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PA RTISAN REVIEW
same room as death. Distinguishing between the violence of war and the
rigid milieu of the camps Amery observed: "The soldier was driven into
the fire, and it is true his life was not worth much. Still, the state did not
order him
to
die, but to survive. The final duty of the prisoner, however,
was death." In other words, the
necessity
of dying replaced the possi–
bility of dying, even as many inmates struggled
to
stay alive-which is
different from resolving to survive. Their surroundings, rather than
some internal system of values inherited from their normal life, infil–
trated the mental content of their days. What this meant can be illus–
trated by two brief excerpts from witness testimonies. Renee H., who
was little more than ten years old at the time, recalls a scene from
Bergen-Belsen:
Right across from us was a charnel house filled with corpses, not
just inside but overflowing all over. There were corpses all over. I
lived, walked beside dead people. After a while it just got
to
be so
that no one noticed, and one had
to
say
to
oneself, "I am not going
to see who it is. I am not going
to
recognize anyone in this person
who is lying there."
It
got
to
a point where I realized that I had
to
close my eyes
to
a number of things. Otherwise I would not have
survived even at that time, because I saw people around me going
mad. I was not only having
to
live with all things, but with madness.
We need
to
imagine how such imagery imprints itself on consciousness,
despite efforts
to
avoid the unavoidable; but even more, we need
to
acknowledge the impact of such imagery on the unfolding of Holocaust
narrative as memory stumbles repeatedly over death while it seeks
to
recount episodes of life in the camps under conditions of atrocity.
The second example is both more vivid and more graphic.
It
docu–
ments with uncanny if unintended precision a moment of failed purga–
tion, as if the
body
were seeking
to
expel what memory could not cast
out from consciousness:
I got a job carrying people's waste out from the barrack at night
... .I
was very sick. I got diarrhea. That was already recuperat–
ing a little bit from the malaria. I walked out with two pails of
human waste... ,and I was going toward the dump. I walked out,
and between the barracks was a mountain of people as high as
myself ....When the people died at night, they were put out and
in the dump-a big pile of people. I said to myself "0 God, must
I walk by?" Meanwhile, I couldn't hold back, and I put down the
two pails and sat down because I had a sick stomach. And the
