In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 THE DILEMMA OF CHOICE IN THE DEATHCAMPS Lawrence L. Langer Do you know how one says never in camp slang? Morgen friih: tomorrow morning. -Primo Levi Suppose Dante's pilgrim in the Divine Comedy had arrived at the exit from the Inferno to find the way barred by a barbed wire fence, posted with warnings reading "No trespassing. Violators will be annihilated ." When the spiritual and psychological equivalents of Purgatory and Paradise are excluded from human possibility, to be replaced by the daily threat of death in the gas chamber, then we glimpse the negative implications of survival, especially for the Jews, in the Nazi extermination camps. After we peel from the surface of the survivor ordeal the veneer of dignified behavior, hope, mutual support, and the inner resolve to resist humiliation, we find beneath a raw and quivering anatomy of human existence resembling no society we have ever encountered before. When such an existence transforms the life instinct and forces men and women who would remain alive to suspend the golden rule and embrace the iron one of "do unto others before it is done unto you," we must expect some moral rust to flake from the individual soul. We are left with a spectacle of reality that few would choose to celebrate, if they could tolerate a world where words like dignity and choice had temporarily lost their traditional meaning because Nazi brutality had eliminated the human supports that usually sustain them. But such a world so threatens our sense of spiritual continuity that it is agonizing to imagine or consent to its features without introducing some affirmative values to mitigate the gloom. For those like Viktor Frankl who see life as a challenge to give meaning to being, the notion that the situation in Auschwitz deprived This article originally appeared in Centerpoint: A Joumal of Interdisciplinary Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 53-59. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author and Centerpoint. 118 Copyrighted Material The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps I 119 being of meaning is the highest form of impiety. He speaks of the deathcamp as a "living laboratory" or "testing ground" where he witnessed how "some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints." But this arbitrary division into heroes and villains is misleading, since it totally ignores the even more arbitrary environment that shaped human conduct in Auschwitz. Frankl cannot resist the temptation to incorporate the deathcamp experience into his world view, to make events serve his theory of behavior: "Man has both potentialities within himself: which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions."! This may be an accurate description of human character in a Dostoevski novel: We shall see how much evidence Frankl was required to ignore to protect his image of man in the deathcamps as a self-determining creature, no matter how humiliating his surroundings. Auschwitz was indeed a laboratory and testing ground, but if we contemplate the "experiment" without rigid moral preconceptions, we discover that men could not be divided simply into saints and swine, and that self-actualization as a concept evaporates when impossible conditions obliterate the possible decisions we have been trained to applaud. To speak of survival in Auschwitz as a form of self-actualization is to mock language and men, especially those who did not survive. lf we pursue the proposition that some stains on the soul of history -and the Holocaust is such a stain-are indelible, where will it lead us? It will lead us certainly to an unfamiliar version of survival, to the conclusion that after Auschwitz the idea of human dignity could never be the same again. It will force us to reexamine the language of value that we used before the event, and to admit that at least when describing the Holocaust, if not its consequences, such language may betray the spirit and the facts of the ordeal. Perhaps this is what Primo Levi, himself a survivor, was trying to say in Suroival in Auschwitz when he wrote: Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say "hunger," we say "tiredness," "fear," "pain," we say "winter" and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers [camps) had lasted longer a new, harsh language...

Share