Ominous Parallels (33 page)

The concomitant of the conditions declaring: “Who are you to understand?” and “Who are you to judge?” was the brazen campaign declaring: “Who are you to
perceive?”

“Don’t dare to notice”—the prisoners were ordered—don’t look at what is going on around you, avert your eyes and ears, don’t be conscious. To violate this rule, Bettelheim states, was dangerous. “For example, if an SS man was killing off a prisoner and other prisoners dared to look at what was going on in front of their eyes he would instantly go after them, too.”

To avoid such reprisals the prisoner had to learn to suppress any outward signs of perceptiveness (as he had to suppress any signs of individuality); or else he had really to comply with the rule, to train himself in the art and practice of
non
perception. Sometimes (if he could not help knowing a forbidden fact) “this passive compliance—not to see or not to know—was not enough; in order to survive one had to actively pretend not to observe, not to know what the SS required one not to know.”
²⁰

Some prisoners concluded that the safest course was to become mentally inert, to deliberately suspend their own consciousness and allow their power of observation to atrophy. The greater a prisoner’s intelligence, they felt, the more he grasped or knew, the greater was the threat to his survival. To these men the inversion was complete: in the outside world, perception was a necessity of life; in the camps the two were antonyms. But nonperception did not work, either: to the extent that prisoners succeeded in stifling their power of awareness, they were helpless to protect themselves even from avoidable danger, and they did not last long.

Not infrequently a guard who had forbidden a prisoner to notice a certain action would, a few minutes later, call the same prisoner’s attention to the action and even stress it. “This was no contradiction,” Bettelheim explains, “it was simply an impressive lesson that said: you may notice only what we wish you to notice, but you invite death if you notice things on your own volition.”

The prisoner was expected to give up everything; he was to give up every voluntary trait and function, from thought and values down to the movement of his eyes and the tilt of his head. “But,” remarks Bettelheim, “if one gives up observing, reacting, and taking action, one gives up living one’s own life. And this is exactly what the SS wanted to happen.”
²¹

Most of the guards did not know it, but the same type of cause was producing the same type of effect in them, also. The young SS man may have imagined that he was merely doing a job or earning a promotion, but, in fact, he was no longer living his own life, either.

The guards were well-clothed, well-fed, and ideologically trained. But they, too, were being processed and shaped. The prisoner was learning to submit to absolute power. The guard (or administrator) was learning to wield it, with everything this requires, and destroys, in the wielder.

With every causeless punishment he inflicted, whether in response to an order or on his own initiative, the young guard was negating the idea of man as a sovereign, rights-possessing entity; he was negating it not only in the prisoner’s mind, but in his own. With every unthinkable atrocity he committed, the guard was negating his former sense of morality; he was helping to make unreal in his own eyes his pre-camp life, including such non-Nazi values as he had once pursued. With every insane rule and switching contradiction he enforced or invented, the guard was schooling himself in senselessness; he was learning to make the negation of logic into a mental habit, which soon became second nature to him. (The guard experienced all these negations from the receiving end, also: there was no form of punishment or evil or wanton caprice that his superiors did not inflict on
him
, whenever they chose.)

The guards’ defiance of all sense created in them a profound feeling of instability and helplessness and, as a result, a profound feeling of dependence on their superiors. Thus obedience in the camps became a self-reinforcing trait: it was gradually stripping the SS of their capacity to judge or to protest. Obedience was turning the young Nazis into monsters, monsters of obedience. According to Bettelheim, the higher a man stood in the hierarchy, the more fully he embodied this state. Bettelheim gives the example of Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, who

so laid aside his personal existence that he ended a mere executor of official demands. While his physical death came later, he became a living corpse from the time he assumed command of Auschwitz.... [H]e had to divest himself so entirely of self respect and self love, of feeling and personality, that for all practical purposes he was little more than a machine functioning only as his superiors flicked the buttons of command.
²²

The power-lusters of the death factories did not pursue their quest with impunity. The opponents of man’s rights, trampling on the rights of others, were underscoring their own rightlessness. The crusaders against the individual, crushing the “self respect and self love” of their enemies, were losing their own in the process. The authors and rulers of a brain-wrecking dimension, learning to accept and adapt to it, were making themselves brainless.

No one, neither prisoners nor guards, could stand it or even fully believe it.

The prisoners could not believe a world in which the whim of the SS set all the terms of human existence, replacing reality as the basic absolute and frame of reference. They could not believe a world which seemed, in Miss Arendt’s words, “to give permanence to the process of dying itself,” as if “some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death....” They had to struggle even to take in the kind of events they witnessed or heard about, such as major surgery being performed on prisoners by trained doctors, “without the slightest reason,” a survivor writes, and without anesthesia; or, as another reports, an inmate being thrown for punishment into “a large kettle of boiling water, intended for preparing coffee for the camp. The [victim] was scalded to death, but the coffee was prepared from the water all the same”; or youngsters being picked out at random, “seized by their feet and dashed against tree trunks”; or flames “leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. [The Nazis] were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes.... Was I awake? I could not believe it.”

“It seemed to me, I’m in another world.... It was so unbelievable that many of the prisoners had hallucinations ...” (survivor of Auschwitz). “I lived as in a dream, waiting for someone to awaken me” (survivor of Auschwitz). “This can’t be true; such things just don’t happen” (prisoners at Buchenwald, according to Bettelheim).
²³

Aside from the actual murders, this was the most lethal feature of the camps: that most prisoners could not accept the reality of what they saw, they could not reconcile the horror with life as they had once known it, and yet they could not deny the evidence of their senses. To such men, the camps lost all connection to life on earth and acquired a kind of metaphysical aura, the aura of being not human institutions in Europe, but “another world,” an impossible world, like a second, supernatural dimension of existence inconceivable in itself yet wiping out the first. The concentration camp seemed to its inmates to be a dimension which is at the same time a foolish nightmare and true reality; a dimension which cannot be, yet cannot be escaped; a dimension which
is not
, but which also, terrifyingly,
is
. It was a world of A
and non-A
.

By the nature of what went on behind the barbed-wire fences, the concentration camps to most inmates represented in essence, a universe which violates the basic law of exis tence, the Law of Identity.

Most prisoners could have coped somehow with privation or with pain, or even (up to a point) with purposeful torture in a knowable world. They were helpless to deal with
metaphysical disorientation.
They could not cope with the eerie feeling that the solid objects and facts of the past have vanished; that there is no difference any longer between truth and raving; that the universe itself, the realm and sum of that which is, has gone crazy. The concomitant of such a feeling is a state of paralysis.

Some prisoners were able to hold on to their knowledge of reality even during the camp experience. They were able to defeat the eerie “other world” around them by clinging to some kind of consistent convictions of their own, on the implicit premise that, the camps to the contrary notwithstanding, things
are
what they are. Many prisoners, however, had no lead to explain any part of what they saw, and they succumbed to the metaphysical pressure.

The most widely known of the latter cases are the columns of prisoners who marched to certain death with no attempt to put up a fight, despite the fact that they vastly outnumbered the guards. This phenomenon, often taken as a sign of cowardice, has nothing to do with the concepts of courage or cowardice, which are inapplicable in this context. These prisoners did know the fate in store for them—they had heard about it from others, or they saw the smoke coming from the crematoria, or they smelled the burning flesh—but most of them could not believe or deal with a universe where such a fate, on such a scale and without any reason, was possible. The result was inertia, vagueness, mental drifting, and obedience. (Some undoubtedly were not disoriented, but chose passivity deliberately, as a form of suicide.)

What disarmed the death-marchers was the converse of the Big Lie: the Incredible Truth,
²⁴
which cannot be accepted and which acts to annul the victim’s grasp of reality as such.

The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; death carried out not as any kind of exception, not as an act of purposeful vengeance or hatred, but as casual, smiling, even homey routine, often against a background of colorful flower beds and to the accompaniment of lilting operetta music. It was to be death as a confirmation of all that had preceded it, death as a last demonstration of absolute power and absolute unreason, death as the final triumph of Nazism over man and over the human spirit.

But the killers, too, were human, at least biologically, and even with all their training could hardly stomach such a triumph. Most could not face what they were doing and tried not to know whatever they did not have to know. Like the prisoners, the SS, too, ended up in effect practicing the art of “not noticing.” The prisoner’s “noticing” was to be knocked out of him by terror; for itself the SS found another method: drink.

Most of the guards were drunk so often that sobriety became noteworthy: “In his report of a mass execution by the SS,” Miss Arendt writes, “a [Nazi] eyewitness gives high praise to this troop which had been so ‘idealistic’ that it was able to bear ‘the entire extermination without the help of liquor.”
²⁵

The partisans of Adolf Hitler were forbidding their enemies to perceive reality, and were struggling to induce a similar nullity within their own skulls. The opponents of consciousness were fighting to extinguish it in their victims and in themselves.

It was the final victory of a bleary, vacant, mindless stare—and of the profession which had unleashed it on a civilized world.

The concentration camps were a major factor fueling the Nazis’ nationwide reign of terror, a reign which in some form has proved indispensable to every dictatorship in history. All details of camp life were kept hidden from the Germans by strict government edict; but the existence of the camps, together with the threat they represented to anyone guilty of disobedience, was noisily publicized.

As a total phenomenon, however, the camps transcend this explanation; they transcend economic issues, political calculation, historical precedent, and
any
“practical” need or concern, including even the elementary requirements of the regime’s own survival, a fact eloquently illustrated by the actions of the camp leadership during the last part of the war. Confronted by an ominous military situation, these men commandeered desperately needed rolling stock to transport camp victims, built huge extermination plants despite an acute shortage of construction materials, and undermined critical armament projects by arresting and deporting the workers en masse. “In the eyes of a strictly utilitarian [i.e., practical] world,” remarks Hannah Arendt, “the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality.”
²⁶

There is only one fundamental explanation of the concentration camps.

The camps
are
“experiments” in power; but they are experiments of a unique kind, with a specific inspiration and method, and with specific findings, which have yet to be fully identified. The inspiration is implicit in the nature and practices of camp life itself.