Those who survived deportation and who sought to transmit its experience in their work as writers teach us a great deal, as much about their experience as about the value and the demands of this work. This text draws on the books of a number of them, but presents quotations only from Robert Antelme, Tadeusz Borowski, Boris Pahor, Jorge Semprun.
It is for readers to be worthy of their efforts and to take their own place, in turn, in the chain of transmission.
Writing helps the author to make his relation to the experience he has lived through evolve and to recover an active position. He chooses the words and the sentences that describe it, without betraying or disguising it. He struggles against forgetting and repression, sometimes massive and early, against shame and guilt, hatred and all the feelings he cannot take on. He confronts the fear of misunderstanding with the reader, of disagreement with his fellow deportees, or his parents, with the living and the dead. He fears being unable to say everything and to awaken in himself the buried distresses, fears not being believed if his descriptions should appear excessive, or that their excessive attenuation should betray his dead companions. In the process, he makes choices, between documentary precision and fictional facilitation, between what he brings to the fore and what he leaves aside. Fiction, inevitably present, can serve to mask or flee reality, or contribute to taming it, to making it unfold so as better to help the reader approach it, without confusing it with the document.
Literary quality, moral and historical concern, the care to move beyond traumatic memory, are thus intimately bound together in their texts. They write for the cathartic or testimonial value of their writing, so that their suffering shall not have taken place to no purpose, shall not have been only negative. The reader can follow in them two complementary lines: a setting of history into narrative and sometimes an explanatory or demonstrative intent on the one hand, on the other the proper logic of the text that seeks to impose its own articulations and its own development. There can also be heard in them words, expressions, emotions, and thoughts that were silent in the time of the camp. Recognizing and taking on this gap between life and writing, between past and present, is also what the author expects of writing.
The responsibility of the survivors
The testimony to come is constituted in the camp itself, and requires lucidity and precision of observation as much as of description and narrative: “I do not know whether we will survive, but I would like us to be able one day to call things by their name… For perhaps, of this camp, of this time of deception, we shall have to give the living an account, and we shall have to make ourselves the defenders of the dead.”1 Borowski, like the others, is fully conscious of his responsibility as a witness. He knows that history is written by the victors, that the victory of the Nazis would not prevent the life of the world from continuing, Germany from becoming richer and stronger, and that very soon the origin of its power will be forgotten, along with the camps: “If the Germans win, gigantic highways will rise from the earth and no one will know anything about us. The poets, the lawyers, the philosophers, the priests will cover over our voices. They will create the Beautiful, the Good, and the True.”2
To bear witness is a duty but also a therapeutic effort
To bear witness, one must first have sufficiently understood the reality that was lived, without embellishing it or artificially darkening it, nor minimizing what might tarnish the fine image left or wished for by the dead as by the survivors. The witness is attentive to these temptations that can touch the most honest and scrupulous among them, sometimes without their knowing it. He must be attentive too to the expectations of his contemporaries, and in particular of those born after the events and separated from them by one or two generations. It is not a matter of submitting to the expectations of society and saying what it wants, but of not risking being ignored or rejected: “Were we capable […] of understanding and of making understood our experiences? What we commonly meant by ‘understanding’ coincides with ‘simplifying.’ […] Now, the network of human relations within the Lager was not simple: it was not reducible to the two blocs of victims and persecutors.”3 No witness can address himself to all, except by weakening the efficacy of his testimony. But he addresses himself first to those who were closest, who have disappeared, with whom he continues to dialogue, sometimes to defend himself against the reproaches he believes he still hears in their words. He addresses himself also to his contemporaries, to reproach them for their indifference or their faults, real or supposed, to make those who have only an abstract or partial vision aware of the daily life of the camps, and to youth so that it may prevent the return of barbarism. A Jew, he addresses himself also to other Jews, to give them back confidence in themselves, to counterbalance the interpretations that some of them make of the Shoah as divine punishment, to combat the contemptuous judgments of those who hold them responsible for their misfortune.
The passing — within families or within society — from the children of the dead or of the survivors to their grandchildren increases the risk of forgetting, of error, or of distortion. The children were in direct contact, in the daily life of childhood and adolescence, with their survivor parents, with their physical or psychic aftereffects, their silence or their repetitive, terrifying accounts. The grandchildren, at a greater distance, can more easily receive the testimony or seek it out.
The stakes of testimony are diverse
Gradowski wagers that a reader will come, sooner or later. He writes so that the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens, where he was forced to work, shall not be forgotten. Also so that his comrades of the Sonderkommando shall not be cast back into the hell in which they were, but be received as victims of barbarism, not as its accomplices. The text has a double value: to transmit but also to make felt what was lived. Testimony is resistance to the Nazi project, certain elements of which perpetuate themselves in the ignorance and forgetting of its acts. “However this war may end, we have already won it against you; none of you will remain to bear witness, but even if a few should escape, the world will not believe them,” said the SS.4 But some continue to doubt the possibility of bearing witness, of being heard and understood, of being effective: “Why does the pain of each day translate itself in our dreams so constantly into the ever-repeated scene of the account given and never listened to?”5
Testimony helps to put distance between what was lived and the present, but no more than the passing of time does it suffice. It can just as well shut the survivor up still more in his alienation to the camp, to which his being has been reduced, or stimulate the work of reflection on deportation and its aftereffects. But it is impossible to act as if it had never taken place, to forget, to flee, to pretend to be other than the one one was then. Nightmares or the negation of oneself are the price to pay for these vain temptations, as with “those who refuse to go back there or even to speak of it, those who would like to forget without managing to and are tormented by nightmares, and finally those who, on the contrary, have forgotten everything, repressed everything, and have begun to live again starting from zero.”6 But the attempt of some to neutralize the suffering of memory and of testimony, to trivialize or reify them, no doubt began in the camp itself, with the desensitization and the separation of their body from their being. Memory thus became encysted within them, as if it did not belong to them, as if they were only the depositories of this object they refuse to mobilize: “For them, suffering was an experience but one devoid of meaning and of lesson, […] memory is a bit like a foreign body […] For the others, to remember is a duty […], for they have understood that their experience had a meaning.”7
Ambiguity of the desire to transmit and contradictory effects of transmission
Transmission brings a knowledge for which the deportee had to pay dearly, and he can feel dispossessed of it. He fears too that collective memory, even official memory, may cover over or fix his personal memory and that of his companions: “In the silence of that cinema hall […] those images of my intimacy [those of the liberation of the camp] became foreign to me, in objectifying themselves on the screen. They thus escaped the procedures of memorization and of censorship that were personal to me.”8 The collective discourse to which he contributes certainly has the merit of giving everyone the minimal knowledge of the camps and of preserving the necessary memory against forgetting and deformation, but it shows as completed the questioning, equally necessary, that must remain evolving and alive. It affirms as truth what should remain a complex opacity that each must approach in his own way. The risk appears still greater for images, which have, more than words, a power of seduction that is difficult to escape. “The images […] acquired a dimension of disproportionate reality that my memories themselves did not reach […] On the one hand I saw myself dispossessed; on the other, I saw their reality confirmed: I had not dreamed Buchenwald.”9 Like official, collective memory, images tip onto a single side the balance between certainty and doubt, reality and imagination, necessary to the survivor in order to de-alienate himself from traumatic memory and to appropriate the experience he has lived.
Difficulties of testimony, so ardently desired nonetheless
It is difficult for deportees to free themselves from trauma if they do not have interlocutors available for dialogue and conscious of the irreducible gap that separates them. It is necessary too that these interlocutors not consider them untouchable, which would shut them up still more in their exceptional status and their isolation. The difficulty can also come from the fear of awakening the pain, the overwhelming memories, the guilt and the shame of what was done or not done. But it coexists with the immense happiness of being alive and of evoking, in safety and in peace, the ordeals undergone, the acts of resistance accomplished, the marvelous solidarity.
The discrepancy. The witness knows, or believes he knows, what he wants to transmit, even if his testimony rarely corresponds to his project. But he knows still less what the interlocutor expects, nor how he will react, whether he will show insensitivity or morbid curiosity, will express doubts about the truthfulness of the account or even about the honesty of the survivor, about his behavior in the camp or the reasons for his survival. This mistrust seems to flow from the temptation to unload onto the survivor the guilt, whatever its cause. The discrepancy also comes from the fact that others rely on landmarks, images, criteria of judgment drawn from normal life, and that cannot apply to the exceptional nature of the camp. The former deportee, split between the one he was in the camp and the one he is now, can himself too have difficulty evaluating and understanding his behaviors or his thoughts of that time: “Changing the moral code always costs dearly. […] We are no longer capable of judging our behavior or that of others, which obeyed the code then in force, on the basis of today’s code.”10 He may distrust his fellow citizens because of the cruel discrepancy between the fine society he had imagined in the camp and the one in which he now lives, where egoism is omnipresent when it is not a dictatorship that imposes its law. He then wonders what good there is in bearing witness, and for whom?
Not all speak spontaneously. It is certainly not easy for the survivor to gather and to sort out what he remembers and what he has forgotten, what he saw and what he did not see even when he was present — “I discovered this [the clandestine organization of the deportees in the camp] only by reading the testimonies of others.”11 —, the important and the secondary, what insists and what remains silent, for reasons that remain to be understood. And this even when the camp continues to exist within him as a living presence and not a fixed memory: “I therefore do not know better what I still see than what I have ceased to see. But it is surely the pressure of what no longer appears that makes surge up, dazzling and possessed of life, these few fragments of day and of night.”12 The witness, however close he may have been to the event, was not able to see everything; the veil of blindness played its role as well as the work of repression and reconstruction. He notes it brutally before the documentary images filmed. “I knew with certainty that they came from Buchenwald, […] without having the certainty of having seen them myself. I had seen them, nonetheless. Or rather: I had lived them. It was the difference between the seen and the lived that was troubling.”13
The difficulty of testimony comes also from the very characteristics of what was lived, so radically foreign to everything the deportee, like the others, had known beforehand, without his having had the possibility of finding the adequate words to formulate it, without even those words existing. So it is with the anguish of being outside the world, of the confusion, the solitude, and the absolute powerlessness prior to all society, all social relation, all speech and all culture, those of the archaic times of humanity or of the infant: “All suffered from a continual disturbance that poisoned sleep and that bears no name. […]: the anguish […] of the ‘tohu-bohu,’ of the deserted universe […] from which man is absent.”14 The world was deserted, no longer existed outside the camp that had become the only reality, or else continued in its normality, but the deportee no longer had a place in it.
The difficulty that flows from language itself. The words of everyday life are insufficient, ill-suited to making understood and felt what was lived. “From the very first days, however, it seemed to us impossible to bridge the distance we discovered between the language at our disposal and this experience that […] we were still in the midst of pursuing in our bodies,” writes Robert Antelme.15 Every survivor notes it before his loved ones and his friends, every writer before the blank page. How to make known and understood the emotions, the sensations, how to transmit, in the aftermath of liberation or years later, these major elements without common measure with what is usually known? Superlatives are of little effect, no more than the accumulation of details, of analogies, of metaphors. But language should be capable of resolving this difficulty: it can say all reality and all thought, however exceptional and unprecedented they may be, even if it means forging new words or giving those that exist an additional meaning. To make up for this insufficiency of testimony, oral or written, Jorge Semprun returned with his grandson to the camp, even though it is now no more than an empty shell whose authentic content (the fear, the smell of the crematorium ovens, the silence of the fled birds) has disappeared.
To no longer have words to express the experience of the camp — or to think one no longer has them —, to note that the common words are powerless to express and transmit it, accentuates the feeling of exclusion. The survivor becomes incomprehensible to others, who can see of him only his appearance or his abstract status, frightening or idealized. The interlocutor may be tempted to trust the aftereffects he perceives in him: his physical aspect, his tics, his inexhaustible need to talk, his silences, his insatiable greed before the slightest food, his coats that protect him from a cold that he alone feels, or his obsessions. But these signs bear witness only to the present; they cannot be automatically related to the camp. The interlocutor can only seek to approach it, relying on his own experiences, on his empathy, his imagination, and his readings, conscious that each word, each expression, each image induces misunderstandings, attentive to the major discrepancy that separates him from the survivor. “One could not resurrect the disquiet of the oral cavity nor the obstinate avidity of the esophagus.”16 When these limits are unbearable to one who does not renounce accomplishing his mission of saying everything and saying the truth, they incite him to despair or to the temptation of an interminable discourse in the hope that it will end up coming closer to the exact description: “One could have spent hours testifying about the daily horror without touching upon the essence of the experience of the camp.”17 He would then engage on a path from which he risks never emerging, continuing to inhabit the camp and to be inhabited by it: “One can say everything about this experience […] even if it means being no longer anything but the language of this death, living at its expense, mortally,” writes Semprun.18
Some have renounced transmitting their experience
Unthinkable, unsayable, and only this impossibility could be said. Others considered that this difficulty, short of the impossible, should on the contrary stimulate the effort to transmit, freed from an ideal of testimony and from the logic of all or nothing: “How could we resign ourselves to not attempting to explain how we had come to that point? […] To ourselves, what we had to say then began to seem unimaginable. […] It was only […] through the imagination that we could hope to say something of it.”19 Since it is unimaginable, one must first strive to imagine it, for description, however faithful it tries to be, fails to transmit. Such is the first necessary stage in the overcoming of this impasse, whether it flows from the limits of the deportee’s capacities to say or from those of others to hear. Fiction makes it possible to escape the paralyzing constraint of saying the totality and the truth of reality. But it can do so only on the condition of remaining as close to it as possible. Failing which, the risk is, by accentuating the share of the imaginary and of images, to widen still further the gap between what the witness seeks to transmit and what the other receives of it. Barbarism is, by definition, exterior to daily reality; the camp is unimaginable for those who were not there but also, in part, differently, for those who were. The difficulty is to make this feeling of unreality perceptible and comprehensible without losing sight of the fact that it gives an account, as closely as possible, of an essential element of reality. Excess of precision and documentary rigor makes it disappear, excess of fiction makes it lose its close relation to reality. This is why the quality of the work of writing is indispensable in order to take both these aspects into account. It limits the risks of incomprehension, of misunderstanding, but also of fascination or rejection on the part of the interlocutor, his temptation to choose between documentary and fiction, reality and imagination: “The stories the fellows tell are all true. But it takes a great deal of artifice to convey a particle of truth […] Here, one would have to believe everything, but truth can be more wearisome to hear than a fabulation.”20 Borowski, commenting on the incredible scene of a football match between deportees taking place a few hundred meters from the crematorium ovens (“Between two corners, three thousand people had been gassed”), makes one aware of the extreme difficulty of living and thinking at the same time these two inseparable aspects of reality. He chooses the path of cruel and despairing humor in order to approach it.
Since not everything can be said, one must choose
Which must be said, to the detriment of other elements. Thus, Lejb Langfus is particularly attentive to the acts of revolt and of resistance, whereas Gradowski, another member of the Sonderkommandos, describes precisely the characteristics of a few SS, whom he draws out of the global abstraction “the SS.” He thus shows a young sadist who orders the deportees to walk on all fours, another who touches the sex of the naked women pushed toward the gas chambers. These descriptions help us to become aware of the daily reality of the camp. Borowski describes, with the greatest precision, the greatest justness, with a bitter humor, the stupefaction and the terror, the egoism and the heroism, correcting the commonplaces about the passivity of the deportees: “An impressive mass of men, with cries and curses […] holding one another desperately by the hand […] I wonder why it was later said at the Lager that the Jews who went to the gas were singing a moving song in Hebrew.”21 The witness transmits also the unindulgent gaze he casts on his experience, on the camp, on himself. Thus, Borowski, like others, does not hesitate to speak of the gray zone, that of the arrangements between those who seek to survive and those who seek to take advantage of them. But he describes it, without contempt or condemnation, without renouncing either his will to understand: “There is no boundary between shadow and light. The shadow creeps up to our feet like the rising tide.”22 Nor does he spare himself, does not give himself the fine role, recognizes that it is hatred that pushes him to write, that he is conscious of it and takes it on: “I would not write out of love for the world. I would write out of hatred, and that is not popular.”23 He likewise questions himself about the place he occupies in his accounts: “In writing that I saw the sky, these men and these women, I tell myself intensely that there is only myself whom I was unable to see.”24 Yet he was a courageous actor, not a cold and exterior observer. But in his texts, as a character, he gives himself no privilege of superiority of gaze and of understanding in relation to the others, and his words and his acts keep the same opacity as that of his comrades. He is a ferryman between them and the reader, with his lucidity and his illusions, his knowledge and his ignorance, his desires and his fears; he belongs to the past and to the present, to his world and to ours.
The relation between barbarism and the human
These writers describe reality but also transmit the affects and the thoughts of their experience. The knot of it is the relation between barbarism and the human. Those between the camp and society, between the SS and the deportee, follow from it. Boris Pahor writes: “The world of the crematoria was only a part of the world of man. Not outside him. Within him.”25; and Robert Antelme: “The SS cannot mutate our species. They are themselves enclosed within the same species and within the same history […] It is because we are men like them that the SS will in the end be powerless before us […] He can kill a man, but he cannot change him into something else.”26 These thoughts bear witness to the dignity and the loftiness of their reflection. The latter is an essential condition of the overcoming of the traumatic alienation to the camp. If there is absolutely no point in common, no bridge between the SS and the deportee apart from the barbarism that the one exercised upon the other, the SS is untouchable and unthinkable, as are his acts and what the deportee underwent. Their reflections express also a call to judge the criminals: the crime against humanity is not exterior to society, its perpetrators are not extraterrestrials whose acts would be absolutely incomprehensible. The deportees were not the victims of a force but of men like themselves. To recognize the inhumanity of the executioners would be to accept their project: certain men do not belong to humanity. It would also be to recognize that the difference between the deportees and the SS flows not from the acts of the one and the other and from the relation that exists between them, but from the place they occupy in the genocide. To free himself from this relation and from the trauma, the deportee needs to have before him the one responsible and to dialogue with him, whether in a trial, in an inner dialogue, in writing. The inhuman that has a face ceases to be inhuman.
This work of testimony and of writing is not without risk for the one who engages in it. It can fix and sterilize his speech by dint of saying it and of controlling it in the excessive scruple lest any modification risk betraying reality. He then remains, or falls back, into the alienation he had hoped to escape, never ceasing to dig and to question, in an endless quest for truth, for the “Why?” and for “Who was I, who am I?” Jorge Semprun expresses it with lucidity: “Only a suicide could sign, could voluntarily put an end to this unfinished work of mourning: interminable. Or else incompletion itself would put an end to it, arbitrarily […] The account that I was tearing from my memory […] was devouring my life […] I would have to take note of my failure. Not because I could not manage to write: because I could not manage to survive the writing, rather.”27 Painful paradox: he writes in order to live afterward, but writing prevents him from living.
The responsibility of the reader
The hesitations and the doubts of these writers are to be respected, but not passively: writing, bearing witness, they expect a dialogue with the reader, on the condition that the latter take into account the exceptional character of the context, that he read first for himself, not out of pity, guilt, voyeurism, or constraint, that he accept being transformed by it, that he transmit to others his reading and the effect he has received from it.
P.S. This text takes up certain elements developed in the last chapter of my book Peut-on guérir de la barbarie. Apprendre des écrivains des camps. (Can One Be Healed of Barbarism? Learning from the Writers of the Camps.) Desclée de Brouwer, 2012.
Notes
Tadeusz Borowski. Le Monde de pierre (The World of Stone). Christian Bourgois 1992, p. 191 (“Bor” hereafter).↩︎
Bor p. 203.↩︎
Primo Levi, Les Naufragés et les Rescapés. Quarante ans après Auschwitz (The Drowned and the Saved. Forty Years After Auschwitz). Gallimard 1989, pp. 36–7 (“PLN” hereafter).↩︎
PLN p. 11.↩︎
Primo Levi. Si c’est un homme (If This Is a Man). Pocket 1968, p. 91 (“PLS” hereafter).↩︎
PLS p. 293.↩︎
PLS p. 293.↩︎
Jorge Semprun, L’écriture ou la vie (Literature or Life), Gallimard, 1996, pp. 260–61 (“SEV” hereafter).↩︎
SEV pp. 260–61.↩︎
PLN pp. 79–80.↩︎
Boris Pahor. Pèlerin parmi les ombres (Pilgrim Among the Shadows). La Table Ronde 1996, p. 183 (“PPO” hereafter).↩︎
Robert Antelme. L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race). Gallimard Folio 1978, p. 275 (“Ant” hereafter).↩︎
SEV, p. 259.↩︎
PLN, p. 84.↩︎
Ant, p. 9.↩︎
PPO, p. 23.↩︎
SEV, p. 119.↩︎
SEV, pp. 25–26.↩︎
Ant, p. 9.↩︎
Ant, p. 302.↩︎
Bor, p. 221.↩︎
Bor, p. 22.↩︎
Bor, p. 355.↩︎
Bor, p. 380.↩︎
Boris Pahor. Printemps difficile (A Difficult Spring). Phébus 1995, p. 170.↩︎
Ant p. 79.↩︎
SEV. p. 254.↩︎