The New Neo

The terrible plight of returned hostage Eli Sharabi – the man who was released from Hamas captivity last Saturday in a state of extreme emaciation and weakness, only to discover that his wife and two teenage daughters had been murdered in cold blood by Hamas right after he was kidnapped in October of 2023 – immediately called forth Holocaust comparisons from many people, including me. This was not only because of his obvious starvation and debility, but also because of the devastation wrought on his family (his brother also was kidnapped, and had died in captivity).

So although Sharabi is having a reunion with relatives, there won’t be any reunions on earth with his wife and daughters except by their gravesites. It’s a blow of such magnitude it’s hard to fathom, but many Holocaust survivors (including Otto Frank) endured similar suffering and losses: the torment and horror of the camps, and then the tragedy of learning that their families were gone. The road to recovery was difficult, and if you have read many tales of Holocaust survivors, you learn that some don’t make it back to wholeness.

I’ve written before about Holocaust survivors and their differing reactions; some do a great deal better than others. Part I of the series can be found here, and Part II can be found here. Part I is about a survivor who had an unusually optimistic nature and made quite a smooth transition, and Part II is about the brilliant Italian writer Primo Levi. I urge you to read them both, but especially the essay about Levi.

Levi may or may not have killed himself forty years after his war experience. He was in his 70s and suffering from depression, but the fall which caused his death may have been an accident. No one knows. In that essay, I quote some passages from his masterpiece Survival in Auschwitz. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.

But it is the sequel to that book that I’m going to be talking about now; its American title is The Reawakening [*see below]. It tells the tale of his year-long journey to get home and to recover from enormous emotional and physical devastation. He was very fortunate in some ways – his family had survived, and he was young (25) and was able to marry and rebuild his life.

This passage from the book (translated from the original Italian) describes the moment when – having been left behind ten days earlier at the camp, expected to die with hundreds of others because of severe illness, when the Germans abandoned the camps and led the rest of the inmates on horrific death marches, so determined were they to cause the death of all the remaining inmates – Levi sees his first liberators, four Russian soldiers on horseback:

To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw.

It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid centre, a nucleus of condensation; four men, armed, but not against us: four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their fur hats.

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.

That’s a sample of the quality of Levi’s writing and the depth of his thought: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist …

The Holocaust haunted him. At the very end of the book The Reawakening, he sounds a chilling note about how extraordinarily difficult it is to endure experiences such as those of the camps, and how life-changing, and how hard to shake. This was written in 1961:

I reached Turin [his home town] on 19 October [1945], after thirty-five days of travel; my house was still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story. I found a large clean bed, which in the evening (a moment of terror) yielded softly under my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.

It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager [German expression for concentration camp] once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream: my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, Wstawàch.

* As I said, the second book is called The Reawakening in the US, but the actual title in Italian is better translated as The Truce, and that’s what it was called in other countries. I think the difference is meaningful. The American title emphasizes hopefulness: the author has come back nearly from the dead, returned to life, and has many adventures. Although the book is hardly light, it’s lighter than Levi’s Auschwitz masterpiece, which was called Survival in Auschwitz only in the US; in other countries it was published with a title that seems to have been Levi’s choice: If This Is a Man.

In each case, the original title is more poetic, more ambiguous, and less upbeat. Yes, the quotes in this post refer to Levi’s reawakening to normal life. But as he describes in his nightmare, it’s not a totally successful reawakening. Sometimes he’s still in the nightmare, and has trouble knowing which world is real. Perhaps they both are real: thus, The Truce.