unpublished than what has already been published!), writings which help us reconstruct his journey as witness and intellectual from the 1950s until his death, in 1987. The ideal readers of this new collection are the young, and the book is dedicated to them.

Warm thanks are offered to Primo Levi’s family for giving their consent to this project.

Part I
The Black Hole of Auschwitz

1
Deportees. Anniversary

Ten years on from the liberation of the concentration camps, it is both distressing and deeply indicative to note that in Italy at least, far from being an important part of our history, the subject of the extermination camps is in the process of being completely forgotten.

It is unnecessary to remind readers of the statistics, to remember that this was a massacre on a scale the world had never before seen, practically wiping out the Jewish population of whole nations of Eastern Europe. Nor should we need to remind ourselves that had Nazi Germany been in a position to carry out its plans, the techniques tried and tested in Auschwitz and elsewhere would, with the famed thoroughness of the Germans, have been applied to whole continents.

Nowadays it is bad taste to speak of the concentration camps. We risk being accused of victimism: at best of a gratuitous fascination with the macabre, at worst, of pure and simple mendacity, of an outrage to decency.

Is this silence justified? Should it be tolerated by those of us who are survivors? Should it be tolerated by those who were rigid with fear and disgust as they witnessed the departure of the sealed trains amidst beatings, curses and inhuman screams, and who were there years later when just a handful of survivors returned, broken in body and spirit? Is it right that the task of bearing witness, which we felt then as a necessary and pressing obligation, should be considered over and done with?

There is just one answer to this. It is not permissible to forget, nor is it permissible to keep silent. If we fall silent, who then will speak? Certainly not the perpetrators and their accomplices. If we fail to bear witness, in a not too distant future we could well see the deeds of Nazi bestiality relegated by their very enormity to the status of legend. It is vital, therefore, to speak out.

Yet silence prevails. There is a silence which is the fruit of an uneasy conscience, or even of bad conscience; it is the silence of those who, when pressed or compelled to pass judgement, try their hardest to steer the debate in a different direction altogether, conjuring up nuclear weapons, carpet bombing, the Nuremberg trials as well as the problematic Soviet work camps. These arguments are not in themselves worthless, but they carry little weight in the attempt to provide a moral justification for Fascist crimes whose manner and scale together constitute a monument of viciousness never before seen in the whole history of humanity.

But perhaps it is fitting to focus on another aspect of this silence, this reticence and evasiveness. It is hardly surprising that it is not spoken of in Germany, or by the Fascists, nor need this bother us. Their words are of no use to us, and we need not expect any laughable attempts at justification from them. But what should we say about the silence of the civilized world, the silence of culture, our own silence towards our children, towards our friends who return after long years of exile in far-off places? This silence cannot be put down simply to weariness, the attrition of the years, our habitual human stance of primum vivere. It cannot be put down to cowardice. There is in us a deeper, worthier instinct that in many circumstances urges us to remain silent about the camps, or at least to tone down or censor the images which are still vivid in our memories.

It is shameful. We are men; we are part of the same human family to which our murderers belonged. Faced with the enormity of their crime, we feel ourselves citizens still of Sodom and Gomorrah, and we cannot feel ourselves exempt from the indictment which our act of witness would prompt an extraterrestrial judge to lay at the door of the whole of humanity.

We are children of the Europe where Auschwitz lies. We have inhabited the century in which science has become warped, giving birth to racial laws and the gas chambers. Who can say that he is immune from infection?

There is more yet to say: painful, hard things which will not be new to those who have read Les armes et la nuit. It is absurd to proclaim as glorious the deaths of countless victims in the extermination camps. It was not glorious: it was a defenceless and naked death, ignominious and vile. There is nothing honourable about slavery. There were those who managed to bear it unharmed, and these are exceptions to be contemplated with reverent amazement. But slavery is a condition that is essentially ignoble, the fount of almost irresistible degradation and moral shipwreck.

It is good that these things be said, because they are true. But let us be clear that this does not mean lumping victims and assassins together. The guilt of the Fascists and the Nazis, far from being alleviated, is aggravated a hundredfold. They have demonstrated for all centuries to come what unsuspected reserves of viciousness and madness lie latent in man even after millennia of civilized life, and this is the work of the devil. They worked with astonishing tenacity to create their gigantic death-dealing and corrupting machine, and no greater crime can be imagined. They insolently constructed their kingdom with the tools of hatred, violence and lies: their failure is a warning.

In Torino, XXX1, no. 4, April 1955, a special issue dedicated to the ten-year anniversary of the Liberation, pp. 53–54. A shorter version of this article appeared in L’eco dell’educazione ebraica in a special issue marking the decade since Liberation.

2
The Monument at Auschwitz

Within what is a relatively short time, if we consider the scale of the undertaking, within two years or maybe even less, a monument will rise in Auschwitz, on the very site which saw the greatest massacre in human history. The second stage of the competition recently held to select the project was won jointly by a group of Polish artists and two groups of Italian architects and sculptors. Collaboration between these groups resulted in the executive project which has been on public view in Rome since 1 July [1959] in the National Gallery of Modern Art. We should be more exact here: the monument will not ‘rise’ literally, in that for the most part it will be at ground level or below. Nor will it be a monument in the usual sense of the word, since it will take up no less than 30 hectares of ground. Furthermore it will not be in the centre of Auschwitz, in other words not in the Polish town of Oswiecim, but at Birkenau.

There are few to whom the name Auschwitz can be new. Around 400,000 prisoners were registered in this camp, of whom just a few thousand survived. Almost four million other innocents were swallowed up by the extermination plants erected by the Nazis at Birkenau, two kilometres from Auschwitz. They were not political enemies; for the most part they were whole families of Jews, with children, old people and women rounded up in the ghettoes or taken from their own homes. Usually they had just a few hours’ notice, and were ordered to carry with them ‘everything they would need for a long journey’. Unofficial advice was not to forget their gold, currency and any valuables they owned. Everything they carried with them (everything: including shoes, linen, glasses) was taken from them when the convoy entered the camp. Out of every transport, a tenth on average were sent straight into the forced labour camps. Nine-tenths of them (including all the children, the elderly and infirm, and the majority of the women) were killed immediately with a toxic gas originally intended to free ships’ holds of rats. Their bodies were cremated in colossal plants, built for the purpose by the honest firm Topf and Sons of Erfurt, who had been commissioned to supply ovens capable of incinerating 24,000 bodies each day. When Auschwitz was liberated, seven tons of female hair were found.

These are the facts: tragic, vile, largely incomprehensible. Why, how did this happen? Will it ever happen again?

I do not believe it is possible fully to answer these questions, either now or in the future; and perhaps it is just as well. If there were to be an answer to these questions, it would mean that the facts of Auschwitz form part of the tissue of human endeavour; that they have a cause and hence a seed of justification. To some extent we can put ourselves in the shoes of the thief, of the assassin. But it is not possible to put ourselves in the shoes of the madman. It is equally impossible to retrace the steps of the main people responsible: their actions, their words, remain encircled by shadows, we cannot reconstruct how it came about, we cannot say ‘from their point of view . . .’. Fundamental to human action is a goal: the massacre at Auschwitz, which destroyed a tradition and a civilization, benefited nobody.

In this sense (and only this sense!) it is highly instructive to read the diary of Höss, former Commandant of Auschwitz. This book, translated into Italian, is a chilling document. The author is not a bloody sadist or a hate-filled fanatic, but an empty man, a tranquil and diligent idiot, whose purpose it is to carry out with the utmost care the bestial initiatives entrusted to him, and in this obedience he appears to succeed in appeasing every niggling doubt and anxiety.

The truth about Auschwitz can only be understood, it seems to me, through the folly of the few, and the cowardly, foolish consensus of the many. Indeed, aside from any moral judgement and keeping to the level of realpolitik, we are inevitably led to conclude that attempts such as Hitler’s, carried through in Auschwitz and meticulously planned for the whole of the New Europe, were errors on a colossal scale. Everywhere, in every single country, there is a capacity for indignation and harmony of judgement in the face of similar atrocities, which Nazism had not bargained for, and which explains the state of quarantine in which the German people still finds itself. Reason suggests that we are not threatened by a restoration of the concentration camp.

But it would not be wise to make predictions on the basis of reason. As Jemolo observed not so very long ago in this same column, it is pointless to credit our enemies with far-sighted plans and diabolical cunning, for stupidity and unreason are powerful historical forces. Experience has sadly demonstrated this point, and continues to demonstrate it. A second Hitler could be born, has perhaps already been born, and we should always be on our guard. Auschwitz can, then, be repeated. Once they have been discovered, techniques take on a life of their own, in a state of potentiality, waiting for the moment to be put into practice. Over fifteen years the techniques of destruction and propaganda have progressed to the point where the destruction of a million human lives at the press of a button is easier today than ever before, while distorting the memory, conscience and judgement of 200 million people becomes simpler with each passing year.

Nor does it stop there. The Nazi massacre bears the mark of folly, but another mark also. It is the sign of the inhuman, of human solidarity denied, forbidden, broken; of slave-driving exploitation; of the shameless assertion that might is right, smuggled in under the banner of order. It is the sign of oppression, the sign of Fascism. It is the coming to pass of a demented dream in which there is but one commander; nobody thinks any more, everybody marches in line, everybody obeys to the death, everybody always says yes.

It is, therefore, both right and important that in our age of facile enthusiasms and deep weariness a monument should rise in Auschwitz, and it should be a work that is both new and perennial, which can speak with the utmost clarity to whoever visits it both today, tomorrow and in centuries to come. It does not have to be ‘beautiful’, it doesn’t matter if it verges on the rhetorical, or even if it succumbs to it. It must not be used by any one side. It must be a warning dedicated by humanity to itself, which can bear witness and repeat a message not new to history but all too often forgotten: that man is, must be, sacred to man, everywhere and for ever.

La Stampa, 18 July 1959

3
‘Arbeit Macht Frei’

These are the well-known words written over the entrance gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Their literal meaning is ‘work makes free’, but their real meaning is somewhat less clear; it inevitably leaves us puzzled, and is worth some consideration.

The concentration camp at Auschwitz was created relatively late, and was conceived from the start not as a work camp but as an extermination camp. It became a work camp later, in 1943, and then only in partial and subsidiary fashion. I think we can therefore exclude the hypothesis that in the intention of the person who coined it, this phrase was to be understood in its straightforward sense and for its obvious proverbial and moral value.

It is more likely that the meaning is ironic, springing from the heavy, arrogant, funereal wit to which only Germans are privy, and which only in German has a name. Translated into explicit language it should, it seems, have gone something like this: ‘Work is humiliation and suffering, and is fit not for us, the Herrenvolk, the people of masters and heroes, but for you, enemies of the Third Reich. The only freedom which awaits you is death.’

In reality, and despite appearances to the contrary, denial of and contempt for the moral value of work is fundamental to the Fascist myth in all its forms. Under each form of militarism, colonialism and corporatism lies the precise desire of one class to exploit the work of others, and at the same time to deny that class any human value. This desire was already clear in the anti-worker position adopted by Italian Fascism right from its early years, and became increasingly refined in the evolution of the German version of Fascism, reaching the point of the wide-scale deportations to Germany of workers from all the occupied countries. But it is in the universe of the camps that it finds both its crowning glory and its reductio ad absurdum.

The exaltation of violence has a similar goal in mind and this, too, is essential to Fascism; the club, which quickly assumes a symbolic value, is the instrument used to stimulate beasts of burden and haulage to work harder.

The experimental character of the camps is clear to us today and arouses an intense retrospective horror. We know now that the German camps, whether intended for work or for extermination, were not, so to speak, a by-product of conditions of national emergency (the Nazi revolution first, then the war). They were not an unfortunate transitory necessity, but the early seedlings of the New Order. In the New Order, some human races (Jews, Gypsies) would be wiped out while others, for example the Slavs in general and the Russians in particular, would be enslaved and subject to a carefully controlled regime of biological degradation, transforming individuals into good labouring animals, illiterate, devoid of all initiative, incapable of either rebellion or criticism.

The camps were thus largely ‘pilot plants’, an anticipation of the future assigned to Europe in Nazi planning. In the light of these considerations, phrases such as the one at Auschwitz, ‘Work makes free’, or the one at Buchenwald, ‘To each his own’, take on a precise and sinister meaning. They are, in their turn, an anticipation of the new tablets of the Law, dictated by master to slave, and valid only for the slave.

If Fascism had prevailed, the whole of Europe would have been transformed into a complex system of forced labour and extermination camps, and those cynically edifying words would have been read on the entrance to every workshop and every worksite.

In Triangolo Rosso, Aned, November 1959

4
The Time of Swastikas

The Deportation Exhibition, which opened in Turin in a seemingly minor key, has been an unexpected success. Each and every day a close-packed crowd stood, deeply moved, before those terrible images; the closing date had to be postponed not once, but twice. Equally surprising was the welcome given by the Turin public to two talks aimed at young people, given in the Cultural Union in Palazzo Carignano to an attentive, thoughtful and packed public. These two results, in themselves positive and worthy of more than superficial comment, nonetheless contain the seed of a reproach: maybe it took us too long, and we wasted too many years; maybe we were silent when we should have spoken out, maybe we did not measure up to what was expected of us.

But there is also a lesson to be learnt here, and not a new one, to tell the truth, for the history of customs is a series of rediscoveries: in these noisy and paper-thin times of ours, full of bare-faced propaganda and hidden attempts to persuade, of mechanical rhetoric, compromises, scandals and world-weariness, the voice of truth is far from lost and indeed acquires a new resonance, a clearer and more distinctive tone. It seems too good to be true, but that’s the way it is: the widespread devaluation of the word, whether written or spoken, is neither definitive nor final: something has survived. Strange as it may seem, whoever speaks the truth today finds a listener and is believed.

Only in this way will young people be able to feel our most recent history as a web of real human events, and not as a ‘pensum’ to be added to all the others decreed by ministerial programmes.

In Il giornale dei genitori. II, n.1, 15 January 1960