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
how much is back and coming back? what can each of us do, so that in this world
pregnant with threat will be nullified
Human memory is a marvellous but
fallacious instrument
the memories which lie within us are not carved in stone
not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features
some mechanisms are known which falsify memory under particular conditions:
traumas, not only cereal ones; interference by other ‘competitive’ memories; abnormal conditions of consciousness; repressions; blockages
even under normal conditions, a slow degradation is at work, an obfuscation of outlines, a so to speak
psychological oblivion, which few memories resist
it is certain that practice (in this case, frequent re-evocation) keeps memories fresh and alive in the same manner
in which a muscle that is often used remains efficient; but it is also true that a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience
tested by experience, crystallised,
perfected, adorned, which installs itself in the place of the raw memory and glows at its expense
I intend to examine here the memories of extreme experiences
of injuries suffered or inclined
in this case, all or almost all the factors that can obliterate or deform the
mnemonic record are at work
the memory of trauma suffered or inflicted is itself traumatic because recalling it is painful or at least disturbing:
a person who was wounded tends to block out the memory so as to renew the pain;
the person who has inflicted the wound
pushes the memory deep down, to be rid of to, to alleviate the feeling of guilt
we are dealing with a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor, and we are anxious to be Clear:
both are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it, and if he suffers from this, it is right that he should suffer
it is iniquitous that the victim should suffer from it,
even at the distance of decades
it must be observed, mournfully that
the injury cannot be healed
[injury] it extends through time, and the furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe not only lack the tormentor (…)
but they perpetuate the tormentors work by denying peace to the tormented
more important are the justifications
:why did you do this? were you aware that you were committing a crime?
in the end they all say substantially the same things:
I did it because I was ordered to; others (my superiors) have committed acts worse than mine; in view of the upbringing I received, and the environment in which I lived I could not act differently
if I had not done it,
another would have done it even more harshly in my place
they cannot see the imbalance between their excuses and the enormity of
pain and death that they have caused
they lie knowing that they are lying:
they are in bad faith
good faith/bad faith (…)
pre supposes a mental clarity which few have, and which even these few immediately lose when for whatever reason, past or present reality arouses anxiety or discomfort in them
the past is a burden for them; they feel
repugnance for the things done or suffered and tend to replace them with others
the silent transition from falsehood to self deception is useful: anyone who lied in good faith is better off
he recites his part better, is more easily believed by the judge, the historian, the reader, his wife and his children
to keep good and bad faith distinct costs a lot: it requires a decent sincerity or truthfulness with oneself:
it demands a continuous intellectual and moral effort
the decisions were not ours, because the regime in which we grew up in did not allow us autonomous decisions: others have decided for us, and it could only happen this way
(…) this reasoning cannot be considered purely the fruit of imprudence
the pressure that a totalitarian state can exercise over the individual is frightful. its weapons are substantially three:
direct propaganda or propaganda camouflaged as upbringing, instruction and popular culture; the barrier erected against pluralism of information; and terror
it is not plausible to admit that this pressure is
irresistible
to ask oneself whether it was done in good or bad faith is
naive
an extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its
suppression
the rememberer has decided not to remember and has succeeded:
by dint of denying its existence, he has expelled the harmful memory as one expels an excretion or a parasite
supposing, absurdly, that the liar should for one instant become truthful, he himself would not know how to answer the dilemma;
in the act of lying he is an act totally fused with his part, he is no longer distinguishable from it
it is easier to deny entry to a memory than to
free oneself from it after it has been recorded
[denial] this in substance was the purpose of many of the artifices thought up by the Nazi commanders in order to
protect the consciences of those assigned to do the dirty work, and to ensure their service, disagreeable even for the mist hardened cut-throats
[hitler] had forbidden and denied his subjects any access to truth, contaminating their…
morality and their memory
[hitler] like all gamers, he erected around himself a stage set woven out of
superstitious lies, which he ended by believing with the same fantastical faith that he demanded from every German
[hitler] his collapse was not only a salvation for mankind but also
a demonstration of the price to be paid when one dismembers the truth
when we say ‘I will never forget that’, referring to some event which profoundly wounded us (…)
we are in foolhardy; in ‘civilian’ life we also gladly forget the details of serious illness from which we have recovered, or those of a successful surgical operation
Alberto never returned. more than forty years have passed; I did not have the courage to show up again and to counterpose my painful
‘truth’ that, one helping the other, Albertos relatives had fashioned for themselves
this very book is drenched in memory; what’s more , as distant memory
thus it draws from a suspect source
it contains more considerations than
memories
