The power to refuse our consent
‘Nothing is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another sky.’
At the age of only twenty-four, Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, a chemist from Turin, was sent to Auschwitz (‘It was my good fortune’, he writes, ‘to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination’).
Levi is among a handful of impressive men and women (Elie Wiesel, author of Night, and Paul Oppenheimer, author of Belsen to Buckingham Palace, also spring to mind) who lived through the atrocities of the Holocaust and, rather than fall into a pit of despair, put pen to paper, and fulfilled the wishes of most in these camps; to tell the outside world what really happened within.
His book If This is a Man is an excellent and deeply moving study of the human mind. I copy below, on Holocaust Memorial Day, the passage from the book which stuck out for me the most, on the power to refuse one’s consent:
‘For many weeks, I considered these warnings about hygiene [‘After the latrine, before eating, wash your hands, do not forget’] as pure examples of the Teutonic sense of humour, in the style of the dialogue about the truss which we had heard on our entry into the Lager [camp]. But later I understood that their unknown authors, perhaps without realising it, were not far from some very important truths. In this place it is practically pointless to wash every day in the turbid water of the filthy washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality, and necessary as an instrument of moral survival.
‘I must confess it: after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness disappeared I me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend ages almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth. Does not Steinlauf know that after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference between him and me will have disappeared? The more I think about it, the more washing one’s face in our condition seems a stupid feat, even frivolous: a mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an extinct rite. We will all die, we are all about to die: if they give me ten minutes between the reveille and work, I want to dedicate them to something else, to draw into myself, to weigh up things, or merely to look at the sky and think that I am looking at it perhaps for the last time; or even to let myself live, to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.
‘But Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees [to prevent it from being stolen] and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administered me a complete lesson.
‘It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the ’14-’18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and is quiet manner of speaking of a good solider into my language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding the form of civilisation. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.
‘These things Steinlauf told me, a man of good will, told me; strange things to my unaccustomed ear, understood and accepted only in part, and softened by an easier, more flexible and blander doctrine, which for centuries has found its dwelling place on the other side of the Alps; according to which, among other things, nothing is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another sky. No, the wisdom and virtue of Steinlauf, certainly good for him, is not enough for me. In the face of this complicated world my ideas of damnation are confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?’
