My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  To organize something of that nature first of all requires an enormous volition; we know what resistance the human being feels to killing its own kind, even for the soldier at war, faced with an armed enemy and in danger of being killed himself, the effort required to overcome that resistance is great, but in this instance we are dealing with unarmed people who never raised a hand against them, even toddlers of two and three years old, boys and girls, young women and men, the elderly and infirm, and over a period of some two years on a scale three times that of the total number of Germans killed in World War I. This is not something that simply happens. It can occur only on the basis of an immense will, since so much human resistance must be overcome in order for it to take place, yet if we look at the sequence of events, how it came about and was carried out, that will seems almost entirely absent, it appears more like something that just happens, wearily and without exertion, something to be gone along with.

  * * *

  The peasants of the Polish village had not understood what had taken place and what it meant. The question is whether we have. For it was not the simple peasants of the Polish village with their uninformed anti-Semitism who exterminated the Jews. It was the Germans, from Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, the big cities of Europe, a modern and in every respect informed society, technologically and culturally among the most advanced, this being true also in Hitler’s own generation, only three generations older than ours. We might posit that the circle of individuals governing Germany at the time were barbaric and brutal, ruthless criminals, and indeed they were, but they were but a tiny handful in a population of sixty million, they were in power because they gave expression to what the people wanted, they were their representatives. But restricting the blame to Germany, the suggestion that the cause lay in some degeneration of things German, would be something of a simplification. It was not German but Norwegian police who identified, tracked down, collected, and dispatched the Norwegian men, women and children who were burned to ashes in Auschwitz. And the Norwegian men, women, and children who were burned to ashes there had neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues, and friends. They bowed their heads, they looked away as if it was not happening. So it was in Norway, so it was in Germany, so it was over the entire continent. It was not happening, or only barely so. No one knew what was going on. No one saw. It scarcely happened. And then it was over. Then we realized that what had taken place had not been inconsequential at all, but the opposite, something so extreme and so huge in scale that nothing like it had ever happened before.

  How are we to make sense of this? That while it is happening it is scarcely of consequence, since it happens namelessly and imperceptibly, and those who see it do not know what it is they see, whereas afterward, when it has happened, it is understood to be the very end point of humanity, our outermost boundary, something that must never, ever be repeated. How can one and the same event give rise to two such different perspectives? And how can we know what we must never, ever repeat, when we did not even know what was happening when it happened? Why was it seen only when it was over and there was no longer anything left to see? At that point all the people were dead, the barracks bulldozed and the incinerators dismantled, trees planted, and traces removed.

  * * *

  We still don’t know who died. They lost their names and became a number, and their names have yet to be reclaimed, they remain a number, six million. I don’t know the name of a single person who perished at Chelmno, first gassed to death in a truck, then burned to ashes in an incinerator and scattered into the river there, the remains of those who were not burned, the largest bones being crushed to bonemeal and likewise scattered into the river, all I know is, their number, 400,000. Nor do I know the name of any one of those gassed and incinerated at Treblinka, only their number, 900,000.

  But I do know the names of the most important figures in the German Nazi Party. Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, Hess, Speer, Rosenberg. Not only that, I also know their faces and quite a lot about their lives and what kind of characters they possessed. The imbalance is striking. Hitler is a name known by everyone and triggers associations in us all. The people he exterminated could be exterminated only by expelling them from the language, taking away their names, making them one with their bodies, severing their connections to the social world, which is the human world, in a process of reduction that ended in them becoming nothing, which is to say a number, their status to this day. The power of the name becomes plain if we bring them together. Hitler on one side, six million Jews on the other. Hitler resurrected two million Germans from their graves in Mein Kampf and led them back to Germany, covered with mud and blood, to remind the population of the sacrifice they had made for their sake. If in our minds we resurrect from their graves the six million people who were exterminated under cover of World War II, bring them together on the plains of Poland, and place Hitler in their midst, the true relationship between them becomes apparent, for his name is then but one among millions of names, his voice one among millions of voices, his life one among millions of lives. The nature of this vast multitude changes according to how far away or how close we stand to observe it. If we are far away, looking at it from high above, we see simply a mass of bodies – limbs, heads, eyes, hair, mouths, ears – man as the creature he is, the human being in terms only of its biology and materiality, and this was what made it possible to incinerate those people, and what their incineration moreover revealed, as if it were some new perspective on the human, our worthlessness, our interchangeability, life rising up in a well. Human life as a cluster of mussels clinging to rocks in the sea, human beings as beetles and vermin, man as a shoal of writhing fish brought gasping to the surface in nets. If, however, we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, families, and friends, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, with all its joy and delicacy, envy and curiosity, routines and spontaneity, imagination and boredom, hate and love, then the opposite becomes apparent, the one, not as I, but as the I’s necessity. Which is you.

  * * *

  When Simon Srebnik, the thirteen-year-old boy with the beautiful singing voice, who bundled dead bodies into the enormous incinerator so the flames leaped into the sky in the forest gloom, thought about the future he would see two things in his mind’s eye. One was five slices of bread, the only thing he wanted. The other was that when all this stopped he would be on his own. That there would not be a single person left on earth but him. So it was that he went about his work beneath the sky, dragging the corpses, singing his delightful songs in the fields, without feeling anything else but that beyond all this, if he survived, nothing would be left. And Richard Glazar recounts the moment they began burning the bodies at Treblinka, it was dark and the forest rose like a wall outside the camp, the flames leaped into the sky, and one of the other Jews who worked there, an opera singer, began to sing, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken us?” That moment, described to Gitta Sereny in Into That Darkness, her book about Treblinka and the camp commandant there, Franz Stangl, and related also to Claude Lanzmann, is not shocking in the way the atrocities themselves are shocking, since they, in all their inconceivable vileness, are perpetrated by “them” and are impossible to entertain as belonging within the realm of one’s own capabilities, for which reason we refer to them as evil; no, that moment shocks in a different way entirely, since in its very monumentality, its invocation of God, and, in that, its overwhelming beauty, it betrays our human truth in favor of divine truth. In that moment, God dies. Not because he has abandoned them, but because the divine belongs to the very perspective that made the Holocaust possible.

  * * *

  As I write about the Holocaust I sense its unmentionable nature. It feels as if there exists some right of ownership to it
that means not just anyone can write about it, one has to have earned the right in some way, either by having lived through it or by writing about it in a manner that is morally binding and unambivalent. To write about the Holocaust one has to be irreproachable, only then is it possible. One’s motives have to be unselfish, uncommercial, unspeculative, good and decent. A writer can say what he or she wants about God in a novel, it may be condemned as blasphemous, but not in all seriousness, for the moral indignation entailed by blasphemous violation no longer exists. But when it comes to the Holocaust the writer certainly cannot say what he or she wants, indeed it is the only phenomenon in our society to which the notion of blasphemy remains applicable, in the sense that the indignation brought about by any violation is unanimous and fierce. There lies the boundary. But what kind of boundary is it? Why is it there and not somewhere else? And why is it so fragile?

  When we condemn any joking about the Holocaust with such moral force it is because we are defending and protecting something, a value we consider to be inviolable. But what is it exactly that we are protecting in this case? What do we achieve by making that event so invulnerable? What value exactly are we talking about? The British historian David Irving was sent to prison for claiming the gas chambers did not exist. This is an opinion, not an action. What other opinions can we be sent to prison for expressing? Not many, certainly. In fact, I can’t think of any.

  The Holocaust has taken on all the characteristics of a taboo. The taboo is society’s way of protecting itself against undesirable forces. It is a way of making them plain by negation, fencing them in by a not, thereby turning them into something that exists outside our daily lives, outside the zone in which normal life, by virtue of its very existence within the field of the normal, unfolds in a continuous flow of possibility. What is particular about the Holocaust is the opposite of what we have made it. What is particular about the Holocaust is that it was trivial, proximate, and local. The Holocaust was families being singled out and made to assemble. It was trains leaving the ghettos in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia – all countries under Nazi control – trundling through Europe, coming to a halt at tiny stations outside Polish villages, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Belzec, where those inside were bundled out if they came from the east or instructed to alight if they came from the west. The places they arrived at were what they believed to be relocation camps or work camps. Here they were segregated, women and children to the right, men to the left, made to strip naked, then led through a corridor into a chamber where they were gassed to death, their bodies removed and incinerated or buried. These camps were small, Treblinka was six hundred by four hundred meters in area, and those who worked there were relatively few, a hundred and fifty Ukrainian soldiers, fifty German SS. Treblinka moreover housed a thousand so-called work Jews who carried out hard labor, before they too were gassed and incinerated. On any normal day in what Glazar refers to as the peak periods ten thousand Jews would arrive at the camp by train. Hours later their bodies were gone. This industrial destruction went on for two years. In that time somewhere between 800,000 and 1,200,000 people were murdered there. No human being is capable of grasping this figure and the events it represents. Yet at the same time it was commonplace, a routine, what they referred to themselves as production, though production of death. The production of death at Treblinka was primitive compared to what took place at Birkenau, according to Franz Suchomel, an SS soldier assigned to the camp.

  What I am trying to say is that all this was real. And in being real, it was tangible. And in being tangible, it was local. And that it was incorporated into the realm of the normal. So wholly incorporated, in fact, that it could take place and scarcely be noticed. All horror converges on this. The first people to be gassed to death in the Third Reich were not Jews, but people with mental and physical disabilities. They called it euthanasia and it was an extension of legislation passed in 1933 sanctioning the sterilization of people with serious hereditary illness. According to Sereny, the Nazis commissioned an opinion from a professor of moral theology at the Catholic university in Paderborn, Joseph Mayer, seeking support before implementing this “merciful” program. Mayer’s hundred-page report firstly provided an historical review, then moved on to discuss the pros and cons, before proceeding to cite the Jesuit moral system of probability:

  there are few moral decisions which from the outset are unequivocally good or bad. Most moral decisions are dubious. In cases of such dubious decisions, if there are reasonable grounds and reasonable “authorities” in support of personal opinion, then such personal opinion can become decisive even if there are other “reasonable” grounds and “authorities” opposing it.

  On which basis Mayer concluded that euthanasia was justifiable, as there were reasonable grounds and authorities both for and against. The report, which according to Sereny was found in five copies only, has never come to light, does not exist; like almost everything else to do with this it has either been destroyed or is merely rumor, initiated with the purpose of legitimizing or whitewashing something incriminating. The silence surrounding these murders and their administration is near total. But the euthanasia program was effectuated, more than a hundred thousand people were exterminated. It was about racial purity and was founded on science and law, it began with sterilization and continued with the gassing of people so badly afflicted and helpless it can be assumed it was seen as a blessing to themselves and those who cared for them.

  * * *

  In Mein Kampf the Jewish question exists in principle within the same sphere, racial purity versus racial impurity, the control of the state over the biological body, racial hygiene, and public health, but whereas sterilization and euthanasia were within the bounds of the law and what the authorities and ordinary people found acceptable, albeit controversial, the matter of wiping out an entire people was of course utterly unprecedented and quite as unthinkable. When the decision to exterminate the Jews was taken, probably somewhere toward the close of 1941, almost certainly in the form of a spoken order given by Hitler to Himmler, and the first death camps were set up that winter, most of the central figures involved were drafted in from the euthanasia program. Killing people on that scale had never been done before, there was no precedent, nothing to refer back to other than the gas chambers of the euthanasia program, and these were accordingly taken as the blueprint. The murders of Jews on the Eastern Front, which were pure executions, not only of men but of women and children too, were too costly in terms of time and personnel and would have been impracticable. What they were looking at was a question: how to kill as many people as possible, in as short a time as possible, using as few human resources as possible? Much trial and error was involved before the system became effective. No budget existed, the whole endeavor financed by the confiscation of the personal assets of the victims. An ordinary travel agency took care of the practicalities of chartering trains in exactly the same way as they dealt with such matters normally. Ordinary railway staff were deployed to organize the logistics of the transports, plotting train times into the schedules, passing information on through the system. The camps were built, personnel received their orders, the industry began. Some of the soldiers must have been picked out on account of their brutality, many being obvious sadists who could find outlets and indulge themselves here, while others were ordinary and, in any other context, considerate men doing a job.

  Two years later they tried to remove all traces; having demolished Treblinka’s every structure they built a farm on the site and instructed the Ukrainian family they installed in it to say they had lived there always. The same occurred in Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno, all traces gone. All around, life went on as if nothing had happened.

  What had happened?

  I think it would be correct to say that what happened was not inhuman at all, but human, and that this is what makes it so terrible and so closely bound up with our own selves and our human lives that in order to se
e it, and thereby take command of it, we must remove it and place it beyond ourselves, outside the boundaries of the human, where it now stands, sacrosanct and inviolable, mentionable only in certain, meticulously controlled ways. But it began in a we, and came together in an I, who concentrated its essence into a book, from where it swelled into the social sphere, unfathomably silent in its seeping pervasion, thought morphing into action, a tangible, physical presence in the world we inhabit, questioned by none of those involved, but carried out and done.