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PARTISAN REVIEW
PL:
Well, no. No, that was a changeable thing. It varied from day to
day. In general, no. Of course I didn't think I'd survive. We all lived
in a very unstable state of mind. AIl it took was one piece of news,
one false item. Someone said, "The English have landed in Greece!"
and that wasn't true, or "The Polish partisans are right outside the
barbed wire!" and it wasn't true either. AIl it took was something like
that to create a wave of optimism ... and then it all collapsed.
RS:
There was a part of your book that I found very disturbing, and
that's the concept of useful and useless violence. Can there really be
such a thing as
useful
violence?
PL:
I know this is a difficult argument to explain. I had the impres–
sion at Auschwitz that there were two different levels of cruelty. For
example, in
I sommersi e i salvati,
I've written that Raskolnikov's
crime, where he kills the old usurer so he won't have to pay his debt,
is not a useless crime. He doesn't want suffering or death for the old
woman; he wants money and murder is his means. By the same
token, AIdo Moro was killed in Italy. The Red Brigrades didn't want
to kill someone or inflict suffering on him or his family: they had a
political plan. Instead, many of the Nazis' actions reflect nothing but
the desire to inflict suffering for the purpose of inflicting suffer–
ing- and nothing more. I've mentioned one example, a clamorous
example, of the ninety-year-olds in the Jewish nursing home in
Venice who were loaded onto trains and taken away to the camps.
Wouldn't it have been much more logical to kill them on the spot? I
don't know if my interpretation of this event is right, but I see it as a
scheme to inflict the maximum possible suffering on them - or else
pure stupidity. When an order reads "alle," everyone, then everyone
must be deported. The Nazis took their orders literally and deported
everyone. Yes, it's a German characteristic to take orders literally,
but as I've said, the Germans weren't made from a different mold
than we were. Nothing would have happened to them if they had
killed the moribund women on the spot. The guards wouldn't have
been punished. But I think they derived a malicious pleasure from
deporting them. Since they had been fed an intense propaganda
campaign, according to which Jews were nothing more than "Unge–
zieferen," harmful animals-vermin, really-we were treated like
vermin, like hateful people. There were many who truly hated us
and considered it just to make us suffer. There's an episode in
The Divine Comedy
in which Dante inflicts suffering on one of the
damned (I believe it's Bocca degli Abbati).5 The condemned man
5. Actually, the character was Fra Alberigo.
