'Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold'
- Excerpt from 'If This is a Man' by Primo Levi
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| A snapshot (literally) of some of my Holocaust related literature. Pictured: If This Is A Man/The Truce by Primo Levi; The Night Trilogy by Elie Wiesel; Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen; Born Survivors by Wendy Holden. |
The humanity of the Holocaust. What does that even mean? Is that even a thing? I don't know. I've read many books on the Holocaust - survivor's testimonies, analyses, biographies, discussions, essays, historical biographies, news articles - but it's the same thing I keep coming back to: the humanity of it all. What immediately comes to mind is the fact that humanity and the Holocaust are words not to be used in the same sentence; they're the perfect paradox, right? But isn't the Holocaust all about humanity, subversively? Humanity is at the core of the Holocaust, I think, in two ways.
First, in its intrinsic aim and systematic abuse of dehumanisation. I'll always remember what Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon said in a documentary I watched last year: (this is paraphrasing as I can't find/exactly remember the quote) to survive Auschwitz, you had to act like an animal, think like one, eat like one, be one. At the core of the Nazi ideology and its racist manifesto was the superiority of 'pure' Aryan, Nordic blood and the conversely inferior, vermin-like nature of other races, cultures and lineages. Indeed, many of the leading Nazi's were previously chicken farmers, including Heinrich Himmler, hence the parallel between the Nazi camps and animal farming takes on a different dimension and implication. Dehumanisation.
The second role of humanity in the Holocaust is its most duplicitous and challenging; that of the Nazi's themselves, and in particular the party leaders including Hitler himself. Many fictional works have been written around the relationship between Hitler and his nieces, and affairs between soldiers and civilians (see Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, April in Paris by Michael Wallner etc.), and I think this is the scariest thing about the Holocaust. Those who perpetrated it were people. They had families, they had crushes, they enjoyed food, they had dreams, they had nightmares, they felt love, they felt jealousy, they breathed, they walked, they laughed. They were humans. They weren't the deformed, horrific, animalistic monsters one would illustrate them as (physically). The scariest thing of all? They thought that what they were doing was right. That it was moral. Despite the many accounts of those who have disagreed with the regime, tried to leave the regime and its actions, it still continued. Not just those in the Party with senior positions. Many civilians, German (see Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada) and invaded (see (movie) Woman in Gold by Simon Curtis), actively supported the work of the Nazis. This struck me initially in my reading of Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay; here, De Rosnay resuscitates the Vel d'hiv's Roundup which was a voluntary, early roundup of French Jews by the French police and camps on French soil like Drancy, highlighting that the Nazi's were not alone in their actions and dehumanisation. The retaliation after the end of the war upon German nationals provides another glimpse of the 'humanity' within the Holocaust, something less widely spoken about nor acknowledged.
Humanity in it's truest sense may perhaps be found most frankly in the acts of people like Corrie Ten Boom and Oskar Schindler, who risked and often sacrificed their lives to save those persecuted by the Nazis.
'Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz'; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response. What I do know is that there is 'response' in responsibility. When we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant, 'responsibility' is the key word.'
- Elie Wiesel, Preface to Night pg. 13
So how do we, who have not experienced the Holocaust, discuss it? How do we regard it? What do we make of its humanity?
In his biographical recount, If This Is A Man, Primo Levi writes extensively on the subject of humanity and its adverse dehumanisation, especially well in the chapter 'This Side of Good and Evil'. Here he challenges how we can condemn and judge the morality of those actively engaged in the Holocaust, either as victims or perpetrators.
"In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil direction, is authorised and encouraged by the SS; theft in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among Hafting is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal gravity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust'; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire." - pg. 92
He also recounts an incident in the bathroom of the camp, where he refused to wash and instead used the time as a moment of idle 'life', judging one of his friends for 'washing' himself in the liquid that passed as water without soap in spite of the fact that within a few hours he would be as coal-covered and dirty as Levi himself, who hadn't washed. But the act of washing, Levi realised, is not an act of cleansing oneself in the camp; it is an act of retaining what little humanity is afforded you; a psychological ritual. A rebellion against dehumanisation. Isn't this the very thing the camps sought to suppress and eradicate?
And, simultaneously, isn't humanity the very thing the Holocaust sought to preserve and strengthen? By 'eradicating' Jews and other 'undesirables', Hitler and his Nazi ideology strove to preserve only the 'purest', 'strongest' people, the Herrenvolk, master race. Writings around the existence of the Lebensborn programme, by which the SS encouraged the procreation between racially-pure SS men and German women, the abduction of Aryan children from conquered nations and the fostering of these children into politically and racially 'pure' German families, explicitly points towards the apparent humanity of these 'angels of death'. Indeed, Lebensborn translates into 'fountain of life' - what place does life, let alone a fountain of it, have in the Holocaust?
When I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau on a school trip a few years ago, the things which struck me at the camps were not the piles of hair, of shoes, of bags, the torture chambers, the gas chambers, the railway tracks, the cattle carts, the barracks. It's easy to immunise yourself against these things and detach them from normality, viewing them instead in the abstract. You know what has happened here, where these bags and shoes have come from, and yet it's so overwhelming it fails to register in reality. What struck me was the cottage/villa on the site of Auschwitz, situated in close proximity to the gas chamber, quite literally amidst the barracks, within the camp, and a picture in a nearby church of a Jewish congregation in the '30s. We were told that the cottage/villa once housed the commander of the camp, moreover, most stunningly, that it housed a family, currently. What place does humanity, a family, have in Auschwitz today? The picture showed smiling faces and laughter, humanity at its best, most of whom had perished in the camp. This was a place of humanity; the Holocaust is shrouded in humanity. When you see it like this, not as some far-removed political mistake, a demonic event orchestrated by animals of another world, or an incident of no relevance to the modern, globalised world, that's when the reality of it sinks in.
I don't pretend to understand the Holocaust. I don't think anyone can ever understand the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel writes, in the preface to his novel Day, that a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel - or else it is not about Auschwitz. Is the fictionalised, perverted use of the Holocaust as a setting, a comparison, an interrogation, an example, wrong because it familiarises us with it, detaches us from it? I don't think so. Remembrance and acknowledgement are key to prevention.
The closest I think we can ever get to understanding and seeing the Holocaust, is in recognising its (relationship with) humanity.
Recommended reads, from which many of my questions have formed:
- Born Survivors // Wendy Holden
- Hitler's Forgotten Children // Ingrid Von Oelhafen
- If This Is A Man & The Truce // Primo Levi
- The Night Trilogy // Elie Wiesel
- Alone in Berlin // Hans Fallada
- Sarah's Key // Tatiana De Rosnay
- Suite Francaise // Irene Nemirovsky
- Schindler's Ark // Thomas Keneally
- Paper Love // Sarah Wildman
- April in Paris // Michael Wallner
C
Disclaimer: these are only musings and personal opinions. I claim no intellectual understanding or study. I haven't formally studied History since year 9; all of the above stems from personal reading.
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