Hannah Arendt
THE CO NCENTRATION CAMPS
"The SS has made the camp the most totalitarian society
in
existence up to now."-David Rousset.
There are three possible approaches to the reality of the
concentration camp: the inmate's experience of immediate suffering,
the recollection of the survivor, and the fearful anticipation of those
who dread the concentration camp as a possibility for the future .
Immediate experience is expressed in the reports which "record
but do not communicate" things that evade human understanding
and human experience; things therefore that, when suffered by men,
transform them into "uncomplaining animals"
(The Dark Side of
the Moon,
New York, 1947). There are numerous such reports by
survivors; only a few have been published, partly because, quite under–
standably, the world wants to hear no more of these things, but also
because they all leave the reader cold, that is, as apathetic and baffled
as the writer himself, and fail to inspire those passions of outrage and
sympathy through which men have always been mobilized for justice,
for "Misery that goes too deep arouses not compassion but repug–
nance and hatred" (Rousset).
Der SS-Staat
by Eugen Kogon and
Les fours de notre mort
by
David Rousset are products of assimilated recollection. Both authors
have consciously written for the world of the living, both wish to
make themselves understood at any cost, and both have cast off the
insane contempt for those "who never went through it," that in the
direct reports so often substitutes for communication. This conscious
good will is the only guaranty that those who return will not, after a
brief period of sullen resentment against humanity in general, adapt
themselves to the real world and become once more the exact same
unsuspecting fools that they were when they
ent~red
the camps. Both
books are indispensable for an understanding not only of the con-
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