Monday 29 April 2024
The first time a student asked me, “Professor, Why Don’t We Read ‘__’” was toward the end of the Fall 2013 semester. The college course was “The Holocaust.” Preparing students for their final exam which focused solely on Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, I allotted six class meetings to teach them the meaning of Levi’s last testament on the Holocaust. I fretted that the students didn’t have enough time to ask questions about this revealing, fluent, and startling memoir. Levi’s book is challenging. Levi’s nonfiction work submerges its readers into parts of the abyss that truly are murky and uncomfortable. The book’s literary and existential pressures are crushing. Therefore, I anticipated few, if any, student questions. Given how rare questions were posed to me by this Fall 2013 (the so-called semester of silence) group of students—the previous course materials demoralized them, and for some students, who were courageous enough to speak against the horrors of the Nazis during class discussions, they expressed their own perceived guilt and ineloquence. For these ironically eloquent students, they understood the lessons of my course, but felt their opinions were inappropriate because they were alive, sitting in a classroom, drinking their morning coffee, and commuting back home.
The Drowned and the Saved is a demanding book. Levi’s frightening prose spares no one. His words burn like acid. I have chosen the word “acid” not to be witty because Levi was a chemist; I picked it because like acid, his words quickly penetrate the mind, attempting to sear it. One drop or one sentence, in this case, dissolves all pretension, illusion, and complacency. Reading the book, one must respect it like when one handles acid. His words come from the abyss. Auschwitz’s heart of darkness is laid bare. Like Tadeusz Borowski’s eye-witness testimony found in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen —both Borowski and Levi were fellow Auschwitz survivors and tragic suicides—Levi’s descriptions of the horrors of the camp are precise, evocative, and gut-wrenching that his all too real representations of Evil not only haunt you while reading them in solitude or teaching/discussing them in a classroom, his all too real illustrations of Evil cling to your consciousness and conscience. After reading Borowski or Levi, you are not the same person you once were.
I don’t remember exactly when the student asked me the question—was it the second or third lesson on Levi, maybe even the first? —but I will always remember the effect his question had and has continued to have on me. I also don’t recall the precise moment (beginning, middle, or toward the end of that day’s lesson) … in other words, what inspired the student to ask his question while I was teaching the students Levi’s memoir? Was the student struck by a particular phrase or word that Levi wrote? Did a specific passage from The Drowned and the Saved scare him? Did he need consolation? Or did I say something he didn’t understand; could I have said something to upset him? I simply don’t remember when the student asked the question, but I still precisely remember his question. Moreover, he was one of the six determined students unafraid throughout the semester to ask questions.
“Professor, why don’t we read something written by the Nazis themselves?” The student’s voice was soft but confident. Not only did his question stun but the timbre of his voice… so gentle, calm, and unironic… terrified me. To ask such a question without hesitation! Dumbstruck, I could only think to say: “What do you mean?”
“We read Tadeusz Borowski and Irene Gut [the Righteous Gentile who rescued dozens of Jews], and we watched the film about Doctor Korczak [the noted Polish-Jewish pediatrician, orphanage director, and hero who didn’t abandon his hundreds of children, thus dying with them in the Nazi death camp Treblinka] and the Russian movie, Come and See, and we watched the documentaries about the Auschwitz prison-photographer and camp musicians. What I mean is we learned about the Holocaust from the perspective of those who died or survived; in other words, we didn’t hear what the Nazis said about what they did…their crimes. I want to know why,” the student said.
Clearly this student’s question wasn’t a simple one to answer, and his feedback about my teaching selections was intelligent but also difficult to respond to. He stumped me. The previous year, Spring 2012, I did include two books viewing the Holocaust through the dark eyes of the murderers: Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Richard Rhodes Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. These first-rate history books weren’t written by the Nazis themselves. These two books were written by researchers, historians; nonetheless, these writers quoted numerous first-hand Nazi accounts of perpetrating the Holocaust by bullets, the murdering time before the Nazis innovated their ghastly killings to extermination by gas.
The students in that Spring 2012 didn’t respond well to either the Browning or Rhodes books. Perhaps the writerly tone of the historians, the candid descriptions of the so-called “sardine packing” (Sardinenpackung) also known as known as the “Jeckeln System;” this method of murder was established by SS Commander Friedrich Jeckeln who supervised the Rumbula (in today’s Latvia), Kamianets-Podilskyi (in today’s Ukraine), and Babi Yar (in today’s Ukraine) massacres. Jeckeln’s fellow executioners forced their Jewish victims to lay down in pits. Often those people to be killed placed themselves on top of the dead, dying, and wounded. I think the abyss stared penetratingly into those Spring 2012 students, and they shuddered.
Teaching both the Browning and Rhodes’ books wasn’t easy. The Spring 2012 students’ voices were utterly squelched by the Nazis they read about. For some unknown reason, these two books overshadowed the blunt and horrific descriptions of atrocities found in Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. I wonder if the strict, so-called objectivity of a historian’s book and its uncompromising dedication to the truth eclipses the artist’s book (although Borowski’s book is more autobiographical than fictional) and its misunderstood aesthetic and its so-called imaginative sensibility. There is a reason why both Borowski and Levi are considered the definitive voices of the Holocaust. And yet, reading transcripts of the Nazi murderers excerpted in both the Browning and Rhodes’ texts unsettled them more than Borowski or Levi. Reflecting on the utterly horrified and silent reactions of this Spring 2012 group, I decided not to include in future versions of this Holocaust course historian-written books and transcripts of Nazi war criminals. The terrified expressions on these students’ faces told me I needed to tone down the course content.
With this Spring 2012 classroom experience being replayed in my mind while absorbing this Fall 2013 student’s question: “Professor, why don’t we read something written by the Nazis themselves?” I improvised a reply. “Huh, your question interests me deeply. In the past I taught books about the Nazis, not written by them but about them. And previous students were… scared by them. Probably scarred, too. Emotionally… psychologically. So, I decided not to teach those books. However, now… here… you’re asking ‘why don’t we read something written’ by them. I am puzzled by your question,” I began.
The student’s inquisitive expression also revealed a mature understanding. After a pause, I continued: “your question challenges me, and I don’t know how to answer you satisfactorily. The survivor testimonies and other nonfiction and even fictional books we’ve read this semester were devastating to all of you. The films, too. The silence was deafening. The semester of silence! And I get it. I taught you things your high school teachers didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t teach you. And certainly, the way I teach this material… I try to make you feel and see these people who died… and those few who had survived… I wanted you to see their humanity. Not to see them as numbers on a statistical data chart. They weren’t numbers; they had names, lives, dreams, fears… just like you. And maybe the reason so many of you were and are still quiet… choose not to speak up during class discussion or not ask questions… maybe because you allowed yourselves to recognize their humanity. You didn’t dehumanize them… right? And doing so stunned you… in a good way. Remember I told you on the first day of class, if there’s going to be only one thing you take away from this course… it should be the meaning of the word ‘dehumanization.’ And you have learned that important but beautiful lesson. You didn’t dehumanize them by referring to them only as 6.1 million Jewish victims. Just numbers. And frankly, I didn’t want to bring the killers’ voices to dehumanize them… again.”
The silence in the classroom was intolerable. The questioning student was deep in thought. My mind was swirling. I spoke again: “I don’t know if I answered your question, but the fact you asked such a question makes me think. It’s one thing to learn about the historical actions of Evil from a historian; it’s another thing to read the words from those who committed those acts of Evil—the killers. Yes, Borowski does include Nazis in his book, but, it seems, you need more… you need to see into their hearts of darkness.” I paused again.
Although we weren’t directly discussing Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, we indeed were analyzing the book by exploring this student’s question. We were in its depths—the abyssal waters where so many did drown… and were drowned by the Nazis. We always were talking about the Nazis; however, this student needed to directly confront those who were causing the drownings. I couldn’t figure out why this student needed to read a book written by a Nazi. My mind spinning, for some reason, in that moment, I didn’t think to ask the student “Why?” Nonetheless, I felt a migraine creeping. The class wasn’t over; again, I can’t remember what time—when? —exactly the student posed this question, but I felt as though two hours went by.
I was lost in my mind. My eyes were closed. The migraine entrenched itself. I still felt obligated to say something else. Was what I said enough? Good enough? Would this student understand me? What about the other students; what were they thinking? I never found out. I couldn’t think to ask them that question.
“’Why don’t we read something written by the Nazis themselves?’” I repeated the student’s question aloud. “Well, their memoirs and interviews are ugly… morally ugly.” I paused again. “There’s…” Again, I hesitated. I struggled: “Should I tell him about the Höss and Stangl books?” I silently interrogated myself.
“There’s the memoir… Rudolf Höss’ Commandant of Auschwitz… and the interviews of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Nazi death camp Treblinka, conducted by Gitta Sereny… called Into That Darkness. Long books. Hard books,” I hesitantly said. Another pause. Students wrote down something in their notes; realizing that this was a break from the intense exchange, I wrote the books’ titles on the dry-erase board. Doing so only gave me a momentary reprieve. “Maybe… I should teach them next semester.” I muttered. Another pause. The God-damned migraine! Now the pain attacked my eyes. “Class is dismissed,” I announced.
Postscript
I picked Into That Darkness for the following semester’s Holocaust class reading list. I selected excerpts from Commandant of Auschwitz, using them as a slideshow presentation; additionally for that presentation, I included excerpts from Soldaten, a collection of transcripts of secretly recorded conversations of imprisoned Nazi war criminals. I even talked about the 2012 documentary film, The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer; this documentary is about the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, and Oppenheimer interviews several of the perpetrators. Grim viewing. I continue to use this presentation in my war class, which I had written about in last week’s blog (22 April 2024), “Professor, How Much Longer?” Based upon the Spring 2024 student’s reaction to these excerpts, the words of Nazi war criminals continue to horrify.