In one of the first scenes of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah, Simon Srebnik, one of the few survivors of the Chelmno camp, walks through a beautiful, almost idyllic, forest landscape, stops short, looking towards a clearing and with the strange apathy of the man who has looked death in the face, he says: “People were being burned here. Many people were burned here. Das ist der Platz. This is the place.”
How can you wipe out an entire population? Not just to exterminate him, setting up real “death factories” but also to try to erase the very memory that this killing took place.
And yet this is exactly what was tried to be done on European soil. We are used to having an image of the Holocaust, the skeletonized prisoners and the piles of corpses that the Allied Powers discovered in the concentration camps.
But the greatest horror of the Holocaust is the millions of victims of whom we have no image, no sign. All those who went straight from the “death trains”, which arrived daily, to the gas chamber or who while selected for some work, often in the Zonderkommandos, the special squads of prisoners who were responsible for operating the crematoria, in a subsequent moment they were being led to the gas chambers.
This leads to the horrible event of the great “death factories” of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, which the Nazis managed to level, there are not many traces. With the exception of monuments erected later, there is no reminder that thousands of people may have been exterminated there every day.
The very fact that real “death factories” were built in Europe in the 20th century and that the extermination of all European Jewry was sought in the context of the “Final Solution” is in itself at the same time an insurmountable historical trauma, a question for historical interpretation but also an agonizing question as to whether this horror can be repeated.
How we got to the Holocaust
The extensive historical research that has been done in the past decades on the Holocaust has helped us to gain insight into how we arrived at the horror.
First of all, the Holocaust cannot be understood outside the context of the continuous reproduction of anti-Semitism in Europe. This concerns not only the “legacy” of medieval anti-Semitism but also the fact that in the emerging European nation-states, despite proclamations of secularism, a new wave of suspicion and hostility against Jews, even if they seemed integrated, would be reproduced. In Central and Eastern Europe the expansion of the tsarist empire into areas with solid Jewish rural populations led to waves of violent discrimination and persecution culminating in pogroms. To this new wave of anti-Semitism will be added a multitude of conspiracy theories, often orchestrated by state agencies.
The fact of the large participation of Jews in radical or subversive movements, culminating in the Russian revolution will also fuel anti-Jewish rhetoric and conspiracy theory culminating in the concept of “Jewish Bolshevism”.
In this landscape, anti-Semitism became a point of reference for deeply reactionary and authoritarian movements. This explains the centrality of anti-Semitism in the ideology of the Nazi party. This also explains the fact that policies of discrimination, displacement and ultimately extermination were part and parcel of the political practice of National Socialism. This was reflected in a rapid shift from a policy of violent displacement to a policy of total extermination, the “Final Solution” plan.
This led first to the continuous mass executions carried out by the SS units in the Jewish villages and towns they occupied on the Eastern Front, to the mobile extermination units and finally to the formation of the large extermination camps and the development of the horror techniques, culminating in the gas chambers. What is frightening is that this whole process was treated by those who organized it as a matter of administrative organization and efficiency. The official mail has no screams of hate but an attempt to deal with technical problems and coordinate the process to make the death factories more efficient, which ultimately makes it scarier. A few years later, Hannah Arendt will speak about the “community of evil” on the occasion of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, perhaps the leading “bureaucrat” of the “Final Solution”.
The concentration camps themselves are liminal forms of spaces of a “state of exception”. Although a large proportion of the prisoners were killed immediately upon arrival, a number would be selected to work even in the process of extermination. This pervasive sense of lives being utterly expendable will define one of the most traumatic experiences in human history.
Although to a large extent the image will be formed that a large part was passively led to extermination, mainly due to the attitude of certain leaders of local Jewish communities, the reality is much more complex and there will be a significant number of acts of resistance from participation in resistance and partisan organizations and the organization of resistance in the ghettos up to even the uprising in the camps (as the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz Birkenau will do, for which we also have the shocking testimony of the Greek Jew Marcel Natzaris).
On the other hand, we must say that the Holocaust was not just the work of the Nazi party leadership. It required the participation (and in this sense the complicity) of a large number of people, both from the German occupation forces and from the local authorities, a guilty memory that was often repressed in the following decades and is gradually being recovered by historical research.
The dark side of modern Europe
The Holocaust will from many quarters be treated as an absolute political pathology. And in many ways it was. But it would be a mistake to think that it was merely a symptom of the sick political insanity of Nazism.
And this because it is connected to the dark sides of modernity. Anti-Semitism has been an archetypal form of racism and at the same time the dimension of genocide or the extermination of populations is something that comes with modernity and colonialism. The way in which, despite the declarations of equality and equity, the European constitutional states reproduced within themselves anti-Semitism and racism and also legitimized colonialism showed that the emergence of national ideologies could easily coexist with brutality. Treating the Jews with a rhetoric that referred far more to the eradication of a pathogen than to human beings was a reminder of how “biopolitics” can ultimately become “death politics.”
And of course the “industrial” organization of extermination itself would not have existed without the emergence of capitalist industry. As has been pointed out several times, the Auschwitz camp complex co-existed Auschwitz II-Birkenau, perhaps the largest death factory of the Third Reich, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, the labor camp financed by the large IG-Farben group, which had a factory there. a subsidiary of which was the manufacturer of the Zyclon B poison gas used in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
The task of memory is a task of resistance
“It happened, therefore it can happen again: it is the essence of what we have to say”, the great Primo Levi will write.
This statement of a man who survived the camps comes to underline the importance of the task of memory. As unspeakable as the horror, the brutality is not unrepeatable.
From the survival of racism and anti-Semitism, to the re-emergence of the far right, to all forms and policies that treat people as “surplus populations”, one can see the dark traces in today’s landscape as well.
“I am searching to find in my conscience what evil I have done to suffer like this, I swear to you my dear child that I cannot find anything. I was always kind and generous to everyone.” This is how Sarina Saltiel from Thessaloniki wrote to her son on March 17, 1943. Six days later she will also be on the fourth mission to Auschwitz. It will never come back.
The duty of remembrance to Sarina Saltiel and millions of other Jews is at the same time a commitment to the need to uproot the mechanisms that breed and reproduce brutality and horror.
