How to transmit the lived experience of suffering is one of the recurring urgencies of the book. Semprún describes a discussion among several camp survivors, just after the war, mostly academics – the discussion focusses on how it might be possible to communicate the ‘radical evil’ of what they’ve experienced. Documentary film is impossible, because nearly all of the most significant events were never recorded, so what is left is literature – but this will have to be more than reportage, more than mere description of horror, it will need to explore the human soul in relation to evil: Semprún says, ‘We’ll need a Dostoevsky!’
This transmission, however, is not only from Semprún and his comrades to the world, but also to Semprún and his fellow prisoners. Early in the book he relates an experience that haunted him for the rest of his life. Sunday afternoons were the one time in the week where prisoners had control over their time. The underground communists in Buchenwald (Semprún’s grouping) used this time for secret meetings. They chose the basement ward for contagious illnesses in the infirmary complex for this purpose – for the intelligent reason that the SS’s horror of contagion meant they almost never set foot in there. On a snowy day in winter 1944, a German communist leader, Kaminski, calls a meeting in the infirmary:
I crossed the camp through flurries of snow that Sunday and entered the infirmary compound. At the door to the isolation hut, I tapped the soles of my boots against the iron bar provided for this purpose on the right side of the doorstep … Kaminski had brought us together to listen to a survivor of Auschwitz, a Polish Jew who had arrived on one of that winter’s evacuation convoys. We settled ourselves in the little room … at the end of the basement reserved for infectious cases … At Auschwitz, Kaminski explained, the man had worked in a Sonderkommando. We didn’t know what that was …
Semprún then relates how this man spoke to them, and the devastating impact of his words:
I no longer remember the name of that Polish Jew … I do remember his eyes. They were an icy blue, like the cutting edge of a broken pane of glass. I do remember his posture. He sat on a chair, absolutely straight, absolutely rigid, his hands on his knees, motionless. He never once moved his hands during the whole story of his experience on the Sonderkommando.
I do remember his voice. He spoke in German, fluently, in a rasping, meticulous, insistent voice … It was only in his voice that his overwhelming emotion broke through, like a groundswell violently stirring the surface of seemingly calm waters. Fear that no one would believe him probably … Because throughout history, there have been survivors of massacres … but there hadn’t been, and there never would be, any survivors of the Nazi gas chambers. No one would ever be able to say: I was there. You were around, or before, or beside, like those in the Sonderkommando …
He spoke for a long while; we listened to him in silence, frozen in the pallid anguish of his story. Suddenly when Ludwig G. lighted a lamp, we realised that wintry night had fallen, that we had been shrouded in darkness for some time already. We had sunk body and soul into the night of that story, suffocating, without any sense of time.
‘That’s it’, said Kaminski … ‘Never forget … Germany! My country is the guilty one – let’s never forget that!’ There was silence. The survivor of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, this Polish Jew … remained motionless, his hands spread out flat on his knees: a pillar of salt and despairing memory.
We remained motionless too.
Semprún, for all the tenderness of his writing, can also be unforgiving. He describes being inspired by Levinas’s essays during his last year at school, and, on Levinas’s recommendation, buying Heidegger’s vast treatise Sein und Zeit (‘Being and Nothingness’) – which he’s not overly impressed by. He later learns of Heidegger’s abhorrent connection with Nazism, and how this bemused his friend, the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan – that the rigorous, supposedly humanist philosopher had never distanced himself from the inhumanity of Nazism. After the war Celan was staying with Heidegger at his log cabin in the Black Forest, and Semprún relates what happened, or, in this case, didn’t happen:
What Paul Celan wanted from Martin Heidegger, you may recall, was a clear statement on his position on Nazism. And on the extermination of the Jewish people in Hitler’s camps, specifically. As you doubtless also recall, Celan was unsuccessful. He found only that silence some have tried to fill with empty chatter, or to erase from memory: Heidegger’s definitive silence on the question of German culpability. A silence Karl Jaspers speaks of with devastating philosophical rigour in some of his letters.
Semprún then translates some lines from Celan’s poem ‘Todtnauberg’ – a meditation on what name might have been written before his own in Heidegger’s guest book. He hopes for a heartfelt word from the philosopher, about what had remained unsaid in their conversation. A word that never came. Semprún continues:
I think about the destiny of the German language: language of barked SS commands … and language of Kafka, of Husserl, Freud, Benjamin, Canetti, of Paul Celan himself – of so many other Jewish intellectuals who created the grandeur and richness of German culture during the 1930s. Language of subversion, therefore: language of the universal affirmation of critical reason … The hope inscribed that day in the guest book of Martin Heidegger was not fulfilled. No heartfelt word had come from the philosopher to fill this silence. Shortly afterward, Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
There is a striking connection here to the corruption of an entire culture and language, with the life and experience of Jean Améry (born Hanns Mayer, in Vienna in 1912). Primo Levi relates that Mayer grew up in a Jewish family so assimilated that he hardly considered himself Jewish at all, had no knowledge of Hebrew or Zionism. He studies German literature and philosophy at university, and this was the language he loved and which he wrote in, as he begins his career as a critic. But when the Nazis annex Austria in 1938, he realises he has no future in his homeland, and emigrates to Belgium. He even feels exiled from his mother tongue. He changes his name to Jean Améry (an anagram of his original name); and he, the cultivated Germanophile humanist, now tried to write in French. He also feels it’s important, at this time, as a matter of human dignity, to accept his Jewish identity more fully. Subsequently he joins the Resistance in Belgium, is captured by the Gestapo in 1943, and is tortured in Breendonk fortfn3 – an experience he writes of unforgettably in At the Mind’s Limit. After this, he is sent to Auschwitz, to Monowitz, where he, like Levi, becomes a slave labourer on the vast IG Farben Buna works.
In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi writes a vivid description of the different ways the German language was brutalised in Auschwitz. He and his fellow Italians learned to understand a primitive form – only inasmuch as their survival depended upon it. But Levi recognises the horror with which a German-speaking prisoner, like Améry, would have experienced the corruption of his native language:
He suffered from it … in a way … that was spiritual rather than material. He suffered from it because German was his language, because he was a philologist who loved the language: just as a sculptor would suffer at seeing one of his statues befouled or mutilated.