'One's Lucidity Is Shaken'

“This is beyond imagining: one’s lucidity is shaken. Difficult to think clearly.” 

As the horrors piled up, the twentieth century taught us to accept such expressions as useful and accurate, not hyperbole, though the events defied belief and understanding, and often still do. The slaughter seemed endless but contemporaries couldn’t believe it and some still deny it – Armenians, Jews, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians and others murdered by the millions on an industrial scale.

 

The Black Book of Polish Jewry was an early attempt to document the Holocaust. It was published in 1943 by the American Federation of Polish Jews and edited by Jacob Apenszlak and others. Among its sponsors were Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. Critics complained the report underestimates the true scale of the mass extermination. It estimates that the number of Polish Jews murdered by the fourth year of the war had exceeded 700,000.

 

Victor Serge was exiled in Mexico when he wrote the sentence quoted at the top. He was reading the Black Book and writing in his Notebooks 1936-1947 (trans. Richard Greeman and Mitchell Abidor, 2019) on November 12, 1944:

 

“Repeated a hundred times with technically organized variants of sadism and bestiality, the same tale of violence, insults, and finally of rationalized extermination in purpose-built factories. Counting Russian Jews, this must add up to three million murdered—at least: an entire people.”

 

I’ve had an interest in Serge (1890-1947) since the late Sixties when I found a remaindered copy of his 1931 novel Birth of Our Power (trans. Richard Greeman, 1967) in, of all places, a hardware/lumber store. Serge’s political metamorphosis – anarchist, Bolshevik, anti-Stalin Left Oppositionist – mirrored that of millions, many of whom were murdered by Stalin and his goons.

 

Serge was close to Trotsky. Unlike him and many of his comrades, Serge died of natural causes. He remained a dedicated revolutionary and Marxist, though he seems to have had a conscience of sorts, a vestigial moral sense. And he could write, a rare gift among political extremists of any stripe. While in Mexico he observed: “Few people know that the so-called Soviet regime is totalitarian. And among those who are aware of this, many admire it for just this reason.”

 

Serge speculates on the operation and organization of the camps: “Probably all the personnel selected for the horrible tasks,” he writes, “are then killed themselves: either the agents become dangerous half madmen or the system plans in advance for the disappearance of such witnesses.” Clearly, he’s thinking of Stalin during the Great Purge murdering the Old Bolsheviks and other loyal communists. But unlike many on the Left, Serge is not naïve about human nature when describing the Nazi atrocities:

 

“In reality the system appealed to destructive instincts, to sadism, to the castration complex in choosing a few thousand brutes ready to do anything. It’s not difficult to find one hundred thousand out of sixty-five million inhabitants, and these hundred thousand are largely sufficient for all tasks.”

 

Serge could be describing ongoing events in the Middle East -- Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Jew-hating functionaries. There’s seldom a shortage of volunteers eager to perform such work. “No civilized man,” Serge writes, “is certain he won’t be either murdered or executed or killed by a rocket-propelled bomb.”

 

I wish more people would read the fiction of Tadeusz Borowski (1922-51), a non-Jewish Pole sent in 1943 first to Auschwitz-Birkenau, then to the sub-camp at Natzweiler-Struthof in Germany, and finally to Dachau. A collection of his stories was published in English in 1967, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (trans. Barbara Vedder). I read his stories as though they were a sacred text. I had never read anything so grim. A warning: events recounted in his stories are shockingly violent. Atrocities are performed casually by German guards and kapos among the prisoners, and Borowski narrates them in a voice almost clinical. There’s no melodrama.

 

Finally, in 2021, Yale University Press published a more complete edition, Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories (trans. Madeline G. Levine), with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). The earlier collection’s title story is here translated as “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas.” Its narrator works on the ramp beside the railroad tracks (as Borowski did), unloading the train cars filled with prisoners. At one point he pulls back from the scene and describes the larger context. In effect, he tries to make sense of the Holocaust and suggests it may continue without end:

 

“The transports grow into weeks, months, years. When the war ends, they will count up the incinerated. They will calculate a total of four and a half million. The bloodiest battle of the war, the greatest victory of united and unanimous Germany. Ein Reich, ein Volk,  ein Führer – and four crematoriums. . . . The Jews will burn, the Poles will burn, the Russians will burn . . . . The gas chambers will be improved, made more efficient, will be more cunningly disguised.”

 

Borowski survived the camps. Like Paul Celan, Jean Améry and Primo Levi he committed suicide. He was twenty-eight.