Humanitarian Concern Versus Zyklon B

Abstract

In 1986, forty years after Auschwitz, Primo Levi considered afresh, and doubtless in still greater depth than in If This is a Man, certain aspects of the complex of facts which have the extermination of the Jews and the system of concentration-camps at its centre. One of the chapters of the new book, The Drowned and the Saved, was entitled ‘Useless Violence’, and the author described some of the abuses which seemed, both from the observer’s and the victim’s point of view, to be cruel. He then tried to find out what had motivated these abuses: overcrowding and lack of hygiene or food in the deportation convoys; violation of modesty by enforced nakedness; the two daily roll-calls; tattooing. Finally, Levi’s careful analysis distinguished between the concept of simple cruelty, i.e. the ‘deliberate creation of suffering as an end in itself, and an instrumental concept of violence, where it is exercised precisely not as an end in itself but is conditioned by another end from which violence proceeds incidentally, or which uses violence as a way of achieving its purpose.

That the clear distinction between good and evil becomes partially blurred, that the Resistance fighter could sometimes seem to be very close to the executioner: such is the inescapable consequence of the human condition in a totalitarian system.

—Saul Friedlander¹