PARTISAN REVIEW
centration camps, but of the totalitarian regime as a whole. They
become useless and even dangerous as soon as they attempt a positive
interpretation-Kogon because he cites apparent historical prece–
dents and believes that the camps can
be
understood psychologically,
Rousset because he seeks the consolation of an "extreme experience"
in a kind of suffering which, strictly speaking, no longer permits of
experience, and thus arrives at a meaningless affirmation of life that
is extremely dangerous because it romanticizes and transfigures what
must never under any circumstances be repeated on this earth.
1
What is really true, on the contrary, was recently remarked by Isaac
Rosenfeld in
The New Leader
(February 14, 1948): "We still don't
understand what happened to the Jews of Europe, and perhaps we
never will.... By now we know all there is to know. But it hasn't
helped ... as there is no response great enough to equal the facts
that provoked it. There is nothing but numbness, and in the respect
of numbness we ... are no different from the murderers who went
ahead and did their business and paid no attention to the screams."
Fearful anticipation is the most widespread and perhaps the only
fitting approach to the reality of the concentration camp. It certainly
has a great deal to do with the attitudes of men under the totalitarian
terror, although it always seems to go hand in hand with a remarkable
and very characteristic uncertainty which impedes both rebellion and
any clear, articulated understanding of the thing feared. Kogon
reports: "Only a very, very few of those who entered a concentration
camp for the first time had the slightest idea . . . of what awaited
them. [Some] were prepared for the worst. But these ideas were
always nebulous; the reality far exceeded them." The reason for the
uncertainty was precisely that this reality was utterly incredible and
inconceivable. In totalitarian regimes, uncertainty as well as fear
is
manufactured and fostered by the propagandistic treatment of the
institution of terror. "There was hardly anything connected with the
SS that was not kept secret. The biggest secret of all was the routine
of the concentration camps ... whose only purpose was to spread an
anonymous terror of a general political character" (Kogon). Concen–
tration camps and everything connected with them .are systematically
publicized and at the same time kept absolutely secret. They are
used as a threat, but all actual reports about them are suppressed
or denounced as fantastic.
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