THE
CONCENTRATION CAMPS
When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus
murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom
he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide
would mean the immediate murder of his own family-how is he to
decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but be–
tween murder and murder. In perhaps the only article which really
gets to the core of this matter, Camus (in
Twice a Year,
1947) tells
of a woman in Greece, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose
which among her three children should be killed.
Through the creation of conditions under which conscience
ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, th.e
consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totali–
tarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.
The SS implicated concentration camp inmates-criminals, politicals,
Jews-in their crimes by making them responsible for a large part
of the administration, thus confronting them with the hopeless di–
lemma whether to send their fi:iends to their death, or to help mur–
der other men who happened to be strangers.
Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still
prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentia–
tion of the individual, his unique identity. In a sterile form such
individuality can be preserved through a persistent stoicism, and it
is certain that many men under totalitarian rule have taken and
are each day still taking refuge in this absolute isolation of a per–
sonality without .rights or conscience. There is no doubt that this
part of the human person, precisely because it depends so essentially
on nature and on forces that cannot be controlled by the will, is the
hardest to destroy (and when destroyed
is
most easily repaired).
The methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human per–
son are numerous and we shall not attempt to list them all. They
begin with the monstrous conditions in the transports to the camps,
when hundreds of human beings are packed into a cattle car stark
naked, glued to each other, and shunted back and forth over the
countryside for days on end; they continue upon arrival at the
camp, the well-organized shock of the first hours, the shaving of
the head, the grotesque camp clothing; and they end in the utterly
unimaginable tortures so gauged as not to kill the body, at any
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