One Generation After (6 page)

Some witnesses answer no. They value their anger and cling to it. It constitutes their link with a world gone by. In their rage, they spare neither the living nor the dead. To better illustrate the evil which dominated all levels of the “concentrationary” kingdom, they challenge even the victims by reproaching them for their docility. That evil had an absolute coefficient is beyond doubt. At Auschwitz one breathed contempt and indignity: a crust of bread was worth more than divine promises, a bowl of soup transformed a sensitive human being into a wild animal.
Principles, disciplines and feelings only feebly resisted the implacable laws of Majdanek.

A killer, for his amusement, simulated the execution of a Jew; he knocked him unconscious and fired a shot into the air. Opening his eyes, the Jew saw his killer bent over him, sneering: “You thought you could escape us by dying? Even in the other world we are the masters!”

Anecdote which contains a part of truth: in dealing with the victims, in an effort to break their morale before annihilating them, the executioners assumed the role of God. They alone could, by decree, proclaim the limits of good and evil. Their idiosyncrasies were law and so were their whims. They were above morality, above truth.

Prisoners of such a system, many deportees chose the easy path of abdication. How is one to judge them? I do not. I cannot condemn anyone who failed to withstand trials and temptations. Guilty or not, the ghetto police, the
kapos
, may plead extenuating circumstances. They arouse pity more than contempt. The weak, the cowardly, all those who sold their soul to live another day, another anxious night, I prefer to include them in the category of victims. More than the others, they need forgiveness. More and in other ways than their companions, they deserve compassion and charity. Their guilt reflects on their tormentors.

Still, I sometimes read books presented as evidence for the prosecution. Their authors are harsh, their judgments devoid of compassion. Whether their words hurt or shock matters little: they will be heard. Of necessity fragmentary, they do not reflect the whole but are part of it. In fact, this can serve as a general rule: every witness expresses only his own truth, in his own
name. To convey the truth of the holocaust in its totality, it is not enough to have listened to the survivors, one must find a way to add the silence left behind by millions of unknowns. That silence can have no interpreter. One cannot conceive of the holocaust except as a mystery, begotten by the dead.

We question today, and will continue to wonder for a long time, how such crimes and horrors could have been committed. We shall never know. Or why one people chose murder and another martyrdom. We shall never know why. All questions pertaining to Auschwitz lead to anguish. Whether or not the death of one million children has meaning, either way man is negated and condemned. Auschwitz defies the novelist’s language, the historian’s analysis, the vision of the prophet. Survivors and witnesses have done their best to describe their experiences, yet their writings have perhaps no substantial relationship with what they have seen and lived through. They have written because they could not do otherwise: after all, one needed to lift the tombstone, however slightly, and grope one’s way out of the night. By speaking out, they have forced us to see that the mystery endures. Which, if it means anything, means defeat. In its presence, words ring hollow. In its shadow, we may well be impostors. Will there be a day when we will know what was the reality of Auschwitz? Perhaps Auschwitz never existed, except for those who left there, beneath the ashes, a part of their future in pledge.

The Talmud relates: when the Temple in Jerusalem was set on fire, the priests interrupted the sacred services, climbed on the
roof and spoke to God: “We were not able to safeguard Your dwelling, therefore we surrender to You its keys.” And they hurled them toward heaven.

Sometimes I think that somewhere the sanctuary is still burning and that the survivors are its priests. But they are keeping the keys.

A Jew, on his knees, is digging a grave. You imagine him dazed, barely conscious. His blackened face, dimly seen, is blurred, half-obscured by night. You can see his parents, his brothers; broken, twisted masks of clay. From behind, arms crossed, legs spread wide, the killers in uniform calmly observe the digging man. Relaxed and jovial, they exchange remarks. They laugh.

*

An old woman, a yellow star on her chest, turns to cast a last bewildered glance at the station before disappearing inside the train already carrying a hundred tangled anonymous bodies. We see her still, leaning on the steps, but we are no longer looking at her: her shadow is what we see. No, not even her shadow.

*

And this faceless corpse, what country and what landscape did he choose as a setting for his abdication? Discreetly he has turned his head away. Did shame for his fellow men compel
him to cover his eyes with his shabby vest? He had reached the end, he wanted to see nothing more. He had seen it all, measured it all. He died blind. Here he is, lying lifeless across a pile of stones, his fist brandished as though to chase away some distant foe. Look closely at his feet: his right shoe is missing. And the left foot? A bone, without a trace of skin.

These snapshots, taken by German officers and soldiers, collectors of exotic souvenirs, appear in various albums devoted to the holocaust. Examine them and you will forget who you are. You will no longer want to know. Nothing will be important any more. You will have glimpsed an abyss you would rather not have uncovered. Too late.

Leafing through these collections of photographs, you feel yourself sinking, numbed and dizzy, into a bottomless and glacial night. Fellow humans seem to recede, your ties with them more fragile. But the very next day, there you are, facing those pages again.

Deep down I know that every eye staring into mine cuts off the new branch of a tree and adds yet another stain to the sun. I know that every image robs me of another reason for hope. And still my fingers turn the pages, and the shriveled bodies, the gaping twisted mouths, their screams lost in space, continue to follow one another. Then the anguish clutching me, choking me, grows darker and darker; it crushes me: with all these corpses before my eyes, I am afraid to stumble over my own.

At every page, in front of every image, I stop to catch my breath. And I tell myself: This is the end, they have reached
the last limit; what follows can only be less horrible; surely it is impossible to invent suffering more naked, cruelty more refined. Moments later I admit my error: I underestimated the assassins’ ingenuity. The progression into the inhuman transcends the exploration of the human. Evil, more than good, suggests infinity.

How can you explain the masochistic urge that impels you to leave opened before you the book of a past in shrouds but without a grave? Above all, there is the thirst for knowledge, the desire to understand. The tales about atrocities, the survivors are the ones who read them. So as to decipher, belatedly, the truth that had eluded them. So as to know all there is to know about the event that mutilated them. Because, in fact, they still do not understand what happened. And how—and why—they were spared. By delving into documents and diagrams, studies and memoirs, they hope to gain a new perspective on themselves, and perhaps beyond. Photographs are even more evocative than words, any words; they are ruthless, definitive, precise. Fascinated by the memory they imprison, the survivor studies them to rediscover an image of himself he had thought extinct: his own way of saying
Kaddish
, with his eyes rather than his mouth. That mouth—surely it is guilty of too many wrongs: remaining silent when it ought to have spoken, speaking when there was nothing left to say. More faithful, the eyes are better witnesses: they have forgotten nothing.

Seen in profile, the prisoner seems strangely serene. One might think him seated, were it not for the belt tightened around his
neck, its other end fastened to a pipe screwed into the ceiling. The hanged man could not have chosen a more fitting or symbolic place: the latrines. Hereby elevated to courtroom, where the suicide has come to deliver a sentence of death.

And more. Under a dull gray sky, in the very middle of a wheat field, five men topple like stalks of wheat under the scythe. Another page: an ageless mother, livid with terror, grimly clutches her child to protect it from the oncoming bullets. Behind her, a soldier, his face an impassive blank, pulls the trigger. And so she falls, the mother, as does her child, they fall and fall, there is no end to their falling.

Don’t stop. Not yet. The next page shows you children with bloated heads like old men, and old men with childlike emaciated bodies. Another displays pregnant women hanging from trees, motionless; causing neither leaves nor wind to tremble, unleashing no storm.

And still the eye wants to see, the finger to turn the pages. The scenes follow and resemble one another, and suddenly their similarity strikes you like a whip: you are looking at the same Jew murdered six million times by one killer, always the same.

Spellbound, dazed, your eyes keep looking. You have shattered the mirror, you are on the other side. Go on, turn the pages, drink in the night they reveal, open yourself to the fixed smiles endlessly dying, the countless arms stretched toward you, capture those wandering gazes that belong to the dead. And then, who cares if, seized with rage and remorse, you spit on this world which was theirs and still is yours.

So, go on. There is more, much more. The pictures spin, become a kaleidoscope and send you back into infinity. Come
on, don’t give up. You haven’t seen it all; you haven’t seen anything. Wait: after this ghetto, you’ll visit another, bigger, smaller, closer to hell. Then you will see the forests where the mass executions were held. The graves, the stakes. The fathers and sons who spoke or remained silent before tumbling into the trench. The departures and arrivals. The railway stations, the arbitrary selections. The musicians, the fires. The hunger, the fear, the plague, the shame, the end. Names file past you, pay no attention. Hungarian towns, Polish ghettos, Lithuanian cemeteries, it’s everywhere the same. The fear is everywhere and the hunger and the shame and the end. Go on.

Who is this old man and how dare he defy his torturers? They are cutting off his beard, they are hurting him deliberately. All of them want to take part. Yet he does not complain. Does not moan. Silent and proud, his head held high, he looks straight into their eyes. You’re impressed by his dignity, aren’t you? Why, he is provoking them! He is mad, they will kill him! Doesn’t he know? He seems to be mocking them. I study him more closely. His features seem familiar. A hunch. Followed by a complicated, tortuous investigation. No, my memory has not deceived me. Yes, it is my grandfather.

Another image forever etched into my mind. A small Jewish boy, his hands above his head like a soldier giving himself up to the enemy after a fierce battle. Fear has just overtaken him. His cap, too big for his head, hides his forehead and ears but not the two black braziers that are his eyes. Does he see the soldiers encircling him? The snipers lying in wait? How many are they? Ten, a hundred, a hundred thousand? Armed with revolvers, rifles, submachine guns. All the German warriors, from all
fronts, far and near, have converged here for the sole purpose of slaughtering this one little Jewish boy with knowing eyes, out of breath, and clearly lacking both strength and desire to resist.

A ghetto scene: a fighter jumps from a window, a living torch, pursued by flame-throwers. In the street below, Germans and Poles, military and civilians, find the spectacle interesting.

And from Treblinka—or is it Birkenau, Ponar, Majdanek?—this image which one day will burst inside me like a sharp call to madness: Jewish mothers, naked, leading their children, also naked, to the sacrifice. You stare at them so hard that in the end you see them advancing through an immense flowering field toward an altar red with blood, then you see them suspended halfway between heaven and earth, startled angels condemned to silence. Look at the women, some still young and beautiful, their frightened children well-behaved. Others, older and without illusions, are weary, so weary. And here they are, modestly trying to hide their femininity. The children respectfully avert their gaze. And you, what are you doing? Go ahead, go on, snatch a flower, offer it to the mothers in exchange for their children—what are you waiting for? Hurry up, quickly, grab a child and run, run as fast as your legs will carry you, faster than the wind, run while there’s still time, before you are blinded by the smoke …

 … But motionless and mute, there you remain, like myself, in front of these images that men like you and me took pleasure in consigning to film, to be shown later, back home, to boring guests and admiring cousins.

The fingers turn page after page and your eyes meet again the eyes that burn them. On the far bank of the river, the sun,
having warmed the earth, sinks into a deep red twilight flecked with gold. And what if the holocaust were nothing but a nightmare, a parenthesis?