384
PARTISAN REVIEW
dead, with her dead newborn frozen between her thighs. My son was
also that newborn." Thus even her present family is shrouded by the
subtext of dying in the camps. The challenge of learning how
to
live
while continuing
to
participate in the unnatural death of others haunts
Mado as a persistent melancholy legacy from that time. As the habit of
"holding out"
then
nurtures in Mado the practice of "making do"
now,
a psychology of endurance breeds in her a new sense of who she is, of
what she has become. She recalls her companions arguing in the camps
that if they returned, everything would be different. But they were
wrong. "Everything is the same," Mado discovers. "It is within us that
nothing is the same." This is not a loss of identity but a
shift
in identity,
a painfully honest confession that the self has been split not by some
psychotic condition but by the twin realities that inhabit her spirit.
Mado admits that
to
forget the durational subtext in order
to
return
to
the chronological narrative of her life would be atrocious, then adds
that it would be impossible too. "People believe memories grow vague,"
she ends her monologue, "are erased by time, since nothing endures
against the passage of time. That's the difference: time does not pass
over me, over us.
It
doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not
alive. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it."
Of course, Mado is right. No one but she and Delbo and the handful
of other Frenchwomen who returned from their transport
to
Auschwitz
can hope to enter the dark inner realm where the theme of being dead
while alive enacts its paradoxical drama. Yet perhaps she is mistaken
too. Her words allow us to see feelingly, then
to
imagine the contours
of that alien world, and the missed destiny of death that assaults it. An
alliance with atrocity is part of the burden of modernity, though it is
both simpler and less troublesome
to
pretend that it is not. Atrocity nar–
rative requires us
to
abandon the conviction that the gift of life is anti–
thetical to the menace of unnatural death . Writers like Delbo entreat us
to
discard this consoling template of reality as a remnant of an ancient
nostalgia rather than retaining it as a still-useful blueprint for designing
the future after Auschwitz.
Sometimes episodes surface in Holocaust testimonies that seem to
transgress our sense of the possible,
to
reveal a reality so beyond our
imaginings that we rush
to
consign them to the realm of fantasy. But any–
one immersed in the world of atrocity will be forced
to
concede that few
powers of invention could conjure up some of the most gruesome
moments of the camp experience. From an eyewitness in the Natzweiler–
Struthof concentration camp comes the following account to confirm the
