primo Levi drowned and the saved preface and ch1 Flashcards
the first solution, macabre to the point of making one hesitate to speak of it, had been that of simply
piling up bodies, hundreds of thousands of bodies, in huge common graves
it did not matter that they might die along the way, what really mattered was
that they should not tell their story
having then functioned as centres of political terror then as
death factories
the Lagers had become dangerous for a moribund Germany because they contained
the secret of the Lagers themselves, the greatest crime in the history of humanity
how many knew something but were in a position to pretend that they did not know, and further, how many has the possibility of knowing everything
but chose the more prudent path of keeping their eyes and ears (above all their mouths) well shut
the most obvious demonstration of the cowardice to which Hitlerian had reduced them:
a cowardice which became an integral part of mores, and so profound as to prevent husbands from telling their wives, parents their children
insomuch as they were depositories of the secret
even by keeping it silent they could not always be sure of remaining alive
one prisoner was worth another and if the work killed him he could
immediately be replaced
other industries - or perhaps the same ones- made money out of supplying the Lagers themselves:
Lumber, building materials, the cloth for prisoners stupid uniforms, the dehydrated vegetables for the soup etc
in the inhuman conditions to which they were subjected, the prisoners could barely
acquire an overall vision of their universe
they did not know of the existence of other lagers, even those only a few kilometres away.
they did not know for whom they worked
surrounded by death, the deportee was often in no position to
evaluate the extent of the slaughter that unfolded before his eyes
the companion who worked beside him today was no longer there on the morrow:
he might be in the hut next door, or erased from the world; there was no way to know
in short he felt overwhelmed by an enormous edifice of violence but could not form for himself representations of it because his eyes were fastened
to the ground by every single minutes needs
those not privileged, the ones who represented the core of the camps and who had
escaped death only by a combinations of improbable events
their capacity for observation was
paralysed by suffering incomprehension
therefore the best historians of the Lagers emerged form among the very few who has
the ability and luck to attain a privileged observatory without bowing to compromises
Lager phenomenon and the variety of
human destinies being played out in it
Nazi slaughter was dreadfully ‘exemplary’ and that, if nothing worse happens in the coming years
it will be remembered as the central event, the Scrooge of this century
but the many years that have gone by
make it credible, also upon examination the ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I did not know’ said today by many Germans no longer shocks us , but they did shock or should have shocked us when events were recent
in some cases the lack of memory is
simulated
a certain does of rhetorics is perhaps
indispensable for the memory to persist
every victim is to be mourned and every survivor is to be helped and cited but not all their
acts should be set fourth as examples
the inside of the Lager was an intricate and stratified microcosm;
the ‘grey zone’
[‘grey zone’] that of the prisoners who in some measure, perhaps with good intentions,
collaborated with the authority, was not negligible, indeed it continued a phenomenon of fundamental importance for the historian, the psychologist and the sociologist
this book means to contribute to the clarification of some aspects of the Lager
phenomenon which still appear obscure
how much of the concentration camp world
is dead and will not return, like slavery and the duelling code
