The malign universe of Auschwitz

Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp for political prisoners, was built near Munich in March 1933, only two months after Hitler took power.  In 1942 the Nazis built the first extermination camps, with poison gas and crematoria, in occupied Poland.  In these camps millions of prisoners were enslaved, starved, raped, tortured and murdered.  Survivors of the prison camps have testified to their suffering in poignant memoirs that enabled the living to pay their debt to the dead.  The Hungarian Jew Eli Wiesel (1928-2016) and the Italian Jew Primo Levi (1919-87) bore witness to their horrific experiences and seared readers’ memories with descriptions of precisely what they had endured.

Primo Michele Levii (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987)

The style of Wiesel’s Night (1958) is simple, clear and direct, with no speculation, analysis or literary allusions.  The chronological narrative portrays the inexorable stages of his doom.  It begins in 1943 in the peaceful Hungarian town of Sighet, when the local Jews refuse to believe an eye-witness’ warning that the Nazis want to exterminate them.  But ominous events in March 1944 confirm this.  As the Fascists take power in Budapest, the new rulers arrest Jewish leaders, confine Jews to their houses, forbid Jews to keep jewels, make Jews wear yellow stars and restrict Jews to the ghetto.

The image in the title reappears in the book at least 25 times as night, nightmare and darkness—along with flames from the crematoria that eclipse the dawn and the daylight.  “Night” means spiritual darkness and the nights mark his progress to death: “The last night in Buna [a large sub-camp].  Yet another last night.  The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna.  How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one ‘last night’ to another?”  With the extinction of light, Eli feels stifled by the active presence of death.

Eli’s premonition of evil is confirmed by the sudden deportation order and the end of the ghetto.  The Jewish Council of leaders organises this disaster, and helps the Gestapo to efficiently round up the Jews.  Eli doesn’t explore a contentious issue: was the Council trying to save Jewish lives or merely their own?  Despite the danger, Eli’s father refuses the offer from their gentile servant to provide a safe refuge in her rural village.  The logical order of death followed by hell is reversed: this is hell on earth, followed by death.  The prisoners even recite kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as if they were no longer living.

On the train to Auschwitz, the old men are forced to defecate in the corner of the train.  The young people, desperate for the last bit of pleasure and “free from all social constraint, gave way openly to instinct, taking advantage of the darkness to copulate in our midst”.  In Auschwitz the Jews learn that it’s better to be shot or hanged than to face death in the camps.  The notorious Dr. Mengele presides over a parody of the Last Judgment: a Darwinian “selection” that determines temporary life or immediate death.  The prisoners and guards no longer belong to the same species.  Brutalised and reduced to sub-humans, the Jews are stripped naked, shaved on head and body, showered, disinfected and tattooed.  The high numbers on their arms indicate the late arrivals who don’t know how to protect themselves.  One prisoner is only able to keep living by believing that his wife and children, separated from him on arrival, are still alive.  When Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen thought her parents and sister were dead (though her father survived), she lost the will to live.

Some of the faithful Jews still believe that a benevolent God will save them and fast to hasten the coming of the Messiah.  The older men tell Eli, “You must never lose faith, even when the sword hangs over your  head.  This is the teaching of our sages.”  But the 15-year-old Eli, resentful and with lost illusions, bitterly thanks God for creating in “His infinite and wonderful universe” the Polish mud that ruins his shoes.  He “did not deny God’s existence, but doubted His absolute justice”.

Eli’s transfer to the Buna camp provides the same torments.  The apparently hygienic showers are given to disinfect the new arrivals and to lure the naked victims to the modern Promised Land: the gas chambers.  The homosexual guards sodomise the children.  A Kapo (Jewish guard) forces Eli to give up his own bread ration to pay a dentist who removes his precious gold crown with a rusty spoon.  American planes arouse false hopes by bombing the camp, though the prisoners are also the targets.

As the Russians advance from the east, the Nazis evacuate the camp, just as they had  evacuated the ghetto in Sighet.  In January 1945 conditions on this train, en route to Buchenwald near Weimar, are even worse than in the camp.  Eli manages to revive his fatally-ill father, the last contact with his idyllic childhood.  But when Eli falls asleep, his apparently dead father, stinking of dysentery, is carried—perhaps still breathing—to the cemetery.

On April 11,1945, after Eli’s year in the camps, the Jewish “resistance movement decided to act.  Armed men suddenly rose up everywhere. . . . The battle did not last long.  Toward noon everything was quiet again.  The SS had fled and the resistance had taken charge of the running of the camp.”  Some of the young men went to Weimar to sleep with girls.  Despite starvation and disease they still had their sexual urge and, like the copulating couples on the train, they wanted to cling to life again.  By some miracle, and a lot of luck in several selections, Eli managed to survive to write this book.

Night has two main themes. First is his conflict between selfishness and self-sacrifice, between caring for his father and helping himself in order to live.  Eli is horrified when he sees a son abandoning his sick father “to free himself from an encumbrance which could lessen his own chances of survival”.  Yet when Eli is separated from his father during a bombing raid, he thought, like the selfish son, “ ‘Don’t let me find him!  If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself.’  Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever.”  Eli finally finds and protects his father, who dies before he has to make that fatal choice.

The second crucial theme in this memoir, the struggle between good and evil, recalls the question asked by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: how can you reconcile the suffering of a child with the idea of a kindly God?  Eli is overwhelmed by watching the execution of a single clearly defined prisoner, even though “thousands who had died daily at Auschwitz and at Birkenau in the crematory ovens no longer troubled [him].”  In a crucial scene he sees a child, convicted of hiding arms, hanging from the gallows but too light to choke, still moving and still alive.  A prisoner asks, “Where is God now?”  and answers his own question: “He is hanging here on the gallows.”

In a blasphemous prayer in biblical language, Eli furiously protests about God’s cruel treatment of His Chosen People: “Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory?  Praised by Thy Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine altar.”

Finally, he can no longer accept the comforting belief that men cannot understand a God who works in mysterious ways.  Eli then becomes the prosecutor, not the defendant, and declares, “I was the accuser.  God the accused.  My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God.  Without love or mercy.”  He has to agree with another prisoner, who replaces the devil with the deity and bitterly asserts, “I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else.  He’s the only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”

The study of the Talmud and wisdom of the sages that had once sustained Eli in Sighet now seem futile and meaningless.  The Jews were innocent, led a pious life and worshipped God.  But if an all-powerful God exists, then He wanted Auschwitz to happen and must be malevolent. In the Christian New Testament, the Jewish convert Paul writes: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord”  (Romans 12:19).  The extermination camps are even worse than the most severe punishments in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament: the expulsion from Eden, Noah’s flood, the destruction of Sodom, the Babylonian exile and Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents.  It’s as if the Angel of the Lord had not stopped his hand and allowed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  Eli is forced to conclude, as Nietzsche had prophesied in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “God is dead.  Anything is possible.”

The adolescent Eli Wiesel came with his father from a provincial town in Hungary.  The adult Primo Levi was a professional chemist from Turin who’d been captured in the mountains when fighting for the anti-fascist Resistance.  Both Wiesel and Levi were prisoners in Auschwitz from January 1944 until the camp was liberated by the Russians a year later.  Both describe the same hellish conditions, use the recurrent image of night and explain how they survived by chance.  Both deny God and emphasize the need to bear witness.  Both published their memoirs, in translations from French and from Italian, in 1958.

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016)

Levi’s Preface to Survival in Auschwitz ironically states: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, when the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals” [my italics]. Levi had not committed a crime, but he was punished as a Jew and sent on a journey to nothingness.  He performs a “dance of death” like skeletons in a medieval allegory, and could say with Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”  Levi repeats “night” a dozen times: “the lorry sped into the night with full speed” and “the night swallowed them up.”  He also contrasts black and bright: “it is dark by now, but the camp is brightly lit by headlamps and reflectors” to ensure obedience and prevent escape.

Levi’s scientific style is more complex than Wiesel’s.  In an elaborate simile he uses the scientific word for the common wasp, “as the ichneumon paralyses the great hairy caterpillar.”  He’s familiar with the glass instruments in the laboratory and with “the precision balance, a Heraeus oven, a Höppler thermostat.”  In a contorted sentence, he writes that the watery soup confers “on all physiognomies a likeness of deformation, and whose elimination imposes an enervating toil on our kidneys.”  (In other words, it makes you piss.)  He describes the Ulysses Canto in Dante’s Inferno, quotes Dante’s comforting “light that kindles and grows beneath the moon,” but finds it quite impossible, as Virgil urges, “to follow after knowledge and excellence”.

The Buna sub-camp is supposed to manufacture synthetic rubber but never makes anything.  The Lager is a perpetual Babel of shouts in many languages—mainly Yiddish, Polish and Hungarian—with orders screamed in German that most men don’t understand but must obey.  The prisoners are stripped of their old identity and human dignity, and confined to two-man bunks only two-feet wide, which prepare them for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave.

Levi explains the psychology of hunger.  Though it would be better to save part of their meagre bread ration for later, the living specimens of starvation must devour their bread all at once: “the nervous tension needed to preserve the bread is harmful and debilitating”; “the sooner bread is eaten, the more nutritious it is”; tormenting hunger and bread saved “cannot exist in the same individual”.  Finally, “one’s stomach is the securest safe against thefts and extortions.”  Levi tries to preserve his will to live by “economising on everything, on breath, movements, even thoughts.  It is better to be beaten because one does not normally die of blows, but one does of starvation, and badly.”

The skilled workers—doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians and cooks, as well as young homosexuals and friends of the Kapos—are the elite.  The rest are slaves of the slave-masters, and would “stoop to any baseness [for the] negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain.”  These slaves—helpless, vulnerable and with no real human contact—“must struggle to survive because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.”  All expect to die and very few survive.

The Sephardic Greeks from Salonika (Thessaloniki) oppose this overwhelming isolation, oppression and  betrayal in the camp.  They share their food and fruits of their labor; speaking a Jewish dialect of Spanish, they cooperate, protect each other, and form “the most coherent national nucleus in the Lager and the most civilized.”  Levi doesn’t understand why the word Muselmann (“musclemen”, which in Yiddish also means “Muslim”) is used to describe the opposite of the Greeks: “the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.”  In fact, these emaciated Muselmänner are fatalistic, believe “it is written” and turn their faces to the wall.  They have lost their will to live and passively submit to death.

Too crushed to be afraid, Levi must “toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.”  In a flash of insight Levi realizes that he’s too intellectual and too weak to survive: “I am not made of the stuff of those who resist, I am too civilized, I still think too much, I use myself up at work.”  He indulges himself for a moment by looking up at the clear blue sky, knowing that he’s probably gazing at it for the last time.  It is paradoxical that the Nazis both treat the sick (until the next selection) and kill almost everyone else.

Like Wiesel, Levi denies the existence of a just God.  When a terrified prisoner, whose name means “bold”, escapes the current selection and thanks God that he has not been chosen, Levi becomes furious: “Kuhn does not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again.  If I were God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”

A fortunate accident occurs when a heavy piece of iron cuts deep into Levi’s foot and gets him into the Krankenbau, the infirmary.  After three weeks he recovers and is discharged.  He passes a test and is chosen (a desirable form of selection) to work in the chemistry laboratory, which gives him access to medicine, food, clothing and heating.  He survives, in his manual of Survival in Auschwitz, through the personal friendship of Alberto and the practical help of Lorenzo, who remains a strangely vague figure, both real and symbolic.  He recalls that Lorenzo, “an Italian civilian worker, brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches.  For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.”  Lorenzo sustains him by proving “there still existed a just world outside our own, still pure and whole, a remote possibility of good for which it was worth surviving.”

Just before the Russians liberate the camp, the Jewish underground blows up a crematorium.  As Levi watches his fourteenth hanging (the gas is reserved for the Jews), one of the rebels is publicly and musically executed.  Unlike Wiesel, Levi does not make this a crucial episode: “The trapdoor opened, the body wriggled horribly; the band began playing again and we were once more lined up and filed past the quivering body of the dying man.”

As the Russians advance, the Nazis destroy the Lager before retreating, the old order collapses and the horrors continue: “other starving spectres like ourselves wandered around searching, unshaven, with hollow eyes, greyish skeleton bones in rags.”  Unable to help them, Levi feels like crying and could have cursed them as they hasten to their agonisingly slow deaths.  Though Levi experiences his first taste of (negative) freedom—“no more selections, no work, no blows, no roll-calls, and perhaps, later, the return”—the book ends grimly with the death of his friend.

Like Wiesel, Levi is compelled to “tell the story, to bear witness.”  His memoir both alleviates his survivor’s guilt and provides a cathartic release.  He has a moral obligation to “force himself to save at least some form of civilization. . . .  No one must leave here and not carry to the world, together with the [tattoo] sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings” of what happened to the Jews in Auschwitz.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish both James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.

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