(Here’s the second part of the conversation between my lead, narrating character Ren Prothero, his wife Vera, his Cousin Bronwyn, and Bronwyn’s Italian friend Alessandro, with the Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi. Set on March 16, 1958.)
(Unless I pose a couple sets of polling questions to you, I won’t be posting again until Thursday, November 16. Then my fellow Substack writer Felix Purat and I will post 7 essays in 9 days about one of our favorite authors, Vasily Grossman — I call him a Ukrainian writer; we’ll see if Felix calls him a Ukrainian or not — and I’ll kick that off with my interview with Felix. Onward!)
“How did this spiritedness manifest itself, Primo?” I ask.
“I quite often observed the need for work properly done – so strong as to induce people to perform even slavish chores properly.”
“Surprising,” I reply.
“The Italian bricklayer who saved my life by bringing me food on the sly for six months – he hated the Germans, hated their food, hated their language. But when they set him to erect walls, he built them straight and solid, not out of obedience but out of professional dignity.”
“Compelling,” I say.
“Sometimes the spiritedness rose higher. One day I was among a few other prisoners who were put to work scraping an underground gasoline tank. We worked in almost total darkness and the work was very hard. The other young prisoners were French, and I began telling them about Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy. Then I recited Dante to them:
Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men
To follow after knowledge and excellence
“For a moment I forgot where I was. And like a blast from a Divine trumpet, these lines flooded the hearts of my fellow prisoners. We all forgot the wretched beasts we had been reduced to and remembered that we were still human beings.”
More silence. “What judgment do you make of the German people, Primo?” I ask.
“I prefer the role of witness to that of judge.”
I try a different tact. “Who created your camp at Auschwitz?”
“The S.S. in conjunction with I.G. Farben, which made use of the endless supply of slave labor in their attempt to produce synthetic rubber called Buna.”
“I.G. Farben?” I ask.
“The chemical industrial conglomerate.”
“Farben owned Degesch,” Alessandro explains. “Degesch? Zyklon-B?”
“Got it.”
Primo continues. “The sign – Arbeit Macht Frei –”
“—Work Makes You Free,” I translate.
“—that sign was provided by I.G. Farben. A company slogan.”
“German businesses certainly share in the responsibility,” I say.
“Certainly. The gas was produced by illustrious German chemical plants. To other German plants went the hair of the massacred women. And to German banks went the gold of the teeth extracted from corpses.”
I turn away as my muscles stiffen. Bronwyn’s eyes bulge, her head jerks back, and she touches her throat. “Oh God! Too much!” Vera’s eyes are glistening.
“You saw this firsthand?” Alessandro asks.
“Yes. A German industrial chemist visited the Buna laboratory where I worked as a slave laborer.”
“I remember this part of your story,” Alessandro replies. “He tried to be cordial with you, but that didn’t make up for his guilt.”
“Right. So I’ve been asking myself, How do I tie him before a mirror? How do I tie all Germans before a mirror?”
“So they’ll confront their true nature,” I venture.
He nods. “Most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Indeed, they wanted not to know. State terrorism is very difficult to resist. But the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. An evil man dragged behind him an entire people like a flock.”
“Terrifying,” says Alessandro.
“Look at the newsreels of Hitler and the people. They are giving and receiving flashes of lightning.”
“The German people lacked courage?” Vera asks.
Primo nods. “Certainly. Hitlerian terror reduced most of the German people to cowardice. And without this cowardice the greatest excesses would not have been carried out.”
“So all German adults who didn’t resist were responsible,” says Alessandro.
“To a greater or lesser degree, all were responsible.”
Vera’s eyes have turned red. “I agree,” she says softly.
“The great majority of Germans accepted – out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride – the ‘beautiful words’ of Corporal Hitler. And they followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him.”
Vera stares down at the floor. “Few Germans did the right thing.”
“There were attempts to help. I know, and I know that they were dangerous. It is impossible to rebel in a totalitarian state. I know that too. But I also know that there exist a thousand ways to manifest one’s solidarity with the oppressed, and in Hitler’s Germany these ways were carried out much too infrequently.”
Vera folds her hands in her lap and stares at them. “Acts of decency were so rare.”
Primo nods again. “Yes. The Nazi system was demonic and it dragged almost everyone down to cruelty. It was extremely hard to break out of. You had to have heroic strength. But if Germans of modest courage had been more numerous, that time’s history would be different.”
“Why don’t you hate the Germans, Primo?” Alessandro asks.
“I regard hatred as bestial. I prefer that my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, should be the product of reason.”
“But the Germans seem like such a flawed people,” Alessandro says.
Primo shakes his head. “I can’t agree with you on that, my friend. I feel a deep revulsion for the followers of Nazism, whether dead or alive. But I cannot tolerate that individuals should be judged not for what they are but because of the group to which they happen to belong. If I did harbor hatred toward the Germans as a group, I would feel that I was following the precepts of Nazism, which was founded on national and racial hatred.”
“I understand,” Alessandro replies. “I’d have to say you are right.”
“So you’ve forgiven the Germans, Primo?” Vera suggests.
He shakes his head again. “I have not forgiven any of the culprits.”
I raise my eyebrows. “No?”
“No, Ren. Nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them.”
“Under any circumstances?”
“Unless he has shown – with deeds – that he has become conscious of the crimes and errors of Fascism and is determined to condemn them, and uproot them from his conscience and from that of others.”
I nod. “Makes sense.”
“In this case am I prepared to forgive my enemy, because an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.”
Primo begins to shift in his chair a bit, and Alessandro takes this as our signal. “Well, my friend, we’ve taken up enough of your time. We appreciate your wisdom, Primo.”
“Are we done already?” he replies.
“You’ve deepened my understanding,” I tell him. “May I inquire, Primo, what can we learn from all this?”
“To remember.”
Vera brings a shaky hand to her forehead. “There are so many things conspiring against memory.”
He nods. “Yes, Vera. First, the entire history of the brief millennial Reich can be reread as a war against memory. An Orwellian falsification of memory. Falsification of reality. Negation of reality. Hitler had forbidden and denied his subjects any access to truth, contaminating their morality and their memory.
“Second, the extermination plants were the greatest crime in the history of humanity. The S.S. took the greatest care to ensure that no witnesses survived.
“And third, the memory of a trauma suffered is itself traumatic, because recalling it is disturbing or even painful. The person who is wounded blocks out the memory so as not to renew the pain. The person who inflicted the wound pushes the memory deep down, to alleviate the feelings of guilt.”
“Absolutely,” I reply.
“It is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know and remember.”
“Yes,” I say. “Our duty.”
Primo turns even more reflective. “We are all part of the same human family to which the Nazi murderers belonged. They have demonstrated for all centuries to come what unsuspected reserves of viciousness and madness lie latent in humanity even after millennia of civilized life. Who can say that he is immune from infection? We must be on our guard.”
Vera nods. “Against what, specifically?”
“Many people, many nations can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that every stranger is an enemy. For the most part, this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection. It betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.
“But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise, then, at the end of the chain, there is the death camp. Here is the product of a view of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion. So long as the view subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us.”
“This is how it all starts,” I say.
“And with an attack on freedoms,” Alessandro adds.
“That’s right. In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of human beings, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and once on that road it is difficult to halt.”
“What happened could happen again,” I observe.
“And it can happen anywhere,” Alessandro says. “No country is immune.”
“A new Fascism only awaits its new buffoon – to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory, and so contaminate the world.”
I look him in the eye. “You’re offering the world a warning, Primo.”
He looks directly back. “Sure. Consciences can be seduced and obscured again – even our consciences. The intolerance, the abuse, the servitude can be born, walking on tiptoe and calling themselves by other names, and can loose themselves with such violence that they rout all defenses.”
“How can we keep it from happening again?” I ask.
“Every citizen, from schooldays onwards, needs to learn the meaning of truth and lies, and that they are not exchangeable. We all must learn that from the moment you abdicate your own conscience, as soon as you replace your conscience with a cult of the leader ‘who is always right’, you risk becoming guilty of the greatest crimes.”
He stands up. We all stand up. He leads us through the foyer and opens the door of his apartment. We head out into the hall. I arrive last, we all shake hands, and as we walk away, I turn around and ask one last question.
“What must we do, Primo?”
“Sharpen our senses. Distrust the enchanters who seek to convince with words unsupported by reason. Carve memories of the death camps into our hearts. Repeat them to our children. And if our own house begins to fall apart, find the strength to resist.”
This is such an interesting project. Really intrigued by this special edition series with Felix! Can’t wait to see it.