The Theory and Practice of Hell (71 page)

But even if a man had not occupied a high social position in pre-concentration-camp times, it took considerable force of character to overcome the difficulties that faced him, especially the hurdle of not having been a “ proletarian.” A good friend of mine, Willi Jellinek, a pastry baker from Vienna, will serve as an example. At Buchenwald he was a corpse carrier, a nonentity from the point of view of the camp hierarchy. He was a young Jew, a tall man of notable physical strength with marked personal characteristics. During the Koch regime his chances of survival seemed slight.

But what happened to Jellinek instead? He became our out standing tuberculosis expert, an excellent practitioner and in ternist who helped countless comrades. In addition, he was a bacteriologist in Building 50. A deep-dyed pessimist, he never theless managed to steer safely past the numerous treacherous shoals across which his course lay in camp.

Chance? Yes—but only insofar as “ luck” is a component of personal ability. There were plenty of successful businessmen and high officials in camp who greedily scavenged from garbage cans filled with potato peelings even when they were not famished, indeed, who even became bread thieves. In less serious but more numerous cases, such men would selfishly exploit the smallest opportunity for ad vantage, without consideration for their fellow prisoners. True, such incidents were not quite as common as many protagonists of proletarian class superiority liked to believe in their predilection for propaganda and generalization. But the disintegration of a “ high-brow,” of a man who had once oc cupied a respected position, naturally attracted more at tention than the failure of someone who had never drawn any special public notice.

Admission to a concentration camp constituted the shock that immediately hurled the newcomer in one direction or the other. The indignation or desperation that followed the initial

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terror decided whether he would gradually gain inward per spective and thus a chance for individual adaptation to the new life, or whether he would swiftly succumb. In the former case there followed a process of habituation, of trans formation of individual character. During this second stage the ease and speed with which a way was found toward “ nor malcy amid the abnormal” depended on the pluck and deter mination with which the new goal was envisioned.

This period of initial adaptation was full of dangers. Not only the hands, the soul had to grow calluses. Un derstandably, though tragically, the “ community” was con siderate of the newcomer only
after
he had completed the basic process of adaptation, not
during
the initial period when he most needed protection and consideration. But the group attitude was inevitable in the light of the daily, hourly struggle for life against the SS, in which the slightest weak spot resulted in additional suffering.

Within about half a year a prisoner began to become a “ concentrationary,” i.e., to develop a specific type of men tality which generally grew fully developed in the course of another two or three years. It is no accident that the “ old timers” hardly took a man seriously before then. It took a long time for a mind, torn from the anchorages of the outside world and thrust into life-and-death turmoil, to find a new in ward center of gravity.

The change in mentality was by no means a simple matter of good or evil, conceived as standards of value. Both aspects pervaded it. Its main characteristic was a process of regression to a more primitive state. The range of sensations was almost automatically reduced. The mind developed a protective crust, a kind of defensive armor that no longer transmitted every strong stimulus to the sensitive membranes. Pain, pity, grief, horror, revulsion and approval, if admitted in their nor mal immediacy, would have burst the receptive capacities of the human heart. Terror alone, lurking everywhere, would have effortlessly brought it to a stop. Men grew hard and many of them had their sensibilities dulled. It was the same process that takes place in war. A cruel laugh, a brutal jest were often no more than protective devices for minds in danger of becoming hysterical or unhinged. There were many dead martyrs in the camps, but few living saints—though they

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should have had a field day! We laughed, wretched souls that we were, lest we grow petrified and die.

This regression with its opposites of good and evil pervaded every mental quality. Some grew hard in order to be able to help, just as a physician, in his capacity as a man, has feelings and yet, in his capacity as a healer, has none. Others developed a cruelty that ranged from repressed sexual im pulses all the way to sadism. Some allowed an innate op timism to lead them into a credulity that eagerly accepted every illusory rumor. With others the critical capacity was heightened to pessimistic distrust. A determination to fight back might end in quixotic exploits, cowardice in complete assimilation to slave life.

And how would you have reacted, man or woman, had you suddenly been picked out from the protective rank and file of tens of thousands of your kind, to be placed on a pile of stones within sight of all, stripped to the skin and whipped within an inch of your life? Would you have screamed or whined, or would you have kept silent, biting your lips until the blood flowed? On the way back, in filth and tatters, would you have dissolved in shame over the ignominy you had suf fered? Or would you have mustered the superhuman strength and pride to ignore even the final kick from an SS boot that hurled you back into the communion of prisoners? In any event, you would have had to regress to a more primitive level if you wanted to survive. Then your comrades would have welcomed you with a coarse joke that concealed compassion, would have secretly nursed you back to health without fuss or feathers.

Behind this protective armor of the mind, however, there developed in not a few cases a refinement of conscience that sometimes rose to extraordinary heights. In some cases the tension between regressive emotional primitivism and growing sensitivity of conscience found its only possible release in a heightened religious faith. Provided a man had any trace of moral sense and true religious devotion, these qualities, at the very core of personality, were, if anything, promoted by the powerful appeal emanating from the humanity and inhumanity of the concentration camp. In keeping with camp conditions, their presence and their effect could be but rarely manifested in the open, especially since the

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outwardly predominant groups in the camps acted at best on political, never on religious motivations and applied the highest standards of ethical conscience only in exceptional cir cumstances. Thus there are likely to be plenty of old-time concentrationaries who will deny that religion and moral sense played any considerable part. But just as the ordinary prisoner remained in ignorance of the true situation in camp, so few if any camp functionaries knew anything about the inner life of the thousands under them.

It was the pure in heart who suffered the least damage— those men of shining integrity who strove to give their all, who never took umbrage no matter what they faced, who steadfastly put evil to one side. There were such men in the camps, and to them the words of the gospel may be applied:
pertransierunt benefaciendo
—their lives shed radiance and beneficence on the rest of us. But on no account could they be placed in situations where they had to take part in making decisions vital to the very existence of the camp! When the SS demanded that political prisoners select “ socially unfit” inmates who were manifestly destined for death—a refusal involving the risk of the end of red predominance and the rise of the greens—it became necessary for the reds to accept the burden of guilt.1 And the more tender one’s conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions. Since they had to be made, and made swiftly, it was perhaps better that they should have fallen to the more robust spirits, lest all of us become martyrs instead of surviving witnesses.

Every prisoner was dependent on his fellow prisoners, ut terly at their mercy. The predominant impulses that governed their lives were selfishness and common sense, sharpened by many feelings of aversion. There were, however, outstanding examples of solidarity to the death, of the unfaltering assump tion of responsibility for the whole group down to the last. When political prisoners permitted themselves to be led to execution without offering resistance, this was often done in patent consideration for the fellows they left behind. Had such doomed groups defended themselves, in order at least to die fighting, they would instantly have been branded as

1 In a conversation with the translator the author expressly disavowed any in terpretation of this passage that might appear to sanction complicity in
the
taking o f human life for any reason whatsoever, except self-defense.—
Tr.

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mutinous and the fiercest reprisals would have been visited on the whole camp. This question was again and again discussed in camp.

But such demonstrations of the ultimate spirit of fellowship were isolated acts, sacrifices made in the face of inescapable death. When the fight was not to the death but for daily sur vival, the opposite applied. Everyone who has been through a concentration camp knows the saying: “ The prisoner’s worst enemy is the prisoner!” It is not that this was literally true, but that the constant and direct impact of unrestrained selfishness made it appear to be so. The SS struck like light ning, like a storm that passes, like a hurricane that may at worst last a few days. In such crises ranks were closed as well as possible—unless the individual was forced to go it alone. There was mutual aid and protection and rescue, to the limit of available resources. But the ghastly everyday scramble among the prisoners was enacted without a let-up in over crowded quarters.

The torments of this inexorable pattern were intensified by the unspeakably coarse outward forms that it always assumed. A great many prisoners actually took pride in this special refinement of barbarism. They outdid themselves in giving provocative expression to their lack of culture. Even such minor courtesies like “ please,” “ thank you,” “ would you like” and “ may I” —trifles that make life so much easier even though they have often lost inner significance—were rigidly banned. For months in 1938 the many Austrians who had entered the camps were bitterly hated for their un swerving use of polite phrases that are second nature to the people of Austria. The invariable answer to a “ thank you” from them was “ kiss my ass.” Every “ please” drew a plethora of scorn from the primitives.