The Difficult Journey of Truth

Forty years have passed since the start of Hitler’s slaughter, which devastated European Judaism. It was in 1942 that the facilities of all the Polish extermination camps began operating, and the massacre of the Jews, until then a sporadic activity, became a system.

Certainly much remains to be discovered and explained about the motivations for the slaughter, about the assigning of responsibility, and about the paralysis of conscience that characterized Nazi Germany. The facts, on the other hand, are sufficiently clear by now, although the path that had to be traveled was difficult, for various reasons that are worth examining.

The first information about the extermination camps began circulating even before the end of the conflict. It was grim but vague, and yet consistent; it outlined a massacre of such vast proportions and such extreme cruelty that the public tended to reject it precisely because of its enormity. It is significant that this rejection was foreseen well in advance by the perpetrators themselves; many survivors (among others, Simon Wiesenthal) recall that SS soldiers liked to cynically warn their prisoners, “No matter how this war ends, the war against you has been won by us. Not one of you will be left to bear witness, but, even if someone were to escape, the world will not believe him. There will be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but no certainty, because we will destroy the evidence along with you. Even if some evidence were to remain, and some of you were to survive, people will say that your testimony is too monstrous to be believed. They will say that these are exaggerations of Allied propaganda, and will believe us, not you. We will be the ones who dictate history.”

Surprisingly, the same thought (“Even if we were to talk, no one would believe us”) emerged from the prisoners’ despair in the form of dreams. Almost all the survivors, either orally or in written memoirs, recall a dream that recurred frequently during their imprisonment, varying in its details but unchanging in its substance: to miraculously return home, to relate with emotion and relief their past sufferings to a loved one, and not to be believed. More than that, not even to be listened to. In the most typical form of this dream, the interlocutor turns and goes away without a word. Thus, both sides, the oppressors and the victims, were well aware of the enormity, and therefore the unbelievableness, of what was happening in the camps, and, one might add, not only in the camps but also in the ghettos, behind the lines of the Eastern front, in the homes for the mentally handicapped, in the police stations.

However, things did not turn out the way the victims feared and Hitler’s men hoped. Even the most perfect organization has shortcomings, and Nazi Germany, especially in the last months before the collapse, was far from being a perfect machine. Much evidence of the extermination was suppressed, or a more or less thorough effort was made to suppress it. In the fall of 1944 the Nazis blew up the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz, but the ruins are still there, and it is difficult to explain their purpose as being different from what it was. After the uprising of spring 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto was razed, but the superhuman dedication of a few fighter-historians (historians of themselves!) made it possible for other historians to recover from the rubble, several meters deep, the chronicles of how, day by day, that ghetto lived and died. All the archives of the camps were burned during the last days of the war. This was a truly irreparable loss, so much so that to this day we are debating whether the victims of the camps were four or six or eight million—but always in the millions. Before the Germans began using the gigantic multiple crematoriums, the corpses of the innumerable victims, whether killed by force or by privation, could constitute evidence and had to be disposed of. The first solution, atrociously grotesque, was simply to pile up the bodies, by the hundreds of thousands, in big mass graves. This was done in Treblinka and in other, smaller camps. It was a temporary solution, chosen with bestial carelessness when the German armies were triumphant on all fronts and the final victory seemed certain. What to do would be decided later. At any rate, the victor also owns the truth, and can manipulate it as he pleases: the terrible graves would be explained, or denied, or attributed to the Allies. However, after the turning point of Stalingrad there was a change of plan; better make everything disappear right away. The prisoners themselves were forced to disinter those pitiful remains and burn them on open-air fires, as if an undertaking of such proportions, and so unusual, could go totally unnoticed.

Afterward, the SS authorities and the security services did their utmost to ensure that no witness would survive. This was the intent (it would be difficult to conjure a different one) of the murderous and apparently senseless transfers that, in the spring of 1945, concluded the story of the Nazi camps. Having operated effectively as centers of political terror, then as factories of death, and subsequently (or simultaneously) as a bottomless, constantly replenished reservoir of slave labor, the camps had become a danger for a dying Germany because they held the secret of the camps. The army of ghosts that still vegetated there consisted of Geheimnisträger, bearers of secrets; it was necessary to get rid of them. Since by then the extermination plants had been destroyed, it was decided to transfer these people into the heart of the country, with the absurd hope of locking them up again, in camps that were less threatened by the advancing front, and taking advantage of their remaining capacity for work. There was another, less absurd hope—that the hardship of those Biblical marches would reduce their number. And indeed the number was dreadfully reduced, but a few were lucky and strong enough to survive, and remained to bear witness.

A fact that is less well-known and has been less carefully studied is that many bearers of secrets were to be found also on the other side, on the side of the oppressors, although not all of them knew much, and only a few knew everything. No one will ever be able to determine precisely how many people, in the Nazi organization, could not have not known of the existence of the death factories; how many knew but were able to feign ignorance; how many more had the opportunity to know everything, but chose the safer path of keeping their eyes and ears (and, above all, their mouths) shut tight, deluding themselves that this deliberate ignorance could cleanse their conscience. At any rate, it is certain that the silence about the camps is one of the greatest collective sins of the German people, and the most obvious demonstration of the cowardice to which they were driven by Hitlerite terror, a cowardice that became a habit so ingrained as to keep husbands from talking to their wives, and parents to their children. Without such cowardice the greatest excesses would not have been possible.

Deliberate ignorance and fear also reduced to silence many potential “civilian” witnesses of atrocities in the camps. They made up a large and complex system; some have rightly spoken of a concentration-camp universe, but it was not a closed universe, because the camps were an integral part of the economy of the Third Reich. Industrial enterprises large and small took advantage of the almost free labor provided by the camps. Some were merciless in exploiting the prisoners, others tried to alleviate their sufferings. Other companies, or maybe the same ones, made a profit by supplying the Lagers themselves. The crematoriums were designed, built, and tested by the firm Topf, in Wiesbaden (still in business, at least until a few years ago; it makes crematoriums for civilian use). It’s unlikely that the employees of these enterprises were unaware of the purpose of the unusual equipment commissioned by the SS leadership. The same can be said—and has been—of supplying the poison for the gas chambers. Zyklon B, basically hydrogen cyanide, was produced by the same gigantic trust (I.G. Farbenindustrie) that “owned” the Buna-Monowitz Lager and exploited its ten thousand prisoners. The gas had been in use for several years to disinfest ships’ holds, but the sudden increase in orders, beginning in 1942, could not have gone unnoticed. It should have given rise to doubts, and certainly it did, but those doubts were suffocated by fear, by the desire for profits, by the blindness and deliberate stupidity mentioned earlier, and in some cases (probably not many) by fanatic Nazi obedience.

The most substantial contribution to the reconstruction of the truth about the camps comes, naturally, from the recollections of survivors. Beyond the compassion and indignation they arouse, they have to be read with a critical eye. For knowledge of the camps, the camps themselves were not good observatories. In those inhuman circumstances, it was rare for the prisoners to acquire an overview of the universe they inhabited. It was not unusual, especially among those who did not understand German, for a prisoner not even to know where in Europe his camp was situated, for he had arrived there after a murderous and meandering journey in a sealed railway car. He did not know of the existence of other camps, even if they were nearby. He did not know for whom he was working. He did not understand the meaning of certain sudden changes in his circumstances or of mass transfers. Surrounded by death, he was often incapable of assessing the extent of the slaughter taking place under his eyes. He felt, in other words, overwhelmed by a huge, obscure structure of violence and intimidation, but he could not construct an image of it; his constant needs kept his eyes glued to the ground.

A better observation post was available to those privileged prisoners who, owing to luck or cunning, or even just physical strength, had been entrusted with a position within the camp, thus securing somewhat better living conditions. A relatively greater number of these prisoners survived and their testimony is precious but limited; they understood more, but did not plumb the depths. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity to observe was paralyzed by suffering.

For all these reasons, the truth about the Lagers came to light over a long road and through a narrow door, and some aspects of the concentration-camp universe have not yet been closely examined. The forty years that have elapsed since the Wannsee Conference, where perhaps for the first time the program for the so-called final solution of the Jewish question was officially endorsed, have brought conflicting conclusions.

Certainly, there has been a settling, a normal and desirable process whereby historical events acquire shadings and perspective only some decades after their occurrence. At the end of the Second World War, the quantitative data on the deportations and the Nazi massacres, in the camps and elsewhere, were not known, nor was it easy to measure their significance and impact. Only in the past few years have we understood the Nazi massacre as a tremendous example; unless something worse happens, it will be remembered as a blot on the twentieth century. Already today it must be seen as a warning for centuries to come.

On the other hand, as the camps grow distant in time, there are other, historically negative consequences. Most of the witnesses, for both the defense and the prosecution, have by now died. Those who are left, and who (overcoming their remorse or, respectively, their wounds) agree to testify, have memories that are increasingly out of focus and stereotyped, often influenced (without their realizing it) by things that they learned later. Obviously, in some cases the lack of memory is simulated, but the many years that have elapsed make it credible, even in court. The “I don’t knows” and “I didn’t knows” uttered today by many Germans are no longer shocking. They were shocking, or should have been, when the memory of events was fresh.

Out of this inevitable fading of memories an unexpected phenomenon has developed recently that deserves careful consideration. In several countries—significantly, not in Germany but, rather, with its epicenter in France—a movement has been under way to revise history. To readers of Orwell this expression will not sound new. In countries where human rights and basic freedoms are suffocated, history, too, belongs to the ruling class: not just current history but also past history. It can be obliterated, turned upside down, made up; what is true today can become false tomorrow, encyclopedia entries and schoolbooks are rewritten, and the individual memories of loyal citizens are required to be equally submissive. It is no great surprise that this practice, described in the grim utopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, was followed in Hitler’s Germany and is still followed in the Soviet Union. It is surprising, or should be, that the same is attempted today in France, in the United Kingdom, in the United States. Maybe also in Germany, but with less audacity: why? We can attempt an explanation. The history to be revised is German history, the history of the German land and the German people, and only forty years have elapsed between the events and their revision, time enough for many memories to fade, but not enough for them all to be wiped out. In today’s Germany—rather, in the two Germanys—there remain too many witnesses of the atrocities committed in the camps, on the battlefields, in all the occupied countries, and in the homeland itself. Those responsible, if only by omission or complicity, still number in the hundreds of thousands. They may wish that past events not be talked about, but they would be surprised if such events were denied; and indeed in the great trials of Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem the guilty tried in various ways to prove their innocence, but they did not deny the facts.

The French revisionists, on the other hand, deny the facts. Their arrogance and impudence are astounding, but their arguments, which are extremely verbose, boil down to little: all the testimony of the survivors—Jews, Russians, Poles, and Communists—must be rejected, because it is “obviously” biased; all material proofs are forgeries; all the confessions of the guilty were extorted through torture, blackmail, or drugs. It is frightening to think about what could happen in twenty years, when all the eyewitnesses will be gone. Then the forgers will have a free hand; they will be able to assert or deny anything. If convenient, they will demonstrate that the Second World War never took place: the Siegfried and Maginot lines never existed; their still visible ruins were built a few years ago by specialized firms, based on the drawings of obliging set designers, and the same applies to war cemeteries. All pictures from the time are photomontages. All statistics about casualties are falsified, the product of self-serving propaganda. Nobody died in the war because there was no war. All diaries and memoirs are lies, or the work of lunatics, or the result of corruption and violence. War widows and orphans are salaried extras.

Until now, the sacrilegious audacity of the revisionists has not turned, for example, to the Nazis’ exploits on the war’s fronts or their acts of retaliation on the home fronts; even for revisionists it would be difficult to whitewash Marzabotto or the Ardeatine Caves or Lodz or the slaughters committed by the Einsatzkommandos behind the vast Russian front. Whole countries would have risen up to restore the truth. It has been easier, and more advantageous, to stick to the camps: more advantageous because the camps were the gravest crime of the Third Reich; and easier because there were only a few survivors, a few witnesses, and because the Jews, who were the main victims of the camps, were not a single nation but came from dozens of different countries, from North Africa to Norway and from Belgium to Ukraine. However, there is no doubt that if the vigilance of historians, of the public, and of democratic institutions were to slacken, the whole monstrous Nazi machinery would be exonerated, and the revulsion that all Europe continues to feel toward totalitarian regimes would tend to disappear. For this reason it is an important task for us—Jews, survivors, democratic and anti-Fascist Europeans—to prevent this outrage. If the world could be convinced that Auschwitz did not exist, it would be easier to build a second Auschwitz, and there is no guarantee that it would devour only Jews.

Lecture written in June 1982 for a 1983 meeting of the Italian Jewish
Communities that was later canceled; part of the text was merged in
the Preface to The Drowned and the Saved. In Guido Lopez, ed.,
Se non lui, chi (If Not Him, Who) (Rome: Center for Jewish Culture
of the Israelite Community of Rome, 1987)