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This essay appeared as part of an article, under the same name, in the June 26, 1997, issue of the New York Review of Books. In the “Exchanges” printed in the September 25 issue of the journal, a Polish writer took me to task for calling the canonized martyr Father Maximilian Kolbe a“notorious anti-Semite .” Kolbe stepped forward and took the place at Auschwitz of a Polish prisoner with a family who was to be executed. In my reply I tried to point out that Kolbe was, indeed, a well-known anti-Semitic propagandist and that his magnificent act of self-sacrifice and defiance of the Nazis only proves the complexity of human nature. In the vast literature of the Holocaust, scholars have disagreed on nearly every major issue. They have been unable to establish with any precision, for example , the respective guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust of the Führer, his immediate underlings, the SS, the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the Nazi Party, the German social elite, and the rest of the Germans. Nor do they know for certain when, and by whom precisely, the satanic plan called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was conceived. In his brilliant and highly ambitious book, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak; New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1996), Tzvetan Todorov attempts to analyze how people behaved in both the German and Soviet concentration camps and to examine much of the literature of the Holocaust and of the Soviet Gulag. Todorov has written an intellectually honest, unpretentious, and deeply optimistic book, which is almost religious in its conviction that goodness existed in the midst of the worst atrocities and, in fact, arose in response to those atrocities. The ultimate test of human dignity for Todorov is the emblem of the totalitarian regime, the concentration camp. Can there be moral life in such a place? 94 M E M O R I E S O F H E L L Some famous survivors like Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and Eugenia Ginzburg (who spent twenty years at the Kolyma camp in the Soviet Union) argue that in the camps a moral position was impossible. “It was a Hobbesian life,” Levi writes, “a continuous war of everyone against everyone.” Richard Glazar horrifyingly corroborates this argument in his Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka (translated by Roslyn Theobald, foreword by Wolfgang Benz; Evanston il: Northwestern University Press, 1995). Glazar was among the few Jews arriving in the Treblinka camp who were enlisted as workers in the death factory. At Treblinka, near Warsaw, Glazar was assigned to sort and pack the goods confiscated from the gas chamber’s victims. It was backbreaking labor but it brought extraordinary benefits. Valuable goods could be stolen and later exchanged with the Ukrainian and SS guards and the food and clothing the murdered Jews left behind allowed Glazar and his companions to be among the best-fed and best-dressed of the Jewish victims of Nazism. Moreover, as Glazar explains, the welfare of the working prisoners depended directly on the number of death trains arriving at Treblinka. When the trains became less frequent, the inmate-workers starved; thus when the number of trains suddenly increased, they shouted “Hurrah, hurrah!” The same trains often disgorged the prisoners’ own relatives and friends en route to the gas chambers. In other camps mothers sometimes pretended not to know their children in order to save their own lives. Todorov, however, finds many exceptions to the law of the jungle in concentration camp literature and points out that Primo Levi and other pessimists themselves performed quiet acts of compassion and heroism. Not everybody became demoralized, and survival was often a question of mutual assistance and sympathy. Levi’s survival, for example, would have been impossible without the help of such good friends as the Italian worker Lorenzo, who brought him soup every day. Todorov also writes about Margarete Buber-Neumann, the non-Jewish German Communist who fled to the Soviet Union. Once there, both she and her husband, the German Communist leader Heinz Neumann, were arrested. Heinz disappeared forever in the Gulag; Margaret spent two years in a camp in Kazakhstan, after which, in 1940, the Soviet police handed her over to the Gestapo. She spent the next five years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she risked her life to save other women from being selected for...

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