Can someone who has been a victim of barbarism find themselves again, within themselves and among others? To answer this question — which, alas, remains as urgent as ever — I have drawn on the books of several writers who lived through deportation to the Nazi camps or to the gulag. These books belong to the realm of literature as much as to that of History. They are books of testimony that accept their share of the fictional, and whose value lies also in the quality of their writing. These authors all display a remarkable lucidity, which does not preclude the inevitable share of misapprehension, repression, selection and blindness. But none can speak for all. The violence they suffered was such that it brought into play the entire range of the ways a human being can think and act; it called into question and overturned all their markers of identity, all their political, social, familial, philosophical and religious points of reference. The camps too had their diversity, their principal function — extermination or concentration — and the positions deportees might occupy within them varied, as did their personal characteristics and their histories. Diverse too are the aims these writers assign to their books, and what those books represent for them. The labor of writing gave them an exceptional distance from the experience itself and sets their texts apart from the many raw testimonies that have been published. It prompted them to write with great precision: the oral witness does not hear himself speak, whereas the writer is obliged to read and reread what he has written, and every reader can do the same.
Their books do not merely transmit information; they weave an intense and complex relationship between themselves and the reader, who cannot seek in them only knowledge, emotion, reflection. Caught in an intense relationship with them, the reader inscribes himself, in one way or another, in the chain of transmission they have inaugurated. Responsible for his reading, he is also responsible for what he does with it. He thus contributes to ensuring that their experience and their testimony do not congeal, do not remain shut away in a past that keeps receding, becoming incomprehensible to many, foreign to our daily life and our concerns. Dialogue with them averts the dread that casts them back into their solitude and the fascination that alienates and freezes thought; it narrows the distance that separates us, attenuates their opacity without abolishing it. To recognize what we have in common and what separates and differentiates us, to welcome them into our thoughts and our daily life, helps them to continue their journey as living beings among us, and helps us to continue our own.
The return to society
Liberation, the return to their city and to civilian life are not enough to close off the experience of deportation, all the more so since the survivors find that neither society nor men have changed, and they wonder whether they have not suffered in vain. Some, indeed, in the days following liberation, were locked up in the very same cells in the camp now run by the Americans or the Russians.
The former inmates have become strangers to everyone, to every country, to their fellow citizens and, above all, to themselves, to their history and to their identity. To recognize oneself as a Jew is for many impossible, whether through deliberate refusal or through the impossibility of continuing to be one. Many factors contribute to this: the legitimate fear of a return of Nazi barbarism and its antisemitic hatred; the devastating realization that Judaism, in its religious, cultural, political, social and communal aspects, did not protect them and, on the contrary, sometimes hampered their capacity to react and resist; the refusal to transmit this dangerous and discredited Judaism to any descendants they might have — something Kertész expresses powerfully in Kaddish pour l’enfant qui ne naîtra pas (Kaddish for an Unborn Child). Having managed to survive is a remarkable feat, but the psychic and existential price paid is high, quite apart from the physical aftereffects they carry. It risks being high too — though there is no inevitability here — for their descendants, and that across several generations.1
It is not easy for them to reconstitute an identity, the one from before having been destroyed by violence or set at such a distance that it has become inaccessible, as if it had never existed. Is their only identity now that of “former deportee,” or of “person without identity,” for lack of being able to take the measure of their complexity and their contradictions, of their losses but also of what they have acquired? How is one to assume this history and this identity, to bear it, to present it to others — not merely to speak it or keep silent about it — to live it daily in the closest proximity to an intimate other — spouse or child, sometimes father or mother — and among others. Other survivors, by contrast, find or recover their identity in the affirmation, at times intense, of their Judaism, in continuity or in a return after an abandonment or a rupture that sometimes occurred in the generation that preceded them.
The former deportee knows that he must reestablish contact with “normal” life — whose continuity was broken for him but not for others — must rediscover it, in its strangeness and its charge of the unknown, must reinvent the means of approaching it, taming it, finding his place in it. He returns from another world, and the feeling of disbelief he experiences at being alive and free crushes, at first, every feeling of bitterness, jealousy, injustice, revolt, and anger too toward others, who can never truly imagine and understand what he has lived through. He wonders how they managed to go on living so close to the hell he knew; whether such a life is possible, whether it is not an illusion; whether it was not rather the camp that was a mirage. But, when he returns to the camp years later, Boris Pahor feels the satisfaction of seeing tourists there and of finding that the Vosges, where it was located, are no longer merely the place where his companions died, but have become a holiday destination. Once this first phase is past, he realizes that he has no place in this recovered normality, not because others exclude him but because the place he might occupy is impossible.2 He has a double belonging: to the community of the camp and of those who died there, and to that of the present living, where death exists only, pacified, in the form of rituals and processes of mourning. He has the impression that he never left the camp, or that he carried it away with him, that the two are henceforth inseparable. The camp has not become a memory, an image, subject to the processes of modification, sorting and settling of memory; it has remained a living reality, in the present.
The efforts he never ceased to make in order to adapt to it played their positive part in his physical liberation but made his psychic liberation almost impossible. Once freed, Shalamov reconstituted in his room in Moscow his living conditions from the camp, piling up there, like precious treasures, the slightest scraps recovered from the rubbish bins, sleeping on the bare floor, starting at the least noise, waking in the morning exhausted by nightmares, astonished to be still alive and so alone. The experience of barbarism remains inscribed, in the present, in the psyche and in the flesh, in the least gesture, the least element of daily life. When Shalamov reads his stories aloud, “he relives in full what he recounts: hunger, cold, blows, death.”3
Some inflict on their families an astonishing physical or moral violence, provoking dismay and distress: how can they behave like this after all they have endured, say their neighbors, their fellow citizens? Outside the camp, perhaps they identify with the SS as if to seek there the magical protection against the death they had so dreaded and fought throughout deportation; or do they avenge their terrible suffering on those nearest to them who did not share it, as if to redress this injustice? Perhaps, too, the camp made them lose all the markers that structure human relations?
Others have lost the markers and the reflexes that allow everyone to live in society, and find themselves at times, in their strange awkwardness, under the astonished or embarrassed gaze of others. The habits and markers acquired in the camp, which were then so useful, are of no help to them — quite the contrary. From this follows a great solitude, accentuated by the incomprehension, even the fear, that others feel of being contaminated by his unshareable experience. His efforts to make it known and understood to them — while it remains in large part unthinkable to himself — do little to ease this unease. Moreover, the postwar world bears little resemblance to the one he had dreamed of, and there he finds himself out of place and out of time, a stranger to the prewar world, to that of the camp, to that of present-day society. The only ones who could ease his solitude are his fellow deportees, but they are very likely to be just like him.
The difference from others is not only observed, suffered; it is also willed, claimed. Jean Améry refuses all appeasement, whether it comes from his own numbing or from his liberation. The violence suffered, the assault on his dignity and his humanity, the rupture that torture and deportation provoked in the good order of society and of the world cannot thus be cancelled by time alone or by superficial reconciliation. Against the risk of forgetting, he refuses to erase the traces of barbarism, continues to bear them, to suffer them. To accept appeasement, there would have to be a significant change of conscience among his fellow citizens and an authentic reckoning with Nazism, with its consequences enacted. Revenge too is refused, for it perpetuates or reestablishes a relationship between the tortured and the executioner, who would remain the sole object of his thoughts, his affects, his actions. But how to assert that the deportee is henceforth free of all that bound him to the executioner? A difficult balance to strike between the refusal of revenge, the demand for justice, and the preservation of living memory and reflection on what took place.
Jorge Semprún, for other reasons, close and convergent, preserves his memories of the camp for the salutary disquiet they provoke. He refuses to be amputated of them, for they keep open the radical gap between the camp and his present life, but also keep intact the incomparable happiness of the ceaseless passage between the two.
Solitude reveals itself in intimacy as well. It springs from the fear of the other’s intrusion into his space — objective as much as subjective, often empty — into his body, his thoughts and his affects. Is it because his only authentic place remains the camp — did not a deportee, whose words Borowski reported, say “Back home, at Auschwitz” — or because, having been emptied of everything that constituted his substance and his identity, he can no longer invest anything in it? Does he need an empty dwelling so that the place he inhabits is not in painful discordance with the vacuity of his body and his being? The camp traced an impassable border between inside and outside, and established a radical difference between deportees and others. At the same time, the skin, the body’s border, showed its extreme fragility, assailed by cold and blows, physiological misery, vermin and torture. He dares not abandon the psychic carapace into which he then shut himself in order to protect himself. Any approach by the other, even by the woman in love, awakens the memories and terrifies him, for it risks breaking this last protection before the void. No woman can help him, for none can take the place of those he watched die.
Intimate solitude is complex. Both shame and pride in his body, and in what it reveals of his history, take part in it. The body can be hidden or exposed, staged or set in action, but it escapes all control, in its movements of disturbance, submission, fear, abandonment, and in the images it sends back from the subject to the other. The signs it displays draw the astonished gaze and the questions of sympathy or hostility, of solidarity or distrust, to which one must, or would have to, respond. That the former deportee cannot do otherwise than take refuge in silence (“Silence of survival, rustling with the appetite for life,” Semprún wrote), out of a need to find himself within himself, out of fear of others or of pouring onto the first interlocutor he finds a deluge of words — through all this the other is held at a distance. In the camp, he could strive to believe that his body of pain was not his own, did not represent him. He can do so no longer. The display of sex awakens the most unbearable images, those of death, in the disrespectful exposure of naked bodies. Its enactment, in the present, in the sexual act, reactivates the violence suffered in his body and the identification with the executioner. The body and sex constitute a fragile, dangerous and yet necessary footbridge over the chasm that separates past and present, life and death.
His present life cannot rival the intensity of that of the camp, from which, paradoxically, he neither wishes nor dares to detach himself, which he fears to lose, for he would risk finding himself amputated of the most important part of his being. It is difficult to make this ambivalent and alienated relationship to the past and its consequences evolve. To emerge from it, the will is not enough, nor always the hope that recovered freedom will eventually bring about a new birth or a resurrection. Boris Pahor strives to convince himself that, should that moment arrive, there would be no responsibility involved, offloading it onto time, nature or others who will have willed it. Nevertheless, these others can help him, by seeking to draw near to his experience but without the illusion of understanding it, still less of sharing it, without seeking either to rival it, without being passive — accepting everything from him and from his discourse — and renouncing the right to exist before him as a substantial interlocutor.
Who are they now?
“It is a naïveté, an absurdity and a historical error to think that a system as base as National Socialism sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, makes them resemble itself.” Primo Levi firmly opposes this idea, which some assert insistently. This idea does harm, for it reinforces the survivors’ potential guilt: not only do they live while so many of their companions and loved ones are dead, but they would also fail to live up to what the world expects of them — heroes or witnesses of Evil. What can be the motives of those who demand of them such a status and such a comportment? To absolve themselves of not having suffered as they did, of not having been deported? To find it unbearable that no value, no human quality, should counterbalance — failing the ability to erase it — the horror of barbarism, which would otherwise risk representing, alone, the extreme limits to which man can go? But among the deportees existed the entire range of the human, with its qualities and its faults. Rare qualities as much as chance helped some to survive. The experience of the camp inevitably transformed them, without necessarily altering the fundamental traits of their personality. Some quickly forget the camp, the sufferings but also the vital help they received there. It is absurd and indecent to accuse them of not being perfect after the ordeal they underwent, to set them thus apart from all others. They are neither permanent victims — nor are their descendants — nor saints obliged to correspond to what others would wish them to be.
The remarkable qualities they displayed in the camp, and in particular the acuity of their gaze upon others — an error of appraisal could be fatal — turn against them in normal life, for this same gaze that they cast upon their fellow citizens is of a devastating lucidity about their faults. The despair that ensues cannot for long be counterbalanced by deliberate illusion nor by the struggle for a better world, as Jean Améry or Primo Levi pursued them until they reached their limits. The black and bitter humor of Borowski did not protect him for long either. Others strove to accept the world as it is, with a resigned wisdom that does not preclude struggle, blended into the anonymous mass, took up their creative activity again or committed themselves to it, showed that there are multiple ways of existing in the imperfect world after barbarism.
Where is the true life, the reality? Is it in the camp, still and always, or in what came after liberation? Did the former deportee dream the camp, did he massively repress it or, on the contrary, does he let it keep such a place in his life that it excludes all other interest, all other reality, blurring all the more the differences between dream and reality? Frozen time allows the indissoluble bond between the camp and him to endure, both of them indestructible — he for having survived, the camp as proof of what he survived. If the camp’s hold on him were to loosen, how could he avoid recognizing himself as mortal, he who came so close and so lastingly to death? There would then reactivate within him the memory of the most barbarous ways men have had of putting other men to death.
During a visit to Buchenwald, Jorge Semprún finds that time has not passed and that the camp does not belong to memory, that it remains reality, continuing to occupy the present entirely. The absence of a temporality shared with other men weakens the feeling of his substance as a being and of his reintegration among them. It is no longer possible to distinguish the dream from waking consciousness. The frightful images are the same and have the same force, whether the eyelids are open or closed. In the camp, reality was so strong and frightening that he had to transmute it into a dream, not to flee it but to integrate it into his psyche and to dispossess the SS of it. Outside the camp, it appears to him insubstantial, artificial, and he pretends to live in it. Semprún, unlike most other writers, has as his point of reference neither this reality nor the past, but solely the happiness of being alive, in the immediate present, beyond all aim, all justification, all will. Yakov Gabbay, one of the very rare survivors of the Sonderkommandos — the deportees who were forced to work in the gas chambers — refuses to think of the past, even if he accepts that memories come to him. He wants to have with them only a de-subjectivized relationship: “it is so, it was so.” The value of the present, the only time in which he henceforth wishes to live, derives only from the calm he finds there, differing in this from Semprún’s tumultuous and wonderstruck happiness. He strives too to convince himself that he has nothing to reproach himself with.
The relationship to time is overturned. The traumatic event has taken the place of birth, has become origin, and the former deportee remains shut within it, as he may be within a frozen present. Death is no longer the horizon of life. To have survived, to be not only a survivor but one resurrected, gives the feeling of being indestructible, immortal, the certainty that the death so many times eluded will come no more, has wearied, has been definitively vanquished. Thus is constituted another radical difference from others. To reduce it, he must recover the feeling of his common mortality. To give a meaning, a reason to death so that it does not remain the senseless, unforeseeable, inhuman event, man can lean on his belief (“God willed it, he has his reasons”), on fate (“which hounds me, hounds us”), can seek someone responsible (a jealous person’s death-wishes) or lean on a phantasmatic logic such as the one whereby the quantity of death available to humanity is limited and every death lightens the risk for the one who outlives another’s.
The force of the past is such that it occupies the present, imposing on it its ways of thinking and reacting through a tight network of correspondences of images, fears, emotions, which resurface at the slightest occasion. Boris Pahor, returning to the camp, has the feeling that the tourists who visit it and pass him there still see him covered in the striped jacket, as if he were still imprisoned there with all his companions, the living and the dead. His work as a writer helped him, nonetheless, to free himself from this alienation. Other ruses have been used, in particular leaning on a memory predating deportation and strong enough, with the aid of idealization, to be placed in a position to be unique and able to rival the trauma as origin. But those who, like Tadeusz Borowski, idealize the world itself in a willful manner risk no longer living anywhere but in the dream.
The relationship to memory is ambivalent. The memories of the camp, when the former deportee consents to look at them, can blur his present markers, and it is then major distress or hatred that resume all their power. As radical as the rupture is between the time of the camp and the present, he remembers everything, including his own acts, which remain enigmatic to him. He can relegate them to the unique specificity of the camp and dissolve them there, or assume the continuity within himself between the man he then was and the man he is today.
Forgetting is desired and at the same time feared, as difficult to bring about as to accept, for the risk exists that the most important part of his life be erased, along with the treasure of knowledge, so precious to transmit, that he accumulated there at the price of so much suffering. But the memories of the camp and the presence of death contaminate those of the moments of happiness that preceded it. He must therefore, paradoxically, strive to forget them in order to preserve them, following the same logic that, in the camp, drove him to play dead in an attempt to escape death. The negative consequence of this is that he can no longer lean on them, nor on the images and words that accompany them. But how to give up separating the happy memories from those of the camp? The will alone is not enough; a slow and grueling psychic labor is necessary, in writing or in dialogue with the other who is available and able to bear it, to support and accompany him, to consent to be caught up in it and transformed by it. For the hope of overcoming the trauma is as high as the distress is deep and the violence terrible: nothing in it can be mediocre.
Memories make it possible to confront the present with the past, to confirm that the latter did indeed take place, for the persistent pain and the aftereffects, physical and psychic, are not sufficient proof of it, so strong are the incredible and the unthinkable that the camp continues to bear. The difficulty of believing that it really existed averts the troubling feeling of double belonging to those extremes of society and of human experience that are the camp and daily life, as well as the pain of being torn between them. Rare are those who, like Boris Pahor, dare to confront it and to recognize that they lived it, that they survived it, without being able to say whether they are living beings or ghosts, whether they belong to life or to death. Memories do not make it possible to answer this crucial question; they simply help to trace a fragile boundary between past and present, to reassure, so that fear and discouragement do not halt the questioning.
The survivor can neither erase nor disown the past, to which he owes so much, any more than he can amputate himself of that time which occupied in his life a place like no other. He fears too, were he to yield to these temptations, that he would provoke the terrible revenge of the disappeared comrades and loved ones, or of death itself, which he has tamed and which would feel disowned, betrayed. For death takes part in his substance as a being; he must not forget it but put it to good use. The void this expulsion would create within him may also frighten him. He finds himself confronted, once again, with the same contradiction: only death will deliver him from death, but he will then no longer be able to enjoy his recovered life, save, perhaps, in that brief mythical instant that would separate it from death. The achievement would be to be able to distinguish the two deaths: the unique one of the camp and the banal one, to which he aspires, coming from outside himself, belonging to all, which he could fear when thinking of his small miseries, of his banal illnesses well known to doctors, and which would free him from the Death that dwells within him. Through the neutral life he obstinately strives to live and which he describes with cruel humor in his books, it is such a death that Kertész seeks, in vain.
Emerging from the experience of the camps
Overcoming the traumatic experience requires that a gaze be cast, without discrimination, upon the major elements that composed it and in particular upon those that were and remain the most painful, the most troubling. A selective memory, which contributes to the writing of an individual, familial and collective legend, alienates one to the past. This is why reflection on the gray zone, on which Primo Levi insisted, is important. The return of banal cares, of emotion, of naïve wonderments — as before a flower on a roadside bank — bears witness to the setting in motion of the process of rehumanization. But this process cannot circumvent the confrontation with one of the essential elements of the camp: death. To differentiate physical death, psychic death, dehumanization and Death, and to perceive the links they have woven among themselves, appears as a necessary stage. It is in a subsequent phase that he will be able to reappropriate his relationship — not passive, not suffered — to death. Failing this, his only definition would be to be the one who did not die in the camp — a reductive and alienating definition, since it situates itself solely in relation to the project of the Nazis, and to a single one of their aims: to kill. The next step is the one where he recognizes his belonging to society, like any fellow citizen, and this passes through the recognition that he shares, with at least one of them, a few significant traits. Jorge Semprún does this when he sees and recognizes himself in the gaze of the doctor who leans over him when, newly freed, he has just fallen from the suburban train carrying him home. This gaze plays its positive and non-dangerous part, for it is professional and neutral but not indifferent, neither fascinated, nor horrified as was that of the camp’s liberators, nor empty as that of his companions, nor walled-off and blind as that of the SS, nor amorous and curious as that of the woman too soon desiring and desired: “I saw a man, dressed in a white coat, who was observing me attentively. It was at that precise instant that I had begun to exist. That I had begun again to know that it was my own gaze contemplating the world… The world and my gaze faced each other, they coexisted.”4
After the gaze, it will be the turn of hearing, of memory, of thought to come back to life. This mutual recognition counterbalances one of the worst terrors lived in the camp: that of having become unrecognizable to others, including those closest.
True liberation from the camp can then come about. Jorge Semprún gives precious and precise indications of what bears witness to it. “Was I sufficiently freed of myself?… It was then that I heard the manifold murmur of the birdsong. They had returned to the Ettersberg.” The experience of the camp becomes for him, in the aftermath, an ordeal-by-trial victoriously crossed, a successful initiatory passage. By giving it this meaning, in a gesture of absolute sovereignty, he dispossesses the Nazis of their project, of the meaning and the names they gave to the multiple places, mechanisms and moments of its implementation. The de-alienation from the camp is associated with the fall of the persona that had been constructed there, at the end of his adolescence. The return of life goes hand in hand with the return to life: if, back at the camp, he hears the birds there, it is because they have returned but also because he is once again available to hear them.
A few of the books on which this text draws: Jean Améry, Par-delà le crime et le châtiment – Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (At the Mind’s Limits), Actes Sud 2005. Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race), Gallimard, Folio, 1978. Tadeusz Borowski, Le Monde de pierre (The World of Stone), Christian Bourgois 1992. Varlam Shalamov, Récits de la Kolyma, La Nuit (Kolyma Tales), Livre de poche, 1990. Charlotte Delbo, Une Connaissance inutile (Useless Knowledge), Minuit 1970; Mesure de nos jours (The Measure of Our Days), Minuit, 1971. Vassili Grossman, Tout passe (Everything Flows), Julliard/L’âge d’homme, 1984. Imre Kertész, Kaddish pour l’enfant qui ne naîtra pas (Kaddish for an Unborn Child), Actes Sud, 1995. Primo Levi, Si c’est un homme (If This Is a Man), Pocket 1968; Les Naufragés et les rescapés. Quarante ans après Auschwitz (The Drowned and the Saved), Gallimard, 1989. Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire. Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme, Maurice Nadeau 1998. Boris Pahor, Pèlerin parmi les ombres (Pilgrim Among the Shadows), La Table Ronde 1996; Printemps difficile (A Difficult Spring), Phébus 1995. Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Literature or Life), Gallimard 1996.
Notes
Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman, Daniel Oppenheim. Héritiers de l’exil de la Shoah. Eres, 2006.↩︎
Boris Pahor, Printemps difficile, Phébus 1995, p. 78: “It was untenable to be at once a stranger to the world of the dead and a stranger to the world of the living.”↩︎
Nicolas Miletitch, in Varlam Shalamov, Récits de la Kolyma. La Nuit. Livre de poche 1990, p. 13.↩︎
Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie, Gallimard, 1996, p. 279.↩︎