LAWRENCE
L.
LANGER
381
rats were standing and eating the people's faces. They were having
a....Anyway, I had to do my job. I was just looking, what is hap–
pening to a human being. That could have been my mother. That
could have been my father. That could have been my sister or my
brother. I pulled up my underpants, picked up the two buckets. I
emptied them and came back
to
the barrack. There was nothing
to
throw up, but
I
threw up.
The sheer physicality of the description would dampen the ardor of
those who insist on the triumph of the spirit even in Auschwitz, which
is the locale of this remembered episode. The fusion of excrement,
vomit, corpses, and predatory rats creates a cluster of images that forces
us to redefine our notion of dying. At that moment the witness seemed
to be trapped by a cycle of decay from which there was no escape . The
cherished idea of the family as an intimate unit succumbed momentar–
ily to the horrible a lternative of the family as prey for hungry rodents.
It
leaves us numbed by the challenge of absorbing into our hopes for a
human future this grim heritage of unnatural death.
I said that the witness, Hanna E, succumbed
momentarily
to a new
and unprecedented vision of her family's fate, but this was more a char–
itable concession than a discovered truth. Such images may lurk in con–
sciousness undeciphered, but they inspire insight only after being
filtered through a mind determined to wrestle with the implications of
the harsh burden that the Germans imposed on their victims. Jean
Amery spent his post-camp life, which ended in suicide, unsuccessfully
trying to placate the ghost of unnatural death that plagued him after his
survival. In a now classic work called
At the Mind's Limits
he reported:
There was once a conversation in the camp about an SS man who
had slit open a prisoner's belly and filled it with sand.
It
is obvi–
ous that in view of such possibilities one was hardly concerned
with whether, or
that,
one had to die, but with
how
it would hap–
pen. Inmates carried on conversations about how long it probably
takes for the gas in the gas chambers to do its job. One speculated
on the painfulness of death by phenol injections. Were you to wish
yourself a blow to the skull or a slow death through exhaustion in
the infirmary? It was characteristic for the situation of the prisoner
in regard to death that only a few decided to "run
to
the wire," as
one said, that is, to commit suicide through contact with the
highly electrified barbed wire. The wire was after all a good and
rather certain thing, but it was possible that in the attempt to
approach it one would be caught first and thrown into the bunker,
