PARTISAN REVIEW
Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where
neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal
sense was embodied by those types of camp perfected by the Nazis,
in
which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organ–
ized with a view to the greatest possible torment.
All three types have one thing in common: the human masses
sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what
happened to them were no longer of any interest to anybody, as
if
they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing
himself by stopping them for a while between life and death before
admitting them to eternal peace.
It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured
unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous
cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly
normal measure. Everything that was done in the camps is known
to us from the world of perverse, malignant fantasies. The difficult
thing to understand is that, like such fantasies, these gruesome crimes
took place in a phantom world, in a world in which there were neither
consequences nor responsibilities; and finally neither the tormentors
nor the tormented, and least of all the outsider, could be aware that
what was happening was anything more than a cruel game or an
absurd dream.
The films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere
after the w.ar showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and
unreality is not dispelled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced
observer they are just about as convincing as the pictures of mysterious
substances taken at spiritualist seances. Common sense reacted to the
horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument:
"What crime must these people have committed that such things were
done to them!"; or, in Germany and Austria, in the midst of starva–
tion, overpopulation, and general hatred: "Too bad that they've
stopped gassing the Jews"; and everywhere with the skeptical shrug
that greets ineffectual propaganda.
If
the propaganda of truth fails to convince the average Philistine
precisely because it is too monstrous, it is positively dangerous to those
who know from their own imaginings that they themselves are cap–
able of doing such things and are therefore perfectly willing to be–
lieve in the reality of what they have seen. Suddenly it becomes
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