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ROBERT JAY LIFTON
throughout: "This did not prevent the S.S. from killing the Jews during
the day, but the prospect of having to part company soon mellowed
them a little. They had been together for such a long time, they had
so many memories in common; and this camp was a kind of joint
production." The "as if" situation, then, was a collaborative phenomenon
of denial and numbing (" 'The gas chambers? What gas chambers?
The smell? What smell?'''); even concerning the approaching end of
Treblinka itself "everyone . . . pretended not to know it." What this
meant for Jewish prisoners in general was that "all of their activities ...
contributed to the same end: the death of their people."
But not quite. Despite everything, the Jews rebelled, and Steiner's
central purpose in writing the book is to tell the story of their rebellion.
Since all action depends upon images, rebels of any kind must have the
capacity to imagine the overturning of their immediate world. Jews were
for the most part denied this capacity by the numbing imposed upon
them - hence the wisdom of the statement attributed to a physician–
prisoner, when discussing the possibilities of fellow inmates joining in a
rebellion: "First they will have to come to terms with death." What he
meant was the necessity of not only taking risks but of confronting the .
true nature of the environment. In this sense there may be truth in
Steiner's claim that suicides among those facing almost certain death
represented a "first affirmation of freedom" in that prisoners were
assuming a certain amount of autonomy and "had ceased to
be
perfect
slaves" - though we 'also wonder to what extent this is a Camus-like
reconstruction of what must have been a dismal and dispiriting scene.
In explaining the extraordinary transformation of numbed prisoners
into organized rebels, Steiner emphasizes one overriding principle: that
of "bearing witness," of sending "a message to the future."
As
one dying
prisoner puts it, "'What we need is a ... victory of the dead....
{A]
victory and witnesses to tell about it." The rhetorical tone with which
he has prisoners express this principle has led some reviewers to reject
it, and to emphasize more conventional explanations for rebellion–
feelings of hatred and revenge. But what Steiner is getting at, correctly
I believe, is the sense of special mission characteristic of survivors (or
those who must survive by proxy), the need to render significant the
deaths they have seen. Bearing witness has been of great importance
for concentration camp and atomic bomb survivors in carrying out what
is for many a permanent task, the inner formulation of their experiences
ina way that restores balance to death and life. In Hiroshima this
mission became quickly tied in with the elimination of nuclear weapons
and the quest for world peace. With concentration camp survivors it
has been actively associated with the establishment of a Jewish State in
