CONCENTRATION CAMP WORLD

[W]e make our deals with power, willingly or not, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that not far away the train is waiting.¹

The Nazi concentration camps were a zone of annihilation and violence but at the same time a realm of paradox, enigma and secrecy. To recognise this complexity from the outset is to say also that collective remembering must avoid perfunctory recollection—any mere naming of the disaster—if it is to give the honour due to both the dead and the survivors. Memory must enter a sinister territory of shadows and agony. One of the lessons of the camps is that some fates are almost impossible to comprehend: they can be named but not taken to heart. Plentiful testimony exists that people arriving in the camps couldn’t believe it if informed they would soon be murdered. Fellow prisoners who were repeatedly forced to encounter this phenomenon of disbelief would (if they could) spare the condemned from learning of their death sentence, out of pity for the unbearable fear felt by the ones about to die.

To start with paradoxes helps with thinking about the constant violence of the camps. This wasn’t sheer anarchy or frenzy; it was institutionalised chaos. The brutality was made possible by organisational order and efficiency. There was a system. The camps were, to quote Alain Resnais’s film Night and Fog, a machine. Hell on earth required technology, planning and skilful man-management. Bureaucracy and corporate jargon played their part as well but the most notorious euphemism, the Auschwitz gate’s slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI, wasn’t only a piece of falsehood and mockery. Certainly it did deceive: camp commanders quickly learned that to promise frightened crowds of prisoners that they would soon be put to work was the easiest way of herding them into the gas chambers. However, like so much else in the concentration camp world, the Auschwitz sign was Janus-faced. It had a double meaning. Applied not to the extermination factories and killing grounds but to the well-appointed SS barracks and offices, considered from the perspective of staff, the motto expressed an overarching truth about the camp operation. To quote a sociological study, The Order of Terror by Wolfgang Sofsky: “The guards in the camp had every possible freedom—nearly total license. The institution was so constructed that it did not curb power but set it free, transmuting it into absolute terror.”² The work-freedom was theirs: the liberty to massacre and torment with impunity, in accordance with a permissive code of camp regulations and a group culture of privilege.

The Nazi staff weren’t simply degenerates, men who had regressed to barbarism. They were trained and indoctrinated servants of the Nazi state. Notwithstanding any individual criminal instincts, they were company men. It mustn’t be forgotten that the viciousness unleashed in the camps included not only gratuitous torture and merciless beating to death but also the cold, meticulous violence of medical experiments, and the amoral engineering knowhow needed to build and run the gas chambers. The different elements—hell and technology, mass murder and science without soul—went together. The scale of the slaughter was made possible by the industrialisation of atrocity.

One monstrous consequence of the staff’s work-freedom was the enslavement of prisoners in the crematoria and other killing sites. The Sonderkommandos (special squads) had to carry out tasks such as cutting the hair of prisoners going into the gas chambers, stripping the corpses and then incinerating them. Perhaps there was nothing more corrupt than this enforcement of complicity. The system was designed to delegate guilt—to deprive its victims of even their innocence—to lay on these men, chosen for their strength and fitness, the spiritual burden of the concentration camp world’s evil. The special-squad members were kept in isolation. Selected periodically for extermination when deemed no longer useful, they were called secret-bearers (Geheimnisträger) because they alone among the prisoners knew the practical mechanics of genocide. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah relies heavily on the testimony of special-squad members, and what they say is poignant beyond measure. These are the words of Filip Müller, survivor of Auschwitz:

Every day we saw thousands and thousands of innocent people disappear up the chimney. With our own eyes, we could truly fathom what it is to be a human being. There they came, men, women, children, all innocent. They suddenly vanished, and the world said nothing! We felt abandoned. By the world, by humanity. But the situation taught us fully what the possibility of survival meant. For we could gauge the infinite value of human life. And we were convinced that hope lingers in man as long as he lives. Where there’s life, hope must never be relinquished. That’s why we struggled through our lives of hardship, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, hoping against hope to survive, to escape that hell.³
Such words go beyond the ordinary currents of life, beyond any commonly known standard of abandonment, and move into a sacred realm. They are words worthy of reverence.

In the crematoria, complete domination of human beings was attempted. The men, women and children consumed by the million were nothing but “pieces” of rubbish to be harvested and destroyed. The special squads worked in conditions of almost total subjugation until most of them too were murdered. Anything worse than what happened in the crematoria can barely be imagined, and the duty is permanent to seek to remember beyond mere naming of the catastrophe. Yet there is something more: the attempt at absolute dominion failed.

László Nemes’ 2015 fiction film Son of Saul uses cinematic technique to evoke the experience of crematorium compulsion and clampdown, of confinement and powerlessness. The film’s claustrophobic framing means that the surroundings can never be seen clearly. The shoulder-level camera almost always stays just behind Saul the special-squad member as he scurries under the SS lash while stealing whatever tiny fragment of time and space he can, for a purpose of his own.

Others in the squad are planning an uprising. Saul is involved but his own mission is different. Against all odds he wants to arrange a religious burial for a boy who survived being gassed, only to be suffocated by the Nazi doctor who discovered him still breathing. Eventually Saul’s project hinders the rebellion, causing one of the leaders to tell him that he let down the living for the sake of the dead. Yet it is Saul’s very devotion to his unauthorised and impossible labour of Jewish kinship and piety which, rather than the rebellion, surpasses the power of the Nazi lords of death. For, as Shoah makes clear more extensively, secret-bearing too has a second meaning, expressed at a certain moment in Son of Saul by a smile which transfigures Saul’s harried and anguished face. Those who survived the unparalleled ordeal of the crematoria carried with them the secret of what it was to continue to love, even in the infernal centre of the concentration camp world.

1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Michael F. Moore, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein (1986; New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015), vol. 3, p. 2456.
2. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (1993; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 116.
3. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust—The Complete Text of the Film, English subtitles by A. Whitelaw and W. Byron (New York, Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 145–6.