The Penguin Book of Hell

by Scott G. Bruce

  What is Hell? Where is it? Is it really the lake of fire some represent it to be? You will be eternally bewildered and completely confounded if you try to determine this question from the Bible itself. If Hell be below, it must be contained within the earth, for wherever you go on the surface of this globe, you will find the firmament still above and around you. If within, which is the way to it? Strange that no one has ever even by accident discovered it. The only entrance one can imagine to it, is the mouth of Vesuvius. But that cannot be the way, as it is not a brimstone pit, though sulfurous exhalations arise from it. No devil that we ever heard of, was seen to emerge from it—not even by the miracle-working monks who infest the country round about. We knew the right place has a door or grating, and that St. John saw the angel who kept the key. But it is bottomless, and therefore who knows but that Vesuvius is the other side—the front door in the rear, out of which the Devil pops when he wants to go roaring up and down the world? A bottomless pit full of liquid must be like a pot without a bottom filled with water, where all things are not only in a state of solution, but the solution itself is held in suspension!

  We continually hear pious Christians say that the souls of unbelievers have gone, or are going, to Perdition. But there is a consolation in knowing that it is not Hell. Revelation xvii. 8, says that the beast which was so obliging as to carry the scarlet lady of Babylon, “shall ascend out of the bottomless pit and shall go into Perdition.” Perhaps Perdition is the Catholic’s Purgatory! Who knows? But then there is no mistake that Hell is Hell, and that the Freethinker will go there! Not quite so sure. Read Revelation xx. 14—“And Death and Hell were cast into the lake of fire.” Where does this lead us? We have heard of a house being turned out of window, but we never heard of a pit being thrown into itself! This is one of those mysteries which “passeth all understanding.” We still have the lake of fire, where human beings are to be burned for ever and ever, and yet never consumed. Now this is simply an impossibility. The human body, if thrown into a large fire, would be utterly destroyed in a very short time, and nothing could prevent it. Men cannot live in fire. It is the nature of fire to burn up, to destroy, to decompose any animal or vegetable substance that is cast into it. It would require properties of life to be altered before men could live in it for ever. Some will say, God can work a miracle. But we have no reason to suppose that he can. We know nothing of what God can do—we only know what is, and miracles do not take place. We must discard the idea of a burning Hell as a fiction conceived by a brutal and revengeful monster in human form, and afterward taken up and added to by fanatics, whose minds had been worked upon by superstition, till they believed as a reality, that which existed only in their own disordered imaginations.

  * * *

  Who, with human sympathies and affections, would like to go to a place where the nearest and dearest ties are broken? Where the husband is separated from the wife, the parent from the child, the brother from the sister? And not only separated, but where you will know that those you loved are writhing in agony unutterable. It is a doctrine which requires a fiend or a saint to believe in it. We are told that a certain king of the Frisons, named Redbord, when on the very point of being baptized, took it into his head to ask the Bishop, who was preparing him in consequence of his changing his religion, where he should find his ancestors and predecessors.3 The Bishop having told him, that as they had all died Pagans, they could enjoy no portion of the heavenly inheritance, but were all in Hell, “Nay, then,” replied the King, lifting his foot out of the font into which he had already dipped it, “if that be the case, take back again your baptism and your paradise; I had much rather go to Hell, and be there among a good and numerous company, with my illustrious ancestors, and other persons of my own rank, than to your Paradise, from which you have shut out all these brave peoples, and filled it up with none but paupers, miscreants, and people of no note.”

  * * *

  The Bible, or any other book, which teaches the doctrine of Hell torments, is not, cannot be, a revelation from a God of love and mercy. It is the crude production of an ignorant, a superstitious, a priest-ridden, and brutal people. The Bible alone, of all books in the world, first promulgated the monstrous, the fiendish doctrine of eternal, never-ending torments prepared for all men, not one-millionth part of whom ever saw or heard of it. This doctrine, so far from keeping men good, makes good men bad, and brutalizes all who believe in it. It distracts men’s minds from the duties of this life, and deludes them into the belief of another which, when looked at calmly and with reason, will be seen to contain no element worthy of their acceptance, or capable of promoting permanent happiness.

  HELL OF OUR OWN MAKING: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

  By the late nineteenth century, belief in the reality of Hell was in rapid retreat in the wake of secular and rationalist critiques of age-old Christian doctrines about the horrors contained therein. But the idea of Hell has survived in the modern age in the most insidious ways. For two millennia, Western Christians believed in the notion that Hell was a place apart from the world of the living, a subterranean realm where divine justice meted out unimaginable punishments to sinners for all eternity. But in the decades around 1900, Hell found a safe haven in Western culture as an enduring metaphor for conditions of suffering and squalor in this life. During the industrial transformation of England, Friedrich Engels described the filth and debris of urban Manchester as “this Hell upon Earth.” In the American South, A. S. Leitch condemned “the moral hideousness of child labor” that profited the “aristocratic stockholders of Hell’s mills of the South,” while abolitionists decried the cruelty of “the hell-concocted system of American slavery.”

  In the twentieth century, Hell has made great advances despite the appearance of its retreat. The Western tradition may have repudiated the idea of an otherworldly place of eternal punishment, but it was ready to internalize Hell as a state of mind, as a human condition, and as a guiding principle for interacting with other people. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), three Hell-bound characters unexpectedly find themselves trapped together in a plain drawing room. In the closing lines of the play, the realization hits home: “So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning marl. Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS—OTHER PEOPLE!”

  With the rise of killing technologies that have enabled mass murder and destruction on an unprecedented scale, Hell transformed from a passive metaphor to an active inspiration in the devastating wars of the twentieth century. From the extermination camps of eastern Europe to the irradiated ruins of Japanese cities, Christian soldiers—Axis and Allied—actualized with merciless detachment many of the hellish scenes of suffering and carnage that had been nurtured in the Western imagination for centuries. By creating Hell for other people on earth, they unwittingly became the tormenting demons their ancestors had feared.

  Theaters of war were not the only cradles of Hell in the twentieth century. The conditions of incarceration in modern American prisons, both for criminals and for political detainees, have maximized the suffering of those individuals in an effort to make their lives a living Hell. Abandoning God’s justice in the world to come, prison administrators have devised methods of torment as ingenious and cruel as the imagination of any medieval prelate, with one significant difference. In premodern thought, God in his infinite wisdom dispensed divine justice on sinners in the afterlife. In the modern economy of justice, despite their manifest fallibilities, human beings have assumed the roles of divine judge and hellish tormentor, God and demon, to inflict torment on their fellow human beings.

  THE DEATH FACTORIES1

  During World War II (1939–45), Nazi Germany constructed extermination camps to kill millions of people, primarily Jews. Among the most notorious of these camps was Treblinka, located in a forest near Warsaw in occupied Poland. Treblinka was in operation for f
ifteen months (July 1942–October 1943). In this short time, the Nazis murdered between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews in its gas chambers, making it the deadliest extermination camp after Auschwitz. The camp closed in the fall of 1943 after a revolt by Jewish slave-laborers, and the Nazis dismantled the buildings and plowed over the grounds to hide evidence of genocide in the wake of the Soviet advance. Traveling with the Red Army as a war correspondent, Vasily Grossman, a Jewish Russian journalist, was the first author to write an eyewitness account of the extermination camp at Treblinka. He also interviewed former prisoners who had escaped during the revolt. His only point of reference for describing the atrocities of the camp was Dante’s Inferno (see pp. 139–65), but the horrors of literature paled before the reality of such cruelty and suffering: “Not even Dante, in his Hell, saw scenes like this.”

  First people were robbed of their freedom, their home, and their Motherland; they were transported to a nameless wilderness in the forest. Then, on the square by the station, they were robbed of their belongings, of their personal letters, and of photographs of their loved ones. After going through the fence, a man was robbed of his mother, his wife, and his child. After he had been stripped naked, his papers were thrown into a fire; he had been robbed of his name. He was driven into a corridor with a low stone ceiling; now he had been robbed of the sky, the stars, the wind, and the sun.

  Then came the last act of the human tragedy—a human being was now in the last circle of the Hell that was Treblinka.

  The door of the concrete chamber slammed shut. The door was secured by every possible kind of fastening: by locks, by hooks, by a massive bolt. It was not a door that could be broken down.

  Can we find within us the strength to imagine what the people in these chambers felt, what they experienced during their last minutes of life? All we know is that they cannot speak now . . . Covered by a last clammy mortal sweat, packed so tight that their bones cracked and their crushed rib cages were barely able to breathe, they stood pressed against one another; they stood as if they were a single human being. Someone, perhaps some wise old man, makes an effort to say, “Patience now—this is the end.” Someone shouts out some terrible curse. A holy curse—surely this curse must be fulfilled? With a superhuman effort a mother tries to make a little more space for her child: may her child’s dying breaths be eased, however infinitesimally, by a last act of maternal care. A young woman, her tongue going numb, asks, “Why am I being suffocated? Why can’t I love and have children?” Heads spin. Throats choke. What are the pictures now passing before people’s glassy dying eyes? Pictures of childhood? Of the happy days of peace? Of the last terrible journey? Of the mocking face of the SS man in that first square by the station, “Ah, so that’s why he was laughing . . .” Consciousness dims. It is the moment of the last agony . . . No, what happened in that chamber cannot be imagined. The dead bodies stand there, gradually turning cold.

  * * *

  At first there was real difficulty with the process of cremation; the corpses would not burn. There was, admittedly, an attempt to use the women’s bodies, which burned better, to help burn the men’s bodies. And the Germans tried dousing the bodies with gasoline and fuel oil, but this was expensive and turned out to make only a slight difference. There seemed to be no way around this problem, but then a thickset man of about fifty arrived from Germany, a member of the SS and a master of his trade. Hitler’s regime, after all, had the capacity to produce experts of all kinds: experts in the use of a hammer to murder small children, expert stranglers, expert designers of gas chambers, experts in the scientifically planned destruction of large cities in the course of a single day. The regime was also able to find an expert in the exhumation and cremation of millions of human corpses.

  And so, under this man’s direction, furnaces were constructed. Furnaces of a special kind, since neither the furnaces of Majdanek nor those of any of the largest crematoria in the world would have been able to burn so vast a number of corpses in so short a time.

  The excavator dug a pit 250 to 300 meters long, 20 to 25 meters wide, and 6 meters deep. Three rows of evenly spaced reinforced-concrete pillars, 100 to 120 centimeters in height, served as a support for giant steel beams that ran the entire length of the pit. Rails about five to seven centimeters apart were then laid across these beams. All this constituted a gigantic grill. A new narrow-gauge track was laid from the burial pits to the grill pit. Two more grill pits of the same dimenions were constructed soon afterward; each took 3,500 to 4,000 corpses at once.

  Another giant excavator arrived, followed soon by a third. The work continued day and night. People who took part in the work of burning the corpses say that these grill pits were like giant volcanoes. The heat seared the workers’ faces. Flames erupted eight or ten feet into the air. Pillars of thick greasy smoke reached up into the sky and stood there, heavy and motionless. At night, people from villages thirty or forty kilometers away could see these flames curling above the pine forest that surrounded the camp. The smell of burned flesh filled the whole area. If there was a wind, and if it blew in the direction of the labor camp three kilometers away, the people there almost suffocated from the stench. More than eight hundred prisoners—more than the number of workers employed in the furnaces of even the largest steel and iron plants—were engaged in the work of burning the bodies. This monstrous workshop operated day and night for eight months, without interruption, yet it still could not cope with the millions of human bodies. Trains were, of course, delivering new contingents to the gas chambers all the time, which added to the work of the grill pits.

  * * *

  The SS singled out for particular torment those who had participated in the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. The women and children were taken not to the gas chambers, but to where the corpses were being burned. Mothers crazed with horror were forced to lead their children onto the red-hot grid where thousands of dead bodies were writhing in the flames and smoke, where corpses tossed and turned as if they had come back to life again, where the bellies of women who had been pregnant burst from the heat and babies killed before birth were burning in open wombs. Such a spectacle was enough to rob the most hardened man of his reason, but its effect—as the Germans well knew—was a hundred times greater on a mother struggling to keep her children from seeing it. The children clung to their mothers and shrieked, “Mama, what are they going to do to us? Are they going to burn us?” Not even Dante, in his Hell, saw scenes like this.

  After amusing themselves for a while with this spectacle, the Germans burned the children.

  * * *

  The summer of 1943 was exceptionally hot. For weeks on end there was no rain, no clouds, and no wind. The work of burning the corpses was in full swing. Day and night for six months the grill pits had been blazing, but only a little more than half of the corpses had been burned.

  The moral and physical torment began to tell on the prisoners charged with this task; every day fifteen to twenty prisoners committed suicide. Many sought death by deliberately infringing the regulations.

  “To get a bullet was a luxury,” I heard from a baker by the name of Kosow, who had escaped from the camp. In Treblinka, evidently, it was far more terrible to be doomed to live than to be doomed to die.

  Cinders and ashes were taken outside the campgrounds. Peasants from the village of Wólka were ordered to load them on their carts and scatter them along the road leading from the death camp to the labor camp. Child prisoners with spades then spread the ashes more evenly. Sometimes these children found melted gold coins or dental crowns. The ashes made the road black, like a mourning ribbon, and so the children were known as “the children of the black road.” Car wheels make a peculiar swishing sound on this road, and, when I was taken along it, I kept hearing a sad whisper from beneath the wheels, like a timid complaint.

  * * *

  Toward the end of June it turned suffocatingly hot. When graves were open, steam billowed up from them as if fr
om gigantic boilers. The heat of the grills—together with the monstrous stench—was killing even the workers who were moving the corpses; they were dropping dead onto the bars of the grills. Billions of overfed flies were crawling along the ground and buzzing about in the air. The last hundred thousand corpses were now being burned.

  * * *

  After August 2, Treblinka ceased to exist. The Germans burned the remaining corpses, dismantled the stone buildings, removed the barb wire, and torched the wooden barracks not already burned down by the rebels. Part of the equipment of the house of death was blown up; part was taken away by train. The grills were destroyed, the excavators taken away, the vast pits filled in with earth. The station building was razed; last of all, the track was dismantled and the crossties removed. Lupines were sown on the site of the camp, and a settler by the name of Streben built himself a little house there. Now this house has gone; it too was burned down. What were the Germans trying to do? To hide the traces of the murder of millions in the Hell that was Treblinka? Did they really imagine this to be possible? Can silence be imposed on thousands of people who have witnessed transports bringing the condemned from every corner of Europe to a place of conveyor-belt execution? Did the Germans really think that they could hide the dead, the heavy flames, and the smoke that hung in the sky for eight months, visible day and night to the inhabitants of dozens of villages and hamlets? Did they really think that they could force the peasants of Wólka to forget the screams of the women and children—those terrible screams that continued for thirteen months and that ring in their ears to this day? Can the memory of such screams be torn from the heart?