680
PARTISAN REVIEW
inmates as free laborers or routinely accepted a replacement for
every dead one-killed either by SS guards or by work . Also, every
German who saw the trains pass or noticed Jews being assembled for
deportation "could
not not know
about the frightful atrocities being
committed." Others knew something but managed to pretend they
didn't, and yet others could have known everything but chose to
keep their eyes and ears (and mouths) shut. This failure to divulge
the truth about the Lagers, or to want to know it, "represents one of
the major collective crimes of the German people," and demon–
strates the cowardice Hitler's terror had reduced them to.
Levi reports that the systematic degradation ofJews and other
minorities resulted in degradation, and in shame, for everyone in–
side and outside the Lagers. And he deplores the inevitable simplifi–
cations of even the most careful and accurate survivors' accounts.
For instance, to bear witness meant also to "accept" the prevalent
division into good guys and bad guys, into "we" and "them." Instead,
Levi focusses on "the grey zones," such as the locations of the Jewish
Kapos (and differences among them), and other areas of ambiguity:
total moral collapse in both oppressor and victim was a necessary in–
gredient for the successful operation of the concentration camp . To
demolish the new arrival, for example, the SS would kick and punch
him right away, often in the face, scream an orgy of orders, strip him
naked, shave all his hair, and turn him over to a Kapo who would
not or could not treat him much better. Just as in more benign total
institutions, such as prisons and asylums, the rookie was derided
and subjected to cruel pranks and initiation ceremonies that allowed
the seniors to vent their own humiliations.
A number of contemporary films, according to Levi, categori–
cally separate the victims from the persecutors, but without con–
sidering that the space between victims and persecutors is far from
empty; rather, it is "studded with obscene or pathetic figures ...
whom it is indispensable to know if we want to know the human
species, if we want to know how to defend our souls when a similar
test should once more loom before us." Moreover, I would add, such
films further distort the reality of the camps and contribute to the
misrepresentations of this technology of death.
Although Levi is a writer rather than a pragmatic philosopher,
he now asks whether Germany was in the grip of collective madness
or was rationally developing an inhuman plan; whether there was
logical, evil intent (for the sake of the "Thousand-Year Reich"), or
whether logic was absent. Notwithstanding the horror of Hiroshima
