Section V - Continuing Education

Chapter VI ("Us and Them") from The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

by Terrence Des Pres

All around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing: many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still alive. . . . Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies . . . , occasionally firing at those which showed signs of life. . . . One SS man . . . shone his torch on her, . . . but she . . . gave no signs of life.

A. KUZNETSOV
Babi Yar

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

T.S. ELIOT
The Waste Land

In 1959 Stanley M. Elkins put forward his slave-as-sambo thesis in Slavery, arguing that the personality of the American slave had been fundamentally regressive and infantile. Elkins does not examine direct evidence; he uses a "comparative" method, and his main comparison is with inmates of the German concentration camps. To identify the Southern plantation with Auschwitz is senseless, of course; but the comparison is still significant, not for what it tells us of either slaves or survivors, but for the assumptions that are made about behavior in extremity. Elkins takes it for granted that in the camps men and women lost their capacity to act as morally responsible adults, and the point of his comparison is to demonstrate that this also happened to American slaves. Specifically, he states that "old prisoners," by which he means the survivors, suffered "deep disintegrative effects" (107); that the "most immediate aspect of the old inmates' behavior . . . was its childlike quality" (111); and finally that "all" survivors were "reduced to complete and childish dependence upon their masters" (113). Elkins goes on to say that regression began with the abandonment of previous ethical standards, and to make his point he quotes as representative a brief statement by a survivor of Auschwitz. In Elkins' context, here is her remark:

One part of the prisoner's being was thus, under sharp stress, brought to the crude realization that he must thenceforth be governed by an entire new set of standards in order to live. Mrs. Lingens-Reiner puts it bluntly: "Will you survive or shall I? As soon as one sensed that this was at stake everyone turned egotist" (109-10).

In extremity, in other words, everyone fights alone; and the "entire new set of standards" comes from the camp system itself. But is there not a contradiction here? Childlike behavior is not the same as rapacious battle in one's best self-interest. The former entails passivity and preference for illusion; the latter demands intelligent calculation and a capacity for quick, objective judgment. All the same, that survivors suffered regression to infantile stages, and that they were amoral monsters, are very widespread notions. They constitute nothing less than the prevailing view of survival behavior. Nor surprisingly, in Death in Life Robert Lifton has used the same quotation —"Will you survive, or shall I?"— as a representative expression of the "competition for survival" which, in his view, lies at the root of the "guilt" survivors are supposed to feel (490). What, then, are we to make of the Lingens-Reiner statement? Is it a fair summation of her own view?

In Prisoners of Fear she aims to tell the very worst; and the most striking thing about her testimony is the double vision we have already noted in reports by survivors. The viciousness and horror are certainly there, but also examples of morally intelligent behavior, and many references to resistance and solidarity among camp inmates. There is the moment when the narrator exposes herself by taking action to get another prisoner's name off a death list. She does this, all the time calling herself a fool for taking the risk, because she sees an opportunity: there was a way to save someone and that decided her. The incident takes four pages to describe (79-82) and is not an example of "survival egotism" or of "infantile regression." It is one instance among many of men and women acting with courage and intelligence to help others. The following are typical:

There were girls among them who lived through a typhus attack without staying in bed. Two of their friends would take the sick comrade between them, when she had a temperature of 103° F. and saw everything as a blur, and drag her along with their labour gang; out in the fields they would lay her down under a shrub, and in the evening they would march her back to camp — all to avoid her being sent to the hospital hut and so being exposed to the danger of a selection (122). The camp doctors would line up all the Jewish patients. . . . All those who were too ill to get out of bed were lost from the outset. . . . The rest of the prisoners did everything in their power to obstruct the doctor and to save one or other of the victims; I do not think that a single one among us withheld her help. We would hide women somewhere in the hut. . . . We would smuggle them into "Aryan" huts. . . . We would put their names on the list of patients due for release (76-7).

Under the pressure of a concentration camp you grew more closely attached to people than you would have done otherwise in such a short time (162).

The pursuit of self-interest was certainly a determinant of behavior in the camps, but it was everywhere countered by an unsuppressible urge toward decency and care, a multitude of small deeds against the grain of one's "best" interest. Prisoners looked out for themselves first of all, but also for one another when and however they could. In the whole body of testimony by survivors there is no better description of this contradiction than in the book by Lingens-Reiner:

Ena Weiss, our Chief Doctor — one of the most intelligent, gifted and eminent Jewish women in the camp-once defined her attitude thus, in sarcastic rejection of fulsome flattery and at the same time with brutal frankness: "How did I keep alive in Auschwitz? My principle is: myself first, second and third. Then nothing. Then myself again — and then all the others." This formula expressed the only principle which was possible for Jews who intended —almost insanely intended — to survive Auschwitz. Yet, because this woman had the icy wisdom and strength to accept the principle, she kept for herself a position in which she could do something for the Jews. Hardly anybody else in the camp did as much for them and saved so many lives as she did (118).

At least in this instance, Elkins' thesis is not borne out by the evidence from which he quotes, and if for a time his "sambo" theory of slave behavior was accepted, that was not because he had offered solid evidence but because by comparing slavery to the camp experience he was able to mobilize the deeply disturbing and largely uncontrolled range of reaction which attends our idea of the concentration camps. Here is how he sums it up:

Daily life in the camp, with its fear and tensions, taught over and over the lesson of absolute power. It prepared the personality for a drastic shift in standards. It crushed whatever anxieties might have been drawn from prior standards; such standards had become meaningless. It focused the prisoner's attention constantly on the moods, attitudes, and standards of the only man who mattered [the SS guard]. A truly childlike situation was thus created: utter and abject dependency. . . . It is thus no wonder that the prisoners should become "as children." It is no wonder that their obedience became unquestioning, that they did not revolt, that they could not "hate" their masters (122).

Elkins is simply reiterating accepted ideas. But power is never absolute, especially over time, and it is not true that the SS guard was the "one significant other" on whom the prisoners' needs depended. Social bonding among prisoners themselves was a universal phenomenon in the camps. And of course it is not true that survivors were morally crushed, that they lost all sense of prior standards, that moral sanity was meaningless. Certainly it is not true that they did not revolt; to live was to resist, every day, all the time, and in addition to dramatic events like the burning of Treblinka and Sobibor there were many small revolts in which all perished. Prisoners who were capable, furthermore, of organizing an underground and of systematically subverting SS intentions were not behaving "as children." And it is not true, finally, that hatred was absent. Survivors seethe with it, they speak of it often, they describe terrible acts of revenge. In Prisoners of Fear the author praises one of her comrades for "the ice-cold self-control by which she hid her abysmal hatred of the German rulers" (123) in order to exploit them. Ella Lingens-Reiner's own rage rings through her prose on every page.

No, most of this was not true, not for many survivors in many camps. Hence these disturbing questions: Why do we insist that prisoners died "like sheep"? Why is it easy to believe, despite the contradiction, that survivors were infantile and that they were cunning manipulators using every kind of betrayal and base trick to stay alive? Why, in short, do we insist that survivors did not really survive: that they suffered "death in life" and that if they are alive in body their spirit was destroyed beyond salvaging? Here is how one psychoanalytic commentator summed up the opinions of his colleagues in a symposium on the camp experience: "To one degree or another, they all stifled their true feelings, they all denied the dictates of conscience and social feeling in hope of survival, and they were all warped and distorted as a result" (Hoppe, 83). That word "all" — its assurance, its contempt — must be accounted for

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To date, serious study of the concentration-camp experience has been done almost exclusively from the psychoanalytic point of view. Elkins takes the bulk of his evidence from Elie Cohen and Bruno Bettelheim, both of whom employ the psychoanalytic approach, both of whom offer much valuable insight, but both of whom, in the end, are led by their method to mistaken conclusions. The psychoanalytic approach is misleading because it is essentially a theory of culture and of man in the civilized state. Its analytic power — which is considerable — is maximized when turned upon behavior which is symbolic, mediated, and therefore at a sufficient remove from necessity. To be of use, the psychoanalytic method, which is that of interpretation, must be applied to actions which have more than one meaning on the level of meaning. But that is not the case with extremity. When men and women must respond directly to necessity — when defilement occurs at gun-point and the most undelayable of needs determines action, or when death itself is the determinant — then behavior has no "meaning" at all in a symbolic or psychological sense.

The purpose of action in extremity is to keep life going; the multiplicity of motive which gives civilized behavior its depth and complexity is lost. We have seen that live in the camps depended on a duality of behavior, but this duality — this layering of behavior — is very different from the kind of layering which psychoanalysis probes. In extremity, action splits into "primary" and "secondary" levels of adjustment, each of which is real and separate in itself. Precisely here the psychoanalytic approach misleads us: in its search for a second meaning on the first or primary level, it overlooks the secondary level. For psychoanalysis, covert behavior is implicit behavior. But for survivors it becomes explicit, actual, necessary in an immediately practical way.

I am assuming, with Freud, that the phenomenon of civilization, no matter how advanced or primitive, is based first of all on processes of sublimation and symbolization. Taken in this broad sense, civilization as a condition can be described as the transcendence of primal needs and crude necessities through systems of technical and symbolic mediation. Thereby a realm of freedom comes into being which is not governed immediately by the necessities which constitute extremity. Prisoners in a concentration camp would eat anything, at any time they could get it, in almost any state of rawness or decay. We, on the other hand, eat the kind of food we choose, when we choose, after it has been transformed aesthetically through cooking, and upon occasions rich in ritual observance. And thus too, the dead in the camps were stacked naked in piles, rammed into ovens, tossed every which way into ditches and pits. But the man or woman who dies in normal circumstances becomes the object of complicated ritual procedures which confer meaning and dignity upon his or her death and thereby humanize it. The primacy of death is denied symbolically, the immediate facts are overlaid with solemn meaning and removed from the center of consciousness. Death is no long thought of as death, just as animal flesh is no longer thought of as animal flesh after it has been transformed by cooking and table rites.

Freedom to mediate facts and instill new significance, to create and multiply meanings, is the essence of civilization. And here the psychoanalytic method correctly assumes that nothing is to be taken at face value. Our actions are invested with memories, wishes and values reaching far beyond the performance itself, and no action is simply and wholly significant in its immediate, concrete function. Historically, psychoanalysis originated just as the symboliste movement was occurring in the arts, and it is tempting to see in both a common pursuit. Both read facts as symbols, both search out the mysteries of an invisible drama, and both take it for granted that in any act or situation there is more than meets the eye. Survivors act as they do because they must — the issue is always life or death — and at every moment the meaning and purpose of their behavior is fully known. We, on the other hand, act for all kinds of reasons, some known and others unconscious, some practical and others governed by an internal will that can only be guessed at. For us behavior requires interpretation; indeed, interpretation validates experience, and hence the usefulness of the psychoanalytic approach.

But only for us. Attempts to interpret the survivor's experience — to see it in terms other than its own-have done more harm than good. The outstanding spokesman, in this respect, has been Bruno Bettelheim, whose application of the psychoanalytic model to survival behavior has been definitive. Bettelheim was in Buchenwald and Dachau for a year, at a time when prisoners could still hope for release, and before systematic destruction became fixed policy, but he was there and speaks with that authority. His first analysis of the damp experience — "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" — appeared in 1943, adding the weight of precedence to a position which has never been challenged and which has influenced all subsequent study. Even among laymen his ideas are known and accepted. His version is the version, and in The Informed Heart it takes its final, polemical form. Bettelheim argues that prisoners in the camps exhibited the following general traits: they became "incompetent children"; they identified with the SS, "willing and able to accept SS values and behavior"; they fell into an "anonymous mass," without social base or organization; and they possessed no "autonomy," by which he means the capacity for dramatic acts of self-assertion.

Bettelheim's view differs sharply from that of other survivors — Ernst Wiechert and Ernest Rappaport, for example — who were in Buchenwald at the same time. His claims are not substantiated in the bulk of testimony by survivors, including the comprehensive report by Eugen Kogon, who was a member of the underground and was in Buchenwald from the beginning to the end. Bettelheim's attack on Anne Frank and her family is perhaps the essential expression of his outlook. He suggests that their decision to stay together and go into hiding was stupid-a judgment which disregards the situation in Holland, where the population at large helped many Jews to escape in this way. Rather, he argues, they should have abandoned their commitment to each other: each should have fought alone, each shooting down the Germans as they came. Where the guns were to come from, or how scattered individuals were to succeed when nations failed, he does not say.

Bettelheim develops his argument in terms of a dramatic contrast between the individual, who possesses "autonomy," and the masses, who do not possess "autonomy." In many cases this becomes a contrast between Bettelheim himself and "others":

they appeared to be pathological liars, were unable to restrain themselves, unable to separate clearly between reality and their wishful or anxious daydreams. So to the old worries, a new one was added, namely, "How could I protect myself from becoming as they are?" (114).

This may refer to prisoners during the stage of initial collapse, but Bettelheim does not say so. He is describing what appears to him to be the general situation, and this contrast between himself and other prisoners is in fact the theme of his book. It is evident not only in the sense of isolation and superiority which attends references to himself, but also in an animus toward other prisoners generally. At one point he attacks camp functionaries by suggesting that inmates with "privileged" positions had "a greater need to justify themselves":

This they did as members of ruling classes for centuries have done-by pointing to their greater value to society because of their power to influence, their education, their cultural refinement (186).

His specific example is Eugen Kogon:

Kogon's attitudes are fairly representative. For example, he took pride that in the stillness of the night he enjoyed reading Plato or Galsworthy, while in an adjacent room the air reeked of common prisoners, while they snored unpleasantly. He seemed unable to realize that only his privileged position, based on participation in human experiments, gave him the leisure to enjoy culture, an enjoyment he then used to justify his privileged position (186).

That sounds convincing, but let us look at Kogon's description of the same event:

In the winter of 1942-43 a succession of bread thefts in Barracks 42 at Buchenwald made it necessary to establish a nightwatch. For months on end I volunteered for this duty, taking the shift from three to six o'clock in the morning. It meant sitting alone in the day room, while the snores of the comrades came from the other end. For once I was free of the ineluctable companionship that usually shackled and stifled every individual activity. What an experience it was to sit quietly by a shaded lamp, delving into the pages of Plato's Dialogues, Galsworthy's Swan Song, or the works of Heine, Klabund, Mehring! (132).

One of the anomalies of Nazi rule was that books unobtainable in the whole of the Reich were available in the camps. Kogon goes on: "Yes, they could be read illegally in camp. They were among books retrieved from the nation-wide wastepaper collections. The Nazis impounded many libraries of 'enemies of the state,' and turned them over to these collections" (132). There is perhaps a sense of amusement in Kogon's recounting of such details — a Swan Song in Buchenwald? — but not a trace of what Bettelheim calls the "need to justify."

Kogon's book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, is an extensive record of the achievements of the political underground in Buchenwald, including methods of organization, strategic use of functionary positions, and a detailed account of the take-over of the camp by the prisoners. The episode Bettelheim singles out is, in Kogon's view, just another small example of resistance in action. As a member of the underground, Kogon is simply doing his job. The reason he is there is not to read Plato and Mehring, but to enforce the bread law and thereby help keep a sense of moral order alive among the prisoners. He does not, as Bettelheim says, refer to air which "reeked of common prisoners," but to his "comrades." His private enjoyment is a by-product of responsibility, and if there had been no books Kogon would have volunteered all the same, going without sufficient sleep "for months on end" to do his duty as a man committed to the general struggle.

Bettelheim did not know Kogon in camp, and the incident cited above (one of several he takes from Kogon's report) occurred after his release. Yet this is not a matter of ignorance merely. To reduce Kogon's act to "privilege," and further to declare that it was "based on participation in human experiments," is a grave misrepresentation of basic facts. Bettelheim's obsession with "autonomy," his concept of transcendental selfhood, blinds him to collective action and mutual aid. After reading Kogon's book he remains unaware of organized resistance and of the enormous benefits which the camp population received through covert operations of the underground. He goes on to criticize prisoners who did not, at some point, assert their "autonomy" by openly risking their lives (Kogon's was on the line for nine years but never, if he could help it, openly). Bettelheim tells us that the act he himself performed by talking back to an SS officer, thereby risking his life in a dramatic assertion of self, was the kind of behavior all survivors should have displayed. And that is the heart of the matter. Bettelheim's critique of camp behavior is rooted in the old heroic ethic. Heroism, for him, is an isolated act of defiance through which the individual as an individual confronts death. Bettelheim's position is clear from the kind of action he praises:

Once, a group of naked prisoners about to enter the gas chamber stood lined up in front of it. In some way the commanding SS officer learned that one of the women prisoners had been a dancer. So he ordered her to dance for him. She did, and as she danced, she approached him, seized his gun, and shot him down. She too was immediately shot to death (264-65).

"She was willing to risk her life," Bettelheim concludes, "to achieve autonomy once more" (265). But this is not an example of risking life. The act he celebrates is suicide. It is courageous, beautiful, and under the circumstances the only alternative to passive surrender. It is heroic, but it is still suicide. What can "autonomy" at the cost of personal destruction amount to? How effective would underground activities, or any of the forms of resistance, have been on such a principle? Bettelheim's argument comes down to this: "manhood" requires dramatic self-confirmation, and in the camps this could only be achieved through some moment of open confrontation with death. Insofar as the struggle for life did not become overtly rebellious, prisoners were "childlike."

Bettelheim's polemical objective, in The Informed Heart, is to compare the survivor's experience with the predicament of modern man in "mass society," in order to arrive at a critique of the latter. The comparison itself is invalid. No matter how disconcerting conditions become for us, they do not hinge at every moment on the issue of life and death; pain is not constant, options abound, the rule of terror and necessity is far from total. Life for us does not depend on collective action — not directly, that is; nor is death the price of visibility. Bettelheim wishes to rouse us from our sense of victimhood; but by claiming that pressure reduces men and women to children, and by praising a heroism based on death, he tends instead to support what he fears.

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Whatever his conclusions, Bettelheim's argument for "autonomy" is a defense of human dignity, a call to that principle in man which resists determination by otherness. His far is not only that human beings can be made helpless, but that prevailing tendencies in modern thinking have accepted the condition of victimhood as final. A primary assumption of his own discipline is that the self is forever in painful bondage to its past. And much of social, economic and political theory — conservative as well as radical — takes it for granted that external forces shape internal being, or finally that the self is constituted by forces it neither controls nor understands but only suffers. Perhaps the case for man-as-victim has been put most strongly by behaviorism, which assumes outright that environment is omnipotent and that the human self is ever and always a unilateral function of the world in which it finds itself. Applied to the concentration camps, the conclusion can only be that monstrosity breeds monstrosity, and therefore that no one survived. Those not killed in body most surely perished in spirit, for men and women could not long endure such inhumanity without themselves becoming inhuman. One sees why B. F. Skinner, in his attack on freedom, also finds it necessary to attack dignity: as long as people persist in their refusal to be determined by forces external to themselves, the belief in freedom will likewise persist as a by-product of this basic recalcitrance.

That the concentration camps were a kind of "experiment" has often been noted. Their aim was to reduce inmates to mindless creatures whose behavior could be predicted and controlled absolutely. The camps have so far been the closest thing on earth to a perfect Skinner Box. They were a closed, completely regulated environment, a "total" world in the strict sense. Pain and death were the "negative reinforcers," food and life the "positive reinforcers," and all these forces were pulling and shoving twenty-four hours a day at the deepest stratum of human needs. And yet, survivors are proof that the "experiment" did not succeed.

Their behavior was of course determined by camp conditions, but not in the way behaviorism or current theories of victimhood assume. The distinction overlooked is between responses to necessity which are really unilateral and therefore at one with necessity, and responses which are strategic and therefore provoked by, but opposed to, the same necessity. Facing extreme pressure, human beings either acquiesce or resist or do both. Like the psychoanalytic approach, behaviorism does not take into account the duality of action in extremity. It too fixes attention on the "primary" level of adjustment, precisely on those activities which are informed by, and expressive of, camp logic. On this level it appears that prisoners succumbed to their environment (and life depended on the success of this deception). But on the "secondary" level, as we have seen, prisoners were pushing hard against camp controls. And it is perhaps worth noting, finally, that the behaviorist assumption was held in practice by the SS themselves, who never doubted that force and fear could break anyone, could reduce all behavior to a function of their world.

In a way at first surprising, Bettelheim's idea of heroism dovetails with the view of man as victim — just as psychoanalysis and behaviorism, based on opposite principles, agree in the case of extremity. But in fact, the celebration of man's "indomitable spirit" and our acceptance of victimhood are rooted in the single belief, as old as Western culture, that human bondage can be transcended only in death. Death is at once the entrance to a world of fulfillment unobtainable on earth and the proof of a spirit unvanquished by fear or compromise. Neither is possible to men and women getting by as best they can from day to day; and a life not ready, at any moment, to give itself for something higher is life enchained, life cowed and disgraced by its own gross will to persist. Survival in itself, not dedicated to something else, has never been held in high esteem and often has been viewed with contempt. This complex of attitudes is at the heart of the Christian worldview; it had already been expounded in detail by Plato, and before that invested with grandeur by Homer. In the Iliad, the progress of a Greek advance is stopped by sudden mist and darkness; whereupon the great Ajax prays aloud for Zeus to send light to continue the battle, even if light should bring death. Many centuries later, in On the Sublime, Longinus remarked: "This is the true attitude of an Ajax. He does not pray for life, for such a petition would have ill beseemed a hero" (67).

Just so; when we say of someone that he or she "merely" survives, the word "merely" carries real if muted moral objection. And we say it all the time, as if to be alive, or simply to struggle for life, were not in itself enough. For "meaning" and "significance" we look elsewhere — to ideals and ideologies, to religion and other metaphysical systems; to anything, any higher cause or goal which defines life in terms other than its own and thereby justifies existence. Survivors are suspect because they are forced to do openly, without a shred of style or fine language to cover themselves, what the rest of us do by remote control. The bias against "mere survival" runs deep, and derives its force from the fact that all of us think and act in terms of survival, but at a crucial remove and with all the masks and stratagems which cultivated men and women learn to use — of which there would seem to be no end. As Nietzsche observed, man would rather will nothingness than have nothing to will, nothing with which to push life beyond itself. But as Nietzsche implies, the problem with these symbolic superstructures is that they redeem life by negating it.

One of the side-effects of civilization is that life is enhanced by denigrating actual life processes. But is that a side-effect merely? Might it not be the paradox of civilization itself — a direct result of, or even a condition for, the split between mind and body which characterizes the structure of civilized existence as we know it? Surely Descartes was not original when he declared hat mind and matter are separate entities, nor was his "I think therefore I am" anything more than the commonplace bias of culture itself. Within the framework of civilization, experience has always been divided into physical and spiritual realms, immediate and mediated modes, concrete and symbolic forms, lower and higher activities. And all things "higher," as we know, are by definition not concerned with life itself; not, that is, with life in its physical concreteness.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman has observed that human activities take place either in "front" or in "back" regions. We "present" ourselves (our idealized selves) to ourselves and others in "front regions," while keeping our props, especially those which attend our biological needs, out of sight in "back regions":

The line dividing front and back regions is illustrated everywhere in our society. As suggested, the bathroom and bedroom . . . are places from which the downstairs audience can be excluded. Bodies that are cleansed, clothed, and made up in these rooms can be presented to friends in others. In the kitchen, of course, there is done to food what in the bathroom and bedroom is done to the human body (123).

Goffman is talking about American society, but the compartmentalization of existence to which he points can be found everywhere, most dramatically at events which have a religious or an official function, places and ceremonies associated with power or the sacred. In all such instances, a division between front and back, higher and lower, is strictly upheld. And as far as ritual and technology permit, everything "lower" is kept out of sight — and thereby out of mind. Mary Douglas has called this "the purity rule":

According to the rule of distance from physiological origin (or the purity rule) the more the social situation exerts pressure on persons involved in it, the more the social demand for conformity tends to be expressed by a demand for physical control. Bodily processes are more ignored and more firmly set outside the social discourse, the more the latter is important. A natural way of investing a social occasion with dignity is to hide organic processes (12).

The division between body and mind, between lower and higher, is a structural component of civilization as such. Freud's concept of sublimation is helpful here; it refers to the process through which immediate bodily needs are delayed, set at a distance or denied, and finally transformed into the "higher" accomplishments of mind and culture. That which is is negated in pursuit of that which will be or should be. Taken to its religious extreme, this principle results in the negation of this life in favor of another life, higher, purer, elsewhere. Actual existence is "death," whereas death becomes the entrance to "life," or so St. Paul would have us believe. The meaning of life is found in death, and the greatest action an individual can perform is to give his life for some "higher" cause.

The trouble with survivors, in our eyes, is that they do not live by the rules. Their needs cannot be delayed, cannot be transformed or got out of sight. Nor do they seek ideal justification for their struggle. Survivors fight merely to live, certain that what counts is life and the sharing of life. And through this experience of radical de-sublimation they come, as Nadezhda Mandelstam puts it, very "close to earth":

Our way of life kept us firmly rooted to the ground, and was not conducive to the search for transcendental truths. Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: "Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they even hasten it for you." Death was so much more real, so much simpler than life, that we all involuntarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment — just in case the next day brought some relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. . . . In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives. Who knows what happiness is? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for (261).

For years the Mandelstams lived at life's edge: they saw the tree in winter outline, barren against a barren land, and saw the strength of its shape. David Rousset, who passed through several Nazi camps, likewise insists upon a "positive side" to the experience of survival:

Dynamic awareness of the strength and beauty of the sheer fact of living, in itself, brutal, entirely stripped of all superstructures — living through even the worst of cataclysms and most disastrous setbacks. A cool, sensual thrill of joy founded on the most complete understanding of the wreckage, and consequently incisiveness in action and firmness in decisions, in short, a broader and more intensely creative vigor (171).

Certainly one does not have to survive the concentration camps in order to arrive at awareness of life's immanent value. It can come abruptly, with the shock of death-encounter, or gradually after passing through a period of protracted death-threat, and sometimes in a moment of character-changing revelation. Dostoevsky is a wonderful example. As a young man he was arrested for mildly revolutionary activities, condemned to death, and taken to the place of execution; his sentence was commuted to imprisonment only after the ritual of execution had been carried up to the actual point of shooting. He genuinely thought he would die, and later that same day he wrote an extraordinary letter to his brother:

Brother, I'm not Des Pressed and haven't lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. . . . This idea has entered into my flesh and blood. Yes, it's true! That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders. . . . But my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this, after all, life. On voit le soleil! (Mochulsky, 141).

His awakening had nothing to do with belief, and in his letter he thanks neither God nor the Tsar. He has simply realized what he did not know before. Life's fundamental goodness is now clear, and he wants his brother to know that through the years in prison this knowledge will be his strength. Using exactly the same details of the letter, Dostoevsky re-described his mock execution nearly twenty years later in The Idiot. The Prince is obsessed by two images of man-condemned: one is executed, the other pardoned. Myshkin's desire is to conduct his life in terms of what they, the condemned, know. So too with Father Zosimo, and finally Alyosha and Mitya, in The Brothers Karamazov. They know that life justifies ideals and not, as Ivan thinks, the reverse. They know that "life is in ourselves and not in the external."

Survivors develop a faith in life which seems unwarranted to others. Dostoevsky did, and so did Bertrand Russell, to take a final example from our world. While in Peking during the winter of 1920-21, Russell came down with double pneumonia. Complications set in and "for a fortnight," as he tells us, "the doctors thought every evening that I should be dead before morning" (180). But with the coming of spring his health returned, and at some point during recovery Russell had an extraordinary experience, which he describes in Volume Two of the Autobiography:

Lying in my bed feeling that I was not going to die was surprisingly delightful. I had always imagined until then that I was fundamentally pessimistic and did not greatly value being alive. I discovered that in this I had been completely mistaken, and that life was infinitely sweet to me. Rain in Peking is rare, but during my convalescence there came heavy rains bringing the delicious smell of damp earth through the windows, and I used to think how dreadful it would have been to have never smelt that smell again. I had the same feeling about the light of the sun, and the sound of the wind. Just outside my windows were some very beautiful acacia trees, which came into blossom at the first moment when I was well enough to enjoy them. I have known ever since that at bottom I am glad to be alive (181-82).

That is the survivor's special grace. He or she is glad to be alive. For camp survivors this affirmation was seldom so joyous or easily won, and often it was made in stubborn bitterness. A survivor of the Nazi camp at Neubrandenberg speaks of having "no right to be unhappy." She goes on to stress the one solid insight which her experience gave birth to, a vision distilled from such masses of suffering as to bear the force of ethical imperative:

Be happy, you who live in fine apartments, in ugly houses or in hovels. Be happy, you who have your loved ones, and you also who sit alone and dream and can weep. Be happy, you who torture yourself over metaphysical problems, and . . . you the sick who are being cared for, and you who care for them, and be happy, oh, how happy, you who die a death as normal as life, in hospital beds or in your homes (Maurel, 140).

To talk like that a person must be very naive or very wise. Coming out of the concentration camps, such words reach the simplest of all knowledge — that life is what counts, life whose internal destiny has had the peace and the time to unfold. This is the wisdom of Lear on the heath, stripped of everything but his pain, who sees at last that ripeness is all.

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Merely because they are survivors, the men and women who passed through the camps are suspect in our eyes. But when we consider the specific nature of their identity — not only as survivors, but survivors of those places — suspicion deepens to shock and rejection. The concentration-camp experience represents an evil so appalling that we too, when we turn to face it, suffer psychic unbalance. We too flounder in nightmare, in a torment having nothing to do with us yet felt in some strange way to be very much a part of our deepest, most secret being. The terror of the camps is with us. Some hideous impression of Auschwitz is in every mind, far removed from conscious thought but there; and not only as a repressed perception of historical events but as an image which stirs up the demonic content of our own worst fears and wishes. The image is with us; and anything connected with it, anything which starts it into consciousness, brings with it a horror too large and intensely personal to confront safely. Thus A. Alvarez can say:

The concentration camps are a dangerous topic to handle. They stir mud from the bottom, clouding the mind, rousing dormant self-destructiveness. In the last few years I personally have known half-a-dozen suicides or near suicides; and each has prefaced his act with a fierce immersion in the literature of the camps. That is why I suggested that these places, these crimes, have an existential meaning beyond politics or shock or pity. They have become symbols of our own inturned nihilism, which their disproportionately vast scale heightens, even justifies, by making individual suffering seem so insignificant (28).

He means that the dark, unspoken passion of fantasy and desire, the whole of life's demonic undertow, has found, at last, its specific image. The concentration camps have given concrete form to the mind's most terrible enactments, such as before had been known mainly from literature, from religion and folktale, from dream and chthonic myth. The camps have justified and made legitimate the imagination's fascination with destruction and pain and mutilation and defilement. By "justified" I mean as history always justifies: not morally but in terms of priority in time, in the weight of real over possible events, in irreversibility. Events, if they are inclusive and compelling, provide imagination with powerful occasions for mythical investment; and we may at least speculate that for an unknown number of years to come, the imaginative deployment of demonic energy will use imagery drawn from the world of the camps. The elegant perversity of de Sade, the demented majesty of Dali and Lautréamont, seem timid and indulgent compared with the forms now at our disposal — imagery as old as the mind's infernal regions but which found its historical basis only after 1945.

The concentration camps are plainly an embodiment of the archetype we call Hell. They were "hell on earth," as everybody says, and George Steiner has gone so far as to suggest that they were a deliberate actualization of the demonic tradition in art and literature and theology, the most terrible instance of myth turning into history:

The camp embodies, often down to minutiae, the images and chronicles of Hell in European art and thought from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. It is these representations which gave to the deranged horrors of Belsen a kind of "expected logic." . . . The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever régime, are Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface. They are the deliberate enactment of a long, precise imagining (53-54).

We must hope that Steiner is wrong, for if the kind of determinism implied in this "transference" is real — if man eventually and necessarily realizes his deep imaginings in fact — then the end will come, the bombs will fall, the myth of the World's End, imagined for millennia, will arrive in actuality. This is possible, but (employing Steiner's model) so is a new Golden Age, another of man's intenser imaginings. The mind of man holds everything, and our common fate may indeed, as Freud came to believe, be bound to the eventual outcome of a battle between conflicting psychic forces.

But finally I want to mark a lesser symmetry between Hell and the camps, simply the comparison itself. We make it all the time, and so do survivors. But for us it is misleading because the archetype informs our perception and we end up seeing the SS as satanic monsters and the prisoners as condemned souls. When we imagine what the survivor's experience must have been, we thus project our own fantasies, our own worst fears and wishes. From our remote vantage point only the horror is visible; the real behavior of survivors goes unobserved because it was covert, undramatic, not at all in accord with our expectations of heroism. And so it happens that we do not see them as survivors. They belong to that world, and in Hell there are none but the damned, none but the spiritually maimed unto death.

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That mistake is easy to make. The typology of Hell was everywhere evident in the world of the camps. Steiner mentions such conventions as the "whips and hellhounds," the "ovens and stinking air," the "mockery of the damned" (54). And yes, prisoners were mocked while whipped, they were torn to death by dogs, they breathed an air so utterly foul — and this is noted repeatedly by survivors — that nobody every saw a bird fly over the camps. In its primitive Christian form, Hell is a place of darkness, thick with smoke and flame and stench, in which the damned are tormented by demons with pitchforks. What but Hell could this be? —

The burning had reached a peak that night. Every chimney was disgorging flames. Smoke burst from the holes and ditches, swirling, swaying and coiling above our heads. Sparks and cinders blinded us. Through the screened fence of the second crematory we could see figures with pitch forks moving against the background of flames. They were men from the special squad turning the corpses in the pits and pouring a special liquid so that they would burn better. A rancid smell of scorched flesh choked us. Big trucks passed us trailing a smell of corpses (Zywulska, 179).

That was Auschwitz in the fall of 1944, when the Jews of Hungary were being killed so fast and in such numbers that the usual gas-to-oven process had to be supplemented by pits in which the victims burned alive. "Yet from those flames," says Milton in Paradise Lost,

No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all. . . .

Milton's Hell is a "universe of death," and his high style should not deflect us from the fact that Auschwitz might be described in exactly the same terms (although not in Miltonic diction, which applied to the camps would generate lunatic irony). But the camps are there, in Milton's poem and in Dante's, in the underrealms of Homer and Virgil, in Shakespeare's Lear. From the world's literature we can abstract a set of conditions which make up the demonic or infernal depth as men have imagined them always. Northrop Frye has done this, arriving at an archetypal outline of the "world that desire totally rejects":

the world of the nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion. . . . the world also of perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instrument of torture and monuments of folly (147).

Frye is describing an imaginary place, but he could be talking about a real world where men and women were forced to carry gigantic rocks back and forth to no purpose; where prisoners were hung by the hands on trees; where they lay face down in sewage and mud doing push-ups, and where to this day Dachau and Auschwitz stand as monuments to an age which is ours. The move from fiction to history argues the prophetic nature of art and perhaps even, as Steiner implies, a kind of cultural determinism. But it is also the special case of a more general relation between contrary realms of experience, between civilization and extremity, which can be formulated this way: what we experience symbolically, in spirit only, survivors must go through in spirit and in body. In extremity, states of mind become objective, metaphors tend to actualize, the word becomes flesh.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has noted the "curious literariness" of experience in the trenches. He observes that "one way of using canonical literature to help suggest the actuality of front-line experience was to literalize what before had been figurative" (165). Thus Shakespeare's metaphor for fallen majesty — Lear saying of his hand, "It smells of mortality" — becomes plain fact in the rank air of a world where corpses of men and horses lay rotting for months. Fussell concludes that "the drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable" (74), and that beginning with World War I the perception of extreme events reveals a definite tendency: "The movement was toward myth, toward a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant. In short, toward fiction" (131).

But toward fiction which had actualized; and anyone sensitive to aesthetic form, sometimes called "significant form," is bound to wonder at this odd convergence of art and life. Describing a roundup of hundreds of women in the Soviet prison at Yaroslavl for transport to the camps, Eugenia Ginzburg remembers a small incident which, like a Joycean epiphany, revealed in a moment the shattering of personal life under Stalin. "They made us give up the photographs of our children," she writes, and "I can still see the great pile of them on the stone floor of the yard" (268). That is already an example of significant form: the event in itself embodies and shows forth its larger meaning. But there is more, and Ginzburg goes on to remark:

If, today, a film director were to show such a heap in close-up, he would certainly be accused of striving for a forced effect — especially if he were also to show a soldier's heavy boot trampling on the pile lf cards, from which little girls in ribbons and boys in short pants looked up at their criminal mothers. The critics would say, "That's too much." Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened. One of the warders had to cross the yard and, rather than walk around the pile, stamped straight across the faces of our children. I saw his foot in close-up, as though it were in a film (268).

Extremity makes bad art because events are too obviously "symbolic." The structure of experience is so clear and complete that it appears to be deliberately contrived. But the great majority of books and documents by survivors are not consciously formal or deliberately shaped. Their testimony is in no way "literary," and yet everywhere great and terrible metaphors are embedded in events described. Hell first of all, and then "spiritual" states of being like purity and defilement, doom and salvation, death and rebirth. The following example involves a small massacre in a German forest:

Then we were ordered to dig out the soil in the marked area. . . . others were told to break off small branches and twigs. . . . As evening closed in, the S.S. men decided that the pit was deep enough. . . . prisoners were told to stand in one row facing the forest. . . . I watched the dancing rays of the sun glinting through the trees. . . . Suddenly terrible screams, accompanied by the crackle of rifle fire. . . . There was a stampede to the right and to the left. But the women could not run far. A few steps and they were riddled with bullets. I stood in front of the pit quaking. For a fleeting moment, through glazed eyes, I saw my companions in the pit. Some of them were still moving convulsively. I heard a loud rifle volley, then silence and darkness. . . . Is this death? . . . I try to raise my arm but can't. I open my eyes but see nothing. . . . I am lying inert in the dark. . . . I try to raise myself and I find myself sitting up. Fresh branches are brushing my head. It is dark and there are stars above me. . . . As consciousness returns, my mind begins to clear. . . . Trembling and weeping I cry out in a faltering voice: "Are any of you alive? Come out if you are!" And on the other side of the pit sits a dark figure. "It's me," says Charlotte. But in the pit itself no one moves. We two are the only survivors (Weiss, 74-75).

Bullets did not tear through her, her heart did not stop. But she was certain — her body was certain — that death was coming. She felt that she had died, she lay for hours among the lifeless mass of her comrades, and then got up. Is this the famous valley of death through which souls pass? Is this resurrection? How much is metaphor, how much plain fact? Or is there any longer a difference? Archetypes have actualized in events so exaggerated, so melodramatic and patently symbolic, that no serious novelist, except perhaps in parody, would not attempt to treat them as art.

Man's interior drama, the height and depth of spiritual experience, has been writ large in the world. The concentration camps have done what art always does: they have brought us face to face with archetypes, they have invested body with mind and mind with body, they have given visible embodiment to man's spiritual universe, so that the primary states of good and evil are resident in the look and sound and smell of things. The essence of survival is passage through death; this way of speaking may be metaphorical for us, but not for survivors. Of course a man or woman crawling out of a grave is not thinking of rebirth, may never have thought in such terms. For survivors of those ditches and pits there was only dumb pain. Still, they felt themselves die and then return to life, and the "objective correlative" of their ordeal was not a symbolic representation or a ritual entered imaginatively. It was the world itself, albeit a world such as we know through art and dream only. And here especially we must not be misled by our reliance on metaphor: the survivor is not a metaphor, not an emblem, but an example.

For us the camps are terminal images. They are the realized archetypes of eternal victimhood and of evil forever triumphant. As such they confirm most forcefully our vision of man as monster and victim. And yes, we are monsters. We are victims. But we are also survivors; and once we see the central fact about the survival experience — that these people passed through Hell — the archetypes of doom are, if not cancelled, at least less powerful in their authority over our perceptions. Survivors return from the grave, they come through Hell, and some, after descent into darkness and the defiling filth of underground sewers, rise again into the common world of sun and simple life. Existence at its boundary is intrinsically significant. Whatever we make of this fact, we should keep in mind that for survivors the struggle to live — merely surviving — is rooted in, and a manifestation of, the form-conferring potency of life itself.

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