The Black Hole of Auschwitz

Primo Levi, Marco Belpoliti, Sharon Wood

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745632414, 9780745632407
• eBook ISBN: 9781509526239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Black Hole of Auschwitz brings together Levi's writings on the Holocaust and his experiences of the concentration camp, as well as those on his own accidental status as a writer and his chosen profession of chemist. In this book Levi rails intelligently and eloquently against what he saw as the ebb of compassion and interest in the Holocaust, and the yearly assault on the veracity and moral weight of the testimonies of its survivors. For Levi, to keep writing and, through writing, to understand why the Holocaust could happen, was nothing less than a safeguard against the loss of a collective memory of the atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish people.

This moving book not only reveals the care and conviction with which he wrote about the Holocaust, but also shows the range of Levi's interests and the skill, thoughtfulness and sensitivity he brought to all his subjects. The consistency and moral force of Levi's reflections and the clarity and intimacy of his style will make this book appeal to a wide readership, including those who have read and been moved by his masterpiece If This is a Man.

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 spea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Through the Looking Glass: Preface to the Italian Edition Note to the Texts
• PART I: THE BLACK HOLE OF AUSCHWITZ
• PART II: OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES
• Index of Names
• End User License Agreement