An Honourable Defeat (37 page)

Against the German desire to consign the concentration camps to history and hopefully bury them there, there are the voices that have been raised not only by the survivors themselves but by those who are interested in them — and who realize that their experiences are not only of a moral, ethical and philosophical interest, but are of practical application too. The concentration camp syndrome identified by Eitinger, Thygesen and others soon after the war, to take one example (see Chapter 6), has provided a model for and the basis of the post-traumatic stress syndrome, identifiable in the victims of hijack, terrorists’ hostages, and soldiers;
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but if the emphasis shifts, as it must with time, we should not forget the origins. Similarly, courageous work by Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto, who conducted a clinical study of the effects of starvation there (all but one of them died there themselves), and the pioneering work on semi-starvation by a team of Danish doctors, many of whom were themselves former inmates of the KZ, immediately after the war, have contributed to our ability to understand and aid famine victims in the Third World today.
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From what has been said it may be inferred that anyone writing about the concentration camps at the end of the twentieth century is writing at a unique time: at a moment of heightened interest in them, and at a moment when one has a last opportunity to illuminate one’s work through personal contact with survivors. There are great difficulties. I cannot convey a tone of voice beyond describing it; I can say that someone cried; but can I convey what it feels like to sit in a comfortable office in Munich with a woman who stood across a desk from Himmler and pleaded with him for her husband’s life? Can I describe how I felt when, sitting in an armchair in a large drawing-room in Harrow, a vigorous 58-year-old told me how, in Buchenwald, he had awoken on his wooden bunk, disturbed by a stone that was digging into him? ‘But how could a stone be there? I reached around and found that it was my pelvis; there was no flesh between it and the nerves of my skin; my buttocks had disappeared.’ I am deeply aware of the responsibility I have to those who have trusted me. In his Foreword to Eitinger and Krell’s
Psychological and Medical Effects of Concentration Camps and Related Persecutions on Survivors of the Holocaust
Shlomo Breznitz writes: ‘No longer personally painful, yet not entirely distant, the Holocaust experience is situated in that grey no man’s land which makes it for the first time in many years accessible to the objective investigation and mind. However, this may turn out to be a short-lived interest, just as the candle, before dying, flickers intensely just one more time.’ I am not sure that the experience is ‘no longer personally painful’, but I take the point of the caveat. The hope is that the material generated by the interest will be so stimulating that the candle will in fact go on burning, to illuminate future generations.

Part One of this book aims to provide a background of information against which Part Two, which is the body of the book, can be read, thus avoiding the need to pepper Part Two with quantities of explanatory notes. In relating the survivors’ stories, if I have dealt not only with their post-war experiences but also with their lives in the camp, it is because the two are inseparable: one cannot be understood without the other. Jorgen Kieler suggested to me that the number of reactions human beings can master is limited, but the number of stresses they can be exposed to is possibly limitless. I make no apology for any repetition of experience or reaction in the stories related in Part Two, because I believe that the repetitions set up resonances, and such resonances, such similarities of experience and reaction, will enable the reader to draw whatever conclusions about survival in and after the camps he chooses.

Each interview took the survivor through his or her life, from pre-war days and family background, through the camps to the present. There were thus three phases in each conversation. Many survivors, especially Jews, came out of the KZ to find new homes in Israel, the USA and the United Kingdom. Often, where they had hoped to find sympathetic interest in their stories, which they were eager to tell, in order to externalize the experiences and so attempt to exorcize them, they found instead indifference or even hostility. Relatives who had got away in time, or those who had long lived away from mainland Europe, adopted an attitude of ‘don’t tell me — it’s too horrible — I don’t want to hear it’, which deeply wounded the survivors and drove some into a silence which lasted decades. I was the first person many people had told their experiences to; and their need to talk was reflected by the extraordinary detail in which they remembered their time in the KZ, a time which they frequently described as being more real, more vivid to them still, than the decades which have passed since. The reasons for this will become apparent as the stories unfold. Interviews might take seven hours or more, and one French Resistance survivor told me, ‘It would take me a day to really describe a day in Flossenburg.’ The need to tell of the KZ experience, over and over again, is important. Just as you or I, in the wake of a lost job or a broken marriage, will lean on our friends and exorcize our woes by telling and retelling the story of what went wrong, until we have talked it out of ourselves, so a survivor will try to tell his story repeatedly. But we know people who understand completely what it is like to lose a job, or a lover, and we know that they will be able to sympathize because they have shared the experience. The KZ survivor can turn with confidence only to other survivors, and the enormity of his experience is such that it can never be truly talked out.

That is only one reaction. Some former KZ inmates have reacted by blocking or suppressing the memory; one or two who have only recently broken their silence told me that they were made to feel so alien by others who had not been in the KZ and who did not want to hear about it that they kept quiet in order to get a place back in the fold of the ‘normal’. ‘I kept quiet, once I’d got the message, because I wanted to blend into the crowd, to be unnoticed, to carry on as if nothing had happened.’ Many survivors remain silent; but it is impossible to suppress the memories for ever, especially with retirement, the departure of grown children, and the onset of old age. It is at that time, and it is happening now, in the late twentieth century, that the silent survivors are at their greatest danger. They are not the only ones affected, either. In recent years a number of creative writers and historians, themselves former KZ inmates, have committed suicide, among them Paul Celan, Piotr Rawicz, Uri Tal and Primo Levi. This propensity to suicide emerged in a conversation with Albert Friedlander which took place before Primo Levi’s death; but at the time Dr Friedlander, himself a survivor, not of the camps but of the
St Louis
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expressed a fear that more suicides would follow.

Something which I hope will emerge in these pages is a picture not of martyrs or heroes (though I think they are both) but of ordinary people who, subjected to extreme and sustained stress, more or less managed to cope with it, get through it, and afterwards find a way of coming to terms with the wound it left. This book is not a history, not even an interpretation of facts, but a presentation of true stories, of recollections, and a relation of incredible courage in the face of continu-ing pain. A point that must be stressed at the outset, however, is that the people I have talked to belong to an elite group: they have made a sufficient recovery to talk about what has happened to them. There are many, many more survivors whose spirits were permanently broken, or who were driven mad.

Onc could make a shortlist of the attributes essential for survival in the camps: a sense of humour, adaptability, the ability to form small self-help groups, the ability to keep your head down, to get ‘soft’ jobs whenever possible, to maintain your own sense of dignity and decency. It is more difficult to make a similar list of what you need to adapt back to normal life. One thing seems clear to me: for the concentration camp survivor, there is no return to the person he or she formerly was, nor is there any final laying of the ghost, no matter how well adapted once again the survivor may appear to be; and many, possibly most, of them would not even wish there to be. The journey back from hell is not one that is achieved for any former camp inmate — it is a journey each one is still making, with pain, with continuous effort, with courage, with varying degrees of success — some striding, some limping. It is not even a question of putting a greater distance between oneself and the KZ — rather it is a question of coming to an accommodation with the memory, with the person the KZ has made one. If you lose your hand, the impression of it lingers long after it has gone. Ultimately you become used to its absence, and you get along without it. For hours on end you might not even think about its absence. But never a day passes when you are not aware that it has gone. Survivors cannot escape their past, or what was done to them, or what they have lost. The physical and mental scars are there for good; one’s life-expectancy is reduced. But if they are lucky, and strong enough, they can live, and that is a triumph.

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