We celebrate Romani Resistance Day, in which thousands of prisoners in the Gypsy Camp of Auschwitz defied the SS and fought as a brotherhood of liberty, for their lives and one another beyond hope of victory or survival but also for the dignity of humankind and the one freedom which is never lost; to remain unconquered in refusal to submit.
Like the Spartans at Marathon their actions on this day redeemed the chance of liberty for us all, reaffirmed our human meaning and value in the face of dehumanizing tyranny and racist genocide, and along with countless other acts of solidarity and valor among nearly every people on earth in the glorious human struggle against fascism of World War Two helped civilization win time to recognize and meet the threat of atavistic barbarism and the divisions of otherness which remain to be vanquished.
I think of such things in terms of my own Last Stands, which recently include the defense of Mariupol in Ukraine from April 18 to March 22 2022, of Panjshir in Afghanistan from August 24 through September 8 2021, of al Quds or Jerusalem from May 10 to 21 2021 and in the ongoing Third Intifada, and since October of 2023 in the Revolutions of Burma, Haiti, and in the Gaza War and the Third Intifada for the Liberation of Palestine including the victorious Red Sea Campaign which counter blockades the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and Romani Resistance Day also coincides with the final day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of which I wrote in my post of April 19.
Herein I remember the Oath of the Resistance as given to me by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, which he repurposed from that of the French Foreign Legion in Paris 1940; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and surrender not our fellows”. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
Should you ever find it necessary to look for idealizations of masculine beauty as compassion, loyalty, fearlessness, beyond the fetishization of violence or the addiction of power, look to examples of solidarity and our duty of care for each other in the heroism of our mutual defense, in our glorious history of resistance and liberation struggle as a Band of Brothers such as Romani Resistance Day and countless others like it. When everything else is stripped away, this is what remains, and what we truly are.
This our common humanity, this solidarity, this United Humankind. This, this, this.
Our choices and actions in such Defining Moments become a forge of the soul by which we may reinvent ourselves. In the end what determines the quality of our humanity and who we will become among the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value and of becoming human as a seizure of power and self ownership of our identity is a simple thing, but not an easy one; how will you use your power?
We celebrate this, and will soon celebrate Memorial Day which honors our sacred dead in wars of antifascist resistance and revolutionary struggle of liberation, in a context of historical repetition of the conditions which gave rise to the Axis powers, pandemic and economic, political, and civilizational collapse, and in the rising darkness of a global Fourth Reich of authoritarian tyrannies whose figurehead is the repulsive and abominable Traitor Trump.
The tide of darkness, barbarism, atavisms of instinct, dehumanization, and fear weaponized by authority in service to power has begun to turn here in America with the Restoration of our democratic values and ideals during the Biden Presidency, if a deeply flawed, relative, and highly contingent and imperiled Restoration, but we have only just begun to reclaim our humanity from the jaws of fascist tyranny and terror. Much of our world still lives under its shadow, and Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his Deplorables have won the recapture of the state and the final subversion of democracy in our performative elections; this we must resist.
This is an evil which moves among us both brazen in the arrogance of power and privilege and unseen, like an ambush predator concealed by the lies and illusions with which it masks itself, and our greatest weapon against racism and fascism is exposure of its true face. By exposure, second of the four primary duties of a citizen among Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, I mean parrhesia which Michel Foucault reimagined as truth telling and of praxis or the action of our values and ideals as a sacred calling to pursue the truth; to write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
There is no better evocation of fascism as the great enemy of humankind, of the origins of evil, the brokenness of the world, and the flaws of our humanity than Jerzy Kosinski’s magisterial novel The Painted Bird and its film. Herein a child wanders in a purgatory of fear and force, perversions and cruelties, a witness of history written by a Polish Catholic who as a child refugee in Eastern Europe was often mistaken for and tortured as a Gypsy, from his childhood therapy journal.
My mother wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness based on his novel, his childhood therapy journal, and Soviet medical records which describe his long struggle from the age to nine at Liberation to regain his power of speech at 14, and the history and stories of The Painted Bird were part of my teenage years as family conversations, which became a major informing and motivating source for my primary interest in the origins of evil and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force. I found my voice metaphorically at the age he did literally, the summer before high school in Brazil, and I saw myself in his story.
The Painted Bird is a story of humankind and of the collapse of civilization in the twentieth century during the Second World War, but it also typifies the history of the displaced, vilified, and relentlessly persecuted and abused Romani as an iconic figure of Others, a space they share with Jewish peoples. For the Romani are the Shadow of European civilization, cast as Caliban-like figures to establish and reinforce the tyranny of our normalities and the boundaries of otherness, to whom any atrocity may be done; dehumanized as thieves, beggars, whores, categories of exclusion which serve to legitimize authority and identitarian constructions of nationalism.
All those who are Outcasts occupy this figural space with the Romani; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. And we who would become human must place our lives in the balance with them.
In the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, the failure of our ideals of diversity and inclusion, and the limits of our universal human rights exposed by our persecution of Outcasts such as the Romani as our unwilling Sin Eaters, we find a measure of the distance we have yet to go to become civilized or even fully human.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that under the weight of centuries of oppression and demonization, the heroes of the Romani Resistance did not go quietly to their deaths, but fought for one another til the end, defiant and free. In the words of Dylan Thomas; “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
May we all find within ourselves the will to refuse to submit to force and control, and to remain Unconquered.
When they come for us, as those who would enslave us always have and will, let them find not a people subjugated by division, learned helplessness, and despair, but a United Humankind in which we are all of us guarantors of each other’s humanity.
As written by Rain in Counterpunch; “May 16th, 1944, was the day Himmler’s Auschwitz Decree was to be fulfilled. Approximately 6,500 Romani victims confined in the Zigeunerlager, the “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were to be “liquidated.” Surrounded by the SS, the Romani refused to exit the barracks that paid mute witness to 17,000 of their relatives who had already been murdered in the gas chambers or Mengele directed “medical” experiments, worked to death as slave laborers, slowly starved, or succumbed to disease. “We’re not coming out! You come in here!” Mano Höllenreiner, then a ten-year old boy, remembered his father shouting.
Constricted as they were by death, on this day they refused to die. Just hours before, they had been warned that after roll call next morning they would be executed. In preparation to resist they fashioned weapons out of slats from bunks, some held rocks, others had secreted away tools from a warehouse in the compound. It wasn’t so much an act of defiance but of love – for each other and those brutally taken from them, for whom they would live at least one more day. It was an extraordinary display of courage and testament to the human spirit.”
As written by Michal Schuster in an article entitled The Romani Uprising in Auschwitz, 16 May 1944; “The year 1944 can simply be called the closing phase of the so-called “Final Solution to the Gypsy question” in Nazi-occupied Europe, including on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After transporting most Roma to the Auschwitz complex during 1943, smaller transports there took place during 1944. On 16 May 1944 the first attempt to annihilate all the members of the so-called “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place and was prevented by an uprising of the prisoners there. The most tragic event did finally take place and the camp and its inhabitants were entirely destroyed at the beginning of August 1944.
First attempt to destroy the “Gypsy Camp” and the Romani prisoners’ uprising:
The commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, ordered at the beginning of 1944 the acceleration of the work already underway in one section of Birkenau, primarily the construction of ramps and the rails for the three-rail branch of the Oświęcim-Katowice railway line, which led to Crematorium I and Crematorium II. The commander of all the crematoria, SS Otto Moll, had to ensure, during the course of one week, repairs to all the crematoria, completion of the construction of the buildings, and the start of new construction, as well as the erection of several rooms where the prisoners were stripped near the repaired Bunker II and behind Crematorium V. The prisoners also dug two big pits for burning corpses.
All of the preparations were performed in order to receive a transport of Jews from Hungary. Those new prisoners who were labeled capable of work during the selection would need accommodation, so the highest SS command at the main camp decided on 15 May 1944 to kill everyone in the “Gypsy Family Camp”. That would free up space in all of camp B-II-e for more of the Jews from Hungary.
The final action was to have been performed on the evening of 16 May, when the gong was rung announcing a ban on leaving the camp (the so-called Lagersperre) and it was closed. Trucks drove up and parked in front of the gate to the camp; 50 -60 members of a special SS commando unit jumped out of them and called on the prisoners to quickly leave the residential blocks. Inside the blocks, however, a tense silence prevailed and the prisoners refused to come out, barricading the doors and desperately preparing to defend themselves with rocks and work tools. The members of the SS commando unit were startled by this disobedience and their commander decided to postpone the action.
Romani Holocaust survivor Hugo Höllenreiner (born 1933 in Munich), who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp with his family in 1943, later recalled those moments of resistance as follows: “There were about seven or eight men, definitely, who came to the gate. Dad shouted out – the whole building trembled when he shouted: ‘We’re not coming out! You come in here! We’re waiting here! If you want something, you have to come inside!’ “
The entire event was described in a report by Tadeusz Joachimowski (1908-1979), a former Polish political prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp who was assigned to be a “scribe” (a writer) in the “Gypsy Camp”, as follows: “The last commander of the Gypsy Camp and the current rapportführer [reporting officer] was Bonigut. He was probably from Yugoslavia. He disagreed with the approaches and tactics of the SS. He was a very good person. On 15 May 1944 he came after me and said things looked bad for the Gypsy Camp. An order had been issued to destroy it and had reportedly already received confirmation from the political department through Dr Mengele. The Gypsy Camp was to be destroyed and its crew killed using gas. There were roughly 500 Gypsies in the camp at that time. Bonigut entrusted me with informing those Gypsies whom I trusted about what was ahead. He asked me to warn them so they would not go like sheep to the slaughter. He also told me that the signal for the beginning of the action would be the Lagersperre and that the Gypsies should not leave their barracks. Bonigut himself warned several Gypsies of the action. I also (secretly) performed this task. The next day at around 7 PM I heard the gong announcing the Lagersperre. Automobiles drove up in front of the Gypsy Camp and 50 – 60 SS men armed with machine guns got out of them. They immediately surrounded the buildings where the Gypsies lived. Some SS members entered this residential area shouting ‘Los, los‘. There was total calm in the barracks. The Gypsies, armed with handcuffs, knives, shovels and stones, waited to see what would happen. They did not leave the barracks. The SS members were appalled and left themselves. After a brief consultation, they went to find the Blockführerstube [the commander of that block] in order to inform the commander of the action. After some time I heard a whistle. The SS men who were surrounding the barracks left their positions, got back in the automobiles, and drove away. The closure of the camp was lifted. On the next day (17 May 1944), Lagerführer Bonigut came to me and said the Gypsies were rescued, for now…”.
While there was no open clash between the Romani prisoners and the SS members, this event played a significant role. It decidedly was not the habit in the concentration camps for the prisoners to resist a planned, prepared action en masse right before it was to be undertaken. There is absolutely no doubt that the armed SS commando could have suppressed this act of resistance, but decided not to go into an open confrontation with the prisoners and preferred to achieve their aims in another way. This event is unequivocally an uprising and occupies a significant place in the tragic history of the Holocaust of the European Roma.
In the so-called “Gypsy Camp” at Birkenau there were approximately 6,500 prisoners, half of whom were subsequently put into quarantine in the main camp, some at the end of May and start of June, others at the start of August 1944. They included prisoners from Bohemia, Germany, and Poland.
The destruction of the “Gypsy Camp” at Birkenau:
About 10,000 women from Hungary then arrived at the “Gypsy Camp” and were accommodated in the odd-numbered blocks, while the Romani prisoners were put on the even-numbered side. They moved a second time into the rear half of the camp when men from Hungary arrived and were put in the front section of the camp. In July 1944, Himmler decided to destroy the rest of the “Gypsy Camp”. On the morning of 1 August, those prisoners fit for work were supposed to report for transport elsewhere, and Antonín Absolon-Růžička (born 30 September 1930 in the Moravian village of Mistřín) took advantage of the opportunity. He later recalled: “One day in summer when I heard on the grounds that a new transport was leaving and lining up at the gate, I ran out there, naked, fleeing the blocks and heading for the canteen. I met my sister Jana on the way. She asked where I was running to and I told her I wanted to leave with the transport. She started to persuade me not to leave, saying we two were the only ones left, that I should stay with her. All I know is that I told her I had to go. I didn’t even say good-bye I was in such a hurry…”.
On the next day, 2 August 1944, the final transports to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück were put together out of all the female and male prisoners fit for work from the “Gypsy Camp”. There were 918 boys and men sent to Buchenwald, of whom 151 had Protectorate citizenship. At the Buchenwald concentration camp, thanks to these transports from Auschwitz, the number of Romani and Sinti prisoners almost doubled. The Ravensbrück transports included 490 female prisoners. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to determine their state or territorial citizenship. Nevertheless, women from the Protectorate were certainly among them.
Through these six work transports, these female and male prisoners left the camp at Birkenau for good, because at the time the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” was about to be destroyed and the fate of its remaining prisoners had been decided.
After their departure, only the elderly, mothers with children and the fathers who didn’t want to leave their families, and orphans remained in the “Gypsy Camp”. During the late night of 2 August and the early morning hours of 3 August the block was closed (Blocksperre) and the 2 897 children, elderly people, the infirm and women were taken in trucks to the courtyard of Crematorium V. There their unexpected resistance had to be broken, after which they were herded into the gas chambers.
Those horrible moments were described by a member of the so-called Special Division (Sonderkommando), Filip Müller (born 1922 in the Slovak town of Sered’): “The room for removing clothing was stuffed full of people by midnight. The anxiety was growing minute by minute… desperate cries could be heard from all sides, accusations, lamentations, remorse. The voices called out in chorus: ‘We are Germans of the Reich! We’ve done nothing wrong!’ From elsewhere could be heard: ‘We want to live! Why do you want to kill us?’… The liquidation proceeded as usual. Moll and his aides unlocked the safeties on their pistols and rifles and uncompromisingly called on those who had taken their clothes off to leave the room and go into the three spaces where they would be poisoned with gas. On that final trip many were weeping with desperation… Even from within the gas chambers, for a long time afterward, we heard intermittent calls and cries until the gas performed its work and the last voices were snuffed out.”
The bodies of the murdered, who included many prisoners from the Protectorate, were then burned in the pits near the Crematorium because it was not yet running.
A recollection of the murder of those in the “Gypsy Camp” was also recorded by camp commander Rudolf Höss in his memoirs: “They did not know what awaited them until the final moment; they only realized it when they were brought into Crematorium No.V. It was not easy to lead them into the chamber. I didn’t see it, but Schwarzhuber told me about it, that no liquidation action of the Jews had been as difficult as the liquidation of the Gypsies.”
During this action, camp doctor Josef Mengele personally shot dead the male Romani twins on whom he had been performing experiments in order to subsequently use their bodies for autopsy. The female twins were transferred to the Hindenburg concentration camp. Irma Valdová-Krausová survived with her sisters because of that, and later recalled: “On that day Dr Mengele came to the camp at 18:30 in order to take the remaining twins away, including my two sisters Anna and Alžběta. Of my entire extended family, I was their only relative left, and they did not want to leave me, no matter the cost. During the confusion they put me in the car as well, which saved me from a certain death.”
This mass murder was followed by the brutal killing of the female and male prisoners who, after being transported elsewhere, had been sent back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to die in the gas chambers because they were exhausted and unfit for work. For this purpose, 200 Romani boys were sent from the concentration camp at Buchenwald on 26 September 1944 and 800 Romani men were sent on 10 October 1944. On 11 October 1944 and then on 14 October 1944 a total of 217 Romani girls and women were sent back to Auschwitz from the work commando units at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Some underwent a second selection and were once again transported back to Ravensbrück, while the rest ended up, like all of the boys and men who were returned to Auschwitz, in the gas chambers.”
As I have been immersed in the literature of Auschwitz and its reflections in the Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians for days now, and find myself in need of something joyful to balance the darkness lest it consume me, especially that of Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird which became part of my identity as a teenager who saw himself in its tortured child protagonist, the flaws of my humanity now betray the vision which exalts me; the world does not need my grief nor my absurd desires, yet this too is human. The world needs our rage against the dying of the light, and solidarity of action regardless of the cost; but it also needs our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
I find my thoughts surfacing memories of a vanished age, when I made mischief behind the Iron Curtain with the famous gypsy Bluey, smuggler and kingpin of the East Berlin black market who ran an underground railroad and for-hire intelligence service through the Berlin Wall. The man could hold a crowd spellbound with his stories, and roaring with laughter; in his persona as a circus clown, he made an art of being likeable and built an outlaw empire from trading favors and secrets and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.
This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, and the reason my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change. Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German.
Being able to pass as a member of a number of nationalities including multilingualism is a necessity of survival and a defining characteristic of being Romani as a protean and stealth identity among peoples who would kill them for being who they are. Bluey once described it to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; first, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”
Here I wish to clarify and disambiguate the origin and meaning of the terms Romani, which broadly describes an ethnic identity of former citizens of the Byzantine Roman Empire who assimilated Latin, arriving in the Balkans nine hundred years ago having migrated from India in a single wave some fifteen hundred years ago by DNA evidence, and Gypsy, a far narrower title of profession derived from the Hungarian gyepu which refers to the system of remote forest defenses in Transylvania guarding its frontier and border with the Ottoman Empire, of which Romani warriors were a part as foederati. Romani describes blood and language, Gypsy describes a historical social role as a guardian or ranger and a multigenerational brotherhood of warriors which persists as a pan-European secret society, bound by ancient oaths to defend civilization beyond its borders, wherever law ceases to have meaning and all that remains is the valor and loyalty of men.
To be a Gypsy is to be a guardian of humankind and of civilization against barbarism, and a guarantor of our uniqueness and universal rights in a free society of equals, wherein there are no laws and no limits to our possibilities of becoming human beyond those chosen by ourselves.
That the Empire to which these oaths were sworn has not existed for seven hundred years is irrelevant; my kind of people.
As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
In this company, which operated under cover as a circus throughout Europe, I met the girl whose echoes and reflections live in the images of a doppelganger I chanced upon, dancing with crows.
Images which follow my notes and citations of references are of the Polish corset designer Koseatra, but breathtaking in likeness to the gypsy girl I very nearly married, over three decades ago. Impossible that this is the same girl; she would be over a generation older than Koseatra, where these photographs have frozen her image in amber from before the fall of the Iron Curtain, timeless and beyond the limits of the human.
The eyes are the same; tinged green when laughing and mischevious, and in the darkness fathoms of ice blue with a strange silver reflectivity, when closer to the wolf.
So also her grace of movement, refined and elegant, and the regal stillness of her bearing in repose; like the serenity of a bodhisattva, or the coiled stillness of a lioness about to pounce.
But it’s the eyes that compel.
Who could look into such eyes, and send the unique and marvelous being who looks out through them to destruction and death, as the Nazis did countless times at Auschwitz?
This is among the true horrors of fascism, for men who could do this are dead to beauty, wonder, awe, and love.
Fascism is a disease of possession, which steals the soul. Mere bundles of atavisms of instinct, degenerate and hollow, are fascists, whose zombiefication in service to power is a terror to be hunted relentlessly and purged from among us, no less than the amoral rapacity of those who would enslave us.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
THE PAINTED BIRD Official Trailer
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/the-romani-uprising-in-auschwitz-16-may-1944
And the Violins Stopped Playing, by Alexander Ramati
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1474003.And_the_Violins_Stopped_Playing
Ceija Stojka: Even Death Is Afraid of Auschwitz, Ceija Stojka (artist), Karin Berger (Contributor), Barbara Dankwortt (Contributor), Tímea Junghaus (Contributor), Lith Bahlmann (Editor), Matthias Reichelt (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26508356-ceija-stojka?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_46
The Color of Smoke: A Novel, Menyhért Lakatos, Ann Major (Translator)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22926616-the-color-of-smoke
While the witness of history of survivors of Auschwitz includes few Romani such as Alexander Ramati and Ceija Stojka, there are many others whose stories can remind us who we are, and what’s worth fighting for.
Auschwitz, by Laurence Rees
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/978098.Auschwitz
Our Crime Was Being Jewish: Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories, by Anthony S. Pitch, Michael Berenbaum (Foreword)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25533564-our-crime-was-being-jewish
Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6174.Survival_in_Auschwitz
At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, by Jean Améry
Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning, by Paul Steinberg
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/783420.Speak_You_Also
Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, by Olga Lengyel
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249825.Five_Chimneys
Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, by Filip Müller
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73291.Eyewitness_Auschwitz
In the Hell of Auschwitz: The Wartime Memoirs of Judith Sternberg Newman,
by Judith Sternberg Newman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45035834-in-the-hell-of-auschwitz
Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz,
by Shlomo Venezia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6296148-inside-the-gas-chambers
999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz, by Heather Dune Macadam (Goodreads Author), Caroline Moorehead (Foreword)
The Auschwitz Photographer: The Forgotten Story of the WWII Prisoner Who Documented Thousands of Lost Souls, by Luca Crippa
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57659036-the-auschwitz-photographer
The Sisters of Auschwitz: The True Story of Two Jewish Sisters’ Resistance in the Heart of Nazi Territory, by Roxane van Iperen
Outcry: Holocaust Memoirs, by Manny Steinberg
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23268862-outcry
The Dead Years: Holocaust Memoirs, by Joseph Schupack
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34235504-the-dead-years
Hank Brodt Holocaust Memoirs: A Candle and a Promise, by Deborah Donnelly
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32467262-hank-brodt-holocaust-memoirs
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228244.This_Way_for_the_Gas_Ladies_and_Gentlemen
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, by Miklós Nyiszli
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315578.Auschwitz
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive, by Lucy Adlington
By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, by Max Eisen
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25989447-by-chance-alone
The Violinist of Auschwitz, by Ellie Midwood
The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz, by Jack Fairweather
Here I wish to include Sologdin’s review in Goodreads of Giogio Agamben’s four essays published as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, a brilliant problematization of the nature and functions of the literature of witness, an idea central to my own life mission and ars poetica of the witness of history, along with Foucault’s truthtelling a sacred calling in pursuit of truth. With Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia which I attended at UC Berkeley in 1983, and left their stamp of strangeness upon me, here follows one of the finest explications of why I write which I have yet found:
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, by Giorgio Agamben
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85830.Remnants_of_Auschwitz
review by Sologdin
“Four essays. Preface opens with the reasonable proposition that the discrepancy regarding Auschwitz “concerns the very structure of testimony” (12): “On the one hand, what happened in the camps appears to the survivors as the only true thing and, as such, absolutely unforgettable; on the other hand, this truth is to the same degree unimaginable, that is, irreducible to the real elements that constitute it” (id.). The discrepancy concerns “facts so real, by comparison, nothing is truer; a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the aporia of Auschwitz” ((id.). One survivor, Lewental, a sonderkommando, wrote that “the complete truth is far more tragic, far more frightening” (id.)—to which author responds: “more tragic, more frightening than what?” We see that the “aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension” (id.). We also see that
One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante. (Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the ‘banality of evil,’ so often misunderstood, must also be understood in this sense.) (13)
Though Agamben states that this text has little that can’t be found in the actual testimonials, “it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” (id). His task became an interrogation of the lacuna, even though “listening to something absent” may seem counterintuitive: “it made it necessary to clear away almost all of the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics” (id.).
I – “The Witness”
In Auschwitz, one reason to survive was “the idea of becoming a witness” (15). Primo Levi “does not consider himself a writer; he becomes a writer so that he can bear witness” (id.).
Latin has two terms for our ‘witness’: testis (“from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person, who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis)” (17)) and superstes (“a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it”) (id.). These latinate concepts problematize the notion of bearing witness to Auschwitz, as we shall see. Levi is interested only in “what makes judgment possible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims” (17). Judgment can be made, of course, but important that “the law not presume to exhaust the question. A non-juridical element of truth exists such that the quaestio facti can never be reduced to the quaestio iuris” (id.).
Author notes the standard “tacit confusion of ethical and juridical categories” in this connection (18)—all of this is “contaminated by law,” which has the “ultimate aim” of “the production of a res judicata” (id.), quite distinct from the finding of truth or the disposition in justice. Rather, “the sentence becomes the substitute [supplement?] for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice” (id.). Via reference to Kafka, law is reduced to judgment, and judgment to trial: “execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct” (19) (the plotinian hoion, of course) and dude concludes that judgment constitutes “the mystery of trial.” Some suggestion that the post-war trials (which involved “only a few hundred people,” an “evident insufficiency” (19)) “are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz,” as “they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.” We get now that “law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself” (20).
Some discussion here on ‘responsibility’—it has been “irredeemably contaminated by law” (20) (likely we need an archaeology of contamination, considering dude’s reliance thereupon) (cf. also Bakhtin on ‘answerability’). Levi would place certain occurrences in a “zone of irresponsibility,” based on his “unprecedented discovery” at Auschwitz of “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility,” wherein “the long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner comes loose” (21). We are not “beyond good and evil” (i.e., with Nietzsche), but “before them”; “before is more important than any beyond—that the ‘underman’ must matter to us more than the ‘overman’” (id.). Again, this “First Circle” of irresponsibility is Arendt’s banality of evil. The sonderkommando is the representative of this zone of irresponsibility (25).
Etymology again tells the story: spondeo “means ‘to become the guarantor of something for someone (or for oneself) with respect to someone’” (id.). For the Romans, the “custom was that a free man could consign himself as a hostage—that is, in a state of imprisonment, from which the term obligatio derives—to guarantee the compensation of a wrong or the fulfillment of an obligation” (22), and the “term sponsor indicated the person who substituted himself for the reus, promising, in the case of a breach of contract, to furnish the requested service” (id.). Responsibility is accordingly “genuinely juridical and not ethical” wherein “the legal bond was considered to inhere in the body of the person responsible” (id.). (We shall recall this when we get around to volume IX.)
Responsibility and guilt thus express simply two aspects of legal imputability; only later were they interiorized and moved outside law. Hence the insufficiency and opacity of every ethical doctrine that claims to be founded on these two concepts. (22)
Eichmann at his trial walked this distinction by claiming meaninglessly that he felt “guilty before God, not the law” (23). The silliness arises after “having raised juridical categories to the status of supreme ethical categories and thereby irredeemably confusing the fields of law and ethics,” secular ethics still wants to be separate (24): “But ethics is the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is, as Spinoza knew, the doctrine of the happy life” (id.), which reduces, furthermore, the ethical to the mere aesthetic. One would think that if there were an irreducible core of the ethical, regarding which aesthetics is of no moment, then it should be discoverable at Auschwitz.
The analysis turns to Greek martis, ‘martyr,’ as translation for ‘witness’: though the ante-Nicene fathers regarded martyrdom as witness to the faith, the Auschwitz survivors are unanimous that “what happened in the camps has little to do with martyrdom” (26). Conceptually, however, there is some connection, insofar as the Greek term is derived from the verb ‘to remember,’—“the survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember” (id.). More significantly, however, the ante-Nicene fathers “were confronted by heretical groups that rejected martyrdom because, in their eyes, it constituted a wholly senseless death (perire sine causa)” (27). The doctrine of martyrdom was confected to justify “the scandal of a meaningless death, of an execution that could only appear as absurd” (id.): “Confronted with the spectacle of a death that was apparently sine causa, the reference to Luke 12: 8-9 and to Matthew 10: 32-33 [quotations omitted] made it possible to interpret martyrdom as a divine command and, thus, to find reason for the irrational” (id.). Levi does not like the term Holocaust because of the implication of an offering or a punishment for sins (28), noting how Wiesel coined the term “then regretted it and wanted to take it back” (id.).
As we might have predicted, an etymology follows: holocaustos ultimately as a ‘complete burning,’ “used to translate […] the complex sacrificial doctrine of the Bible” (there’s several different Hebrew terms, and the term that the Vulgate rendered as holocaustum, olah, concerns “the dispatch of the offering to the divinity” (29)). The Ante-Nicene fathers used the term literally against Judaism, to “condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices” (id.), but then used it metaphorically to refer to the torture of the Christian martyrs, with the ultimate extension, by Augustine, to se holocaustum obtulerit in cruce Iesus.
The metaphorical usage is not limited to holocaust; the preferred term has been so’ah, which also reveals a metaphorical usage, meaning “‘devastation, catastrophe’ and, in the Bible, often implies the idea of divine punishment (as in Isaiah 10:3)” (31). Unlike holocaust, however, so’ah “contains no mockery”; the former term is an “attempt to establish a connection, however, distant, between Auschwitz and the Biblical olah and between death in the gas chamber and the ‘complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’” (id.). In swearing off the use of the term forever, author notes that “Not only does the term imply an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic” (id.).
Agamben had been challenged for trying to “ruin the unique and unsayable character of Auschwitz” (31). ‘Unique’ is conceded, but ‘unsayable’? Works through Chrysostom’s notion that God is unsayable, unspeakable, unwritable (32), such that the angels must merely adore Him in silence. Author translates ‘adore in silence’ as euphemein, and regards it as the proper way to cognize the complaint that he has ruined the unsayable character of Auschwitz.
“Testimony, however, contains,” once more, “a lacuna” (33): as Levi notes, “witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege.” This lacuna “calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of witnesses” (id.); Levi: “I must repeat: we the survivors, are not the true witnesses.” Levi makes his testimony essentially a representative capacity: “Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (34). Agamben notes that “the value of the testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority” (id.). Rather, the survivors speak as “pseudo-witnesses” insofar as “they bear witness to the missing testimony” (id.). Of course, by means of the standard adverse inference under the requisite rules of evidence, disappeared witnesses and concealed evidence compels the presumption that the party procuring the absence fears its disclosure and therefore we should assume the worst—so we should not be troubled by pseudo-witnesses.
This difficulty is explained otherwise as an inside/outside distinction: “The Shoah is an event without witnesses” because “it is impossible to bear witness from the inside” (no one survives to tell) or from the outside “since the ‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (35). Agamben thinks that the threshold of indistinction (hoion, recall) between inside and outside “could have led to a comprehension of the structure of testimony” (36). Testimony as the “disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness” (39)?
II – “The Muselmann”
Muselmann as the “untestifiable” to which “no one has borne witness” (41). The Muselmann as a “staggering corpse,” “mummy men,” “living dead” (id.), who “became indifferent to everything happening around them” (43). (The designation arises in Auschwitz from “the impression of seeing Arabs praying” (id.), according to one survivor.) No one had sympathy for the muselmanner (id.), and “all the muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story” (44). Little agreement on the “origin of the term Muselmann,” but many synonyms (45).
Muselmanner as marking “the moving threshold in which a man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” (47); “in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man” (id.) (NB: hoion). This particular zone of indistinction is what ties this volume very plainly to volume I (to the extent that “the Muselmann’s ‘third realm’ is the perfect cipher for the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed” (id.)) and volume II (insofar as the philosopher’s “extreme situation” is the jurist’s “state of exception”). In this latter connection, Karl Barth’s notion that “human beings have the striking capacity to adapt so well to an extreme situation that it can no longer function as a distinguishing criterion” (49), i.e., noting the “incredible tendency of the limit situation to become habit (hexis recall): “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of life” (id.) (we shall recall the notion of ‘perfect coincidence with the rule’ in volume VIII).
Muselmanner described with increasing intensity: “witnesses confirm the impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann” (50); filmmaker who “patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible ‘dolls’ dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not bear the sight of these half-living beings” (51); Muselmanner as “an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes” (id.); although the Muselmann is noted by most survivors as “a central experience,” the figure is “barely named in the historical studies on the destruction of European Jewry” (52); Levi designates the Muselmann as “he who has seen the Gorgon” (53). Lots on the Gorgon stuff, impossibility of seeing and being seen, &c.
Much on other interpretations of the Muselmann (57 ff): a biological machine, a limit of certain principles, an experiment, a refutation of Apel’s obligatory communication thesis, as Aristotle’s ‘plant man,’ a radical refutation of all refutations (66).
Critique of the doctrine of dignity thereafter (67 ff.): “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm” (69) insofar as “the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands not conforms to anything” (id.). Rather, “the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life [zoe] in the most extreme degradation” (id.). The Muselmann is accordingly on the threshold of the new ethics of “a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (id.).
Camps as having the role of “the fabrication of corpses” (as stated by Arendt) (71): “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced” (72). (Am skipping over all the Heidegger stuff.) Some reflections on Adorno’s well known positions on Auschwitz (80 ff.), as well as on Foucault’s notation of the passage of sovereignty (“to make die and let live”) to biopower (“to make live and let die”) (82 ff). The Third Reich is of course where the “unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics” (83). The NSDAP dream of volkloser Raum, “not simply a matter of a desert,” but rather “a fundamental biopolitical intensity” (85), “an absolute biopolitical space, both lebensraum and todesraum” (86).
III – “Shame, or on the Subject”
Upon his liberation by the Red Army, Levi reported a sense of shame, which “becomes the dominant sentiment of survivors” (88), which conflated very soon with guilt. Bettleheim reports it as a survivor’s guilt: “one cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished” (89).
This leads to a critique of the doctrine of collective responsibility (94 ff), which Levi acknowledges to be bogus insofar as “it makes no sense to speak of a collective guilt (or innocence) and that only ‘metaphorically can one claim to feel guilty for what’s one’s own people or parents did” (95).
Some thoughtful comments on Hegelian theory of tragedy in this connection (96 ff). Also, Nietzsche: “The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming of resentment” (99) via the eternal return thesis—but: “Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture” (id.). (I.e., who wants Auschwitz to return? “One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself” (101).)
Levinas on shame: it does not derive from “the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take distance” (104), but rather “shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself” (id.). Shame as “the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness [sic] to its own disorder” (106). Shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty” (107).
In Levi, we find “the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann” (120): “Who is the subject of testimony?” A zone of indistinction “in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (id.).
We see that “life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life. […] survival designates the pure and simple continuation of bare life [cf. volume I]” (133).
IIII – “The Archive and Testimony”
Lotsa linguistics stuff: Benveniste, Foucault, &c. “Auschwitz represents the historical point in which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real” (148). We see that the Muselmann is the “absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than volkloser Raum, the empty space of people at the center of the camp” (156).
Ultimately, “the subject of testimony” is “a remnant” (158). This is a “theologico-messianic concept” (162). Regarding the remnant, “the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia of messianism” (163).
“Let us indeed posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness; and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness” (164).
Recommended for those who examine the incomparable; phenomenology of heteronymic depersonalization, degree zero pseudonyms, and readers in secret solidarity with the Arcanum Imperii. ”
Portraits of Our Lost Humanity; may the seas of time return us to ourselves and those we love.
Fragments of myself, lost long ago, look back at me in these images, and I no longer know which of us is which, nor how love transposes us with others and transcends the limits of our form.
But I know these things are true, for in such images I re-enact as mimesis the shattering of myself under love’s hammer; broken open to Otherness and a larger universe into which one may grow as exaltation, rapture, adaptation, change, reimagination and transformation, and metamorphosis.
Never be afraid to be destroyed and recreated.
Thus saith the Caterpillar. Of the redemptive power of love as the only means of escape from the recursive forces of fear, power, and force I have written often; so also with the primary and defining struggle of becoming human between those truths written in our flesh and the falsification of authorized identities.
We were lost to each other when fate trapped us on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall during a firefight with the KGB, though we triumphed in the end when we brought down the Wall to set her and all its captive peoples free.
A note in a bottle, then, cast upon unknown seas, to Dances With Crows:
Should you chance upon this, against impossible odds like so much of our adventures, whomever you now may be; I hope your life has belonged to you alone, to find joy as you so wish, and so for all of us.
Postscript; This one is always hard for me, as I rewrite anniversary posts each year; I image its the only memorial my friend will ever have, nor will I ever know if she survived to walk free through the Berlin Wall when it came down. So much of our lives is exactly like this, a forlorn hope, a message in a bottle cast into vast and unfathomable seas. Yet we must honor what is human in us, beyond all reason and hope, because in this world of darkness we have only the light we are able to give each other.
Koseatra, the doppelganger
Torch of Liberty 