The first reports of the Nazi death camps began to circulate in the crucial year of 1942. Vague yet concordant, they described a massacre of such vast proportions, such deliberate cruelty, and such tangled motivations that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity.
The opening lines of the book’s Preface situates immediately the reason for the author feeling the need to write the book. Imagine if the horrors of the Holocaust were rejected due to their sheer inexplicable inhumanity at a time when the horrors of a world war was taking place right in front of people’s eyes. Now imagine the difficulty of trying to convince people of the historical depths of depravity committed by the Nazis more than half a century removed. The author recognized that past depravities of human nature had taken on the aspect of myth due to the passage of time and did not want such a transformation to happen to the nightmare of the Holocaust. Alas, of course, for more people than one might ever have imagined, such a nightmare scenario is actually taking place despite the efforts of Levi and others to ensure the truth was never allowed to be forgotten.
…the uneducated (and Hitler’s Germans, especially the SS, were shockingly uneducated: either they hadn’t been “educated” or they had been educated badly) do not know how to distinguish clearly between people who do not understand their language and people who do not understand anything…there was only one civilization in the world, German civilization…people who neither understood nor spoke German were barbarians by default.
This quote is from the chapter titled “Communication” in which he re-examines the various means of communication which took place between Nazis and their victims as well as between victims and other victims. At heart, however, the chapter is really about the communication between Nazis and those who weren’t yet Nazis, but soon enough joined to swell their ranks. He is here making a strongly worded if veiled statement about the concept of nationalism in general. Such tunnel vision is the domain of the ignorant and those smart enough to reject it privately, but embrace it outwardly for the purpose of propaganda are responsible—to a point—for creating two completely different types of victimhood. Those who blindly followed were just as much victims as those who were killed for being too intelligent; but victims of much less dire consequence. This concept is not strictly limited to German nationalism and Nazi ideology, of course. Everyone is a barbarian to someone. Nationalism is an international disease of ignorance, not a cancer limited to any one specific people.
We tend to simplify history, too, although we cannot always agree on the outline within which to organize facts, and consequently different historians may understand and construct history in incompatible ways. But our need to divide the field between “us” and “them” is so strong—perhaps for reasons rooted in our origins as social animals—that this one scheme, the friend-enemy dichotomy, prevails over all others.
At the center of the author’s premise that such barbaric displays of inhumanity must never be allowed to devolve into myth is the idea that inhumanity is an element of written history. That which is never recorded is never remembered, of course, but there is an even greater danger: that which is recorded, but allowed to be tempered into the grayness of ambiguity. History may be written by the victors, but even when the victors are on the side of the humanity, politics can make strange bedfellows. Silence by “good Germans” is no more nor less dangerous to truth as the anti-communist politics of post-war America. Communication is vital for not allowing truth to become myth, but at all points along the spectrum, communication is subject to the potential for a less—inconvenient—version of truth. This spectrum is the radiant spokes poking out from the wheel of “us versus them.”
“If it should happen to you another time, do as I said: you’ll see, you’ll succeed.”
The advice is from a young boy in the fifth grade and it follows a truly stunning description of the author’s experience in that classroom. The boy asked a very simple question that has been asked again and again of those who suffered in Nazi camps. After asking the question, he presses forward and asks Levi to make a drawing of the blackboard of the camp as he remembered it. With this image before everyone, the boy proceeds to outline a series of acts which would have led—or the boy imagines—in his successful escape. The question is, of course: “Why didn’t you escape.” The answer is complicated beyond the ability of anyone to truly understand, but it essentially comes down to this: you had to be there. In this book, the author takes us there, to a place none of us would ever like to go and from which it is highly unlikely that boy or anyone else should ever be expected to have escaped. Or even, for that matter, never have to be asked why they didn’t try.
It would be a monumental mistake to suspect that the author was ever only asked this question by ten year old kids.
