We survivors of the Nazi concentration camps have had many occasions to realize that words are of little use in describing our experience. They do not work well owing to “bad reception,” since we now live in the era of recorded, multiplied, telecast images, and the public, especially the young, is less and less inclined to rely on written information. However, there is another reason that words do not work well, and that is “bad transmission.” In our oral or written accounts we frequently use expressions such as “indescribable,” “beyond words,” “words can’t tell . . . ,” “a new language is needed.” Indeed, this was how we felt every day in the camps. If we were ever to return home and wanted to tell our story, we wouldn’t be able to find the words: everyday language can describe everyday experiences, but this was a different world, here we would need a language “from this other world,” a language born here.
With this exhibit, we have tried to adopt the language of images, aware of its power. As you can see, the images here are revealing but not touched up, not “artistic”; they show the Lagers, in particular Auschwitz, Birkenau, and the sinister rice mill of San Sabba, as they appear today. It seems to me that these images confirm what information theory says: an image “tells” twenty, a hundred times as much as a written page of the same size. Moreover, it is accessible to all, even to the illiterate and to the foreigner; it’s the best Esperanto. These observations aren’t new; they were formulated by Leonardo in his treatise on painting; yet, applied to the unspeakable universe of the Lagers, they acquire a stronger meaning. More and better than words, these images reflect the impact that the camps have on the visitor, whether they are well or poorly preserved, whether or not they have been transformed into different places or sanctuaries. And, surprisingly, this impact is more profound and more disturbing on those who were never there than it is on us, the few survivors.
Even today, for many of us compassion and respect are overcome by the old trauma, the scalding memories, and hence the need to repress. Had we been asked at the time of liberation: “What do you want to do with these infected barracks, these nightmarish barbed-wire fences, these rows of latrines, the ovens, the gallows?” I think most of us would have answered: “Get rid of everything. Level everything, raze it to the ground along with Nazism and all that is German.” We would have answered like that (many answered like that in deeds, pulling down the barbed-wire fences and burning the barracks), and we would have been wrong. Such horrors should not be erased. As years and decades go by, these remains do not lose their significance as monuments-admonishments; on the contrary, they increase it. They show us better than any treatise or memorial how inhuman Hitler’s regime was, even in its scenographic and architectural choices. At the entrance to the Birkenau camp, so well portrayed here in the bleakness of the snow and the timeless bareness of the landscape, we can read a Dantesque “abandon all hope.” Nothing conveys better than this image the repetitive obsession of the lights that shine on the no-man’s-land between the electric fence and the barbed wire. Different, but no less striking, are the pictures of San Sabba. It was in fact only a rice mill, a plant for processing rice that had been built when much of the grain imported from the Far East was unloaded in Trieste. In the conversion of that plant into a place of torture we can see a theatrical and malign imagination. The choice of those high, massive, blind walls was not an accident. Visiting San Sabba today, or seeing it in the images that are reproduced here, reminds us that, besides being a fanatical megalomaniac, Hitler was also a failed architect. The scenography of the huge parades was an essential part of Nazi ritual (and of its appeal to the German people). Speer, the equivocal genius of management and the official architect of the Thousand Year Reich, was the Führer’s closest confidant and the organizer of the cruel exploitation of the free labor provided by the Lagers.
Triangolo Rosso, no. 3–4, March–April 1985