…[B]etween 1934 and 1939. Vishniac walked across Poland, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania with his camera, preserving for posterity images of a Jewish way of life fated soon to be destroyed. Of the 16,000 photographs he managed to take — secretly and under dangerous circumstances — he was able to rescue only about 2,000. Some he sewed into his clothing when he came to the United States in 1940, most he left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. A Vanished World brings together nearly 200 of these images…

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the photos and the situation. This is indeed a world that will soon vanish – not just vanish but be violently, cruelly, and purposely obliterated, with great suffering to its inhabitants.

And yet they’ve not all vanished. In fact, some of the former inhabitants of that vanished world are still around, although they are very elderly and won’t be here for much longer. This is an article about a recent get-together of 56 of them, and some of their reminiscences:

“You come home from Auschwitz like you fell from the sky,” [Auschwitz survivor Einhorn] recalled. He had “no parents, no siblings, no nothing.” He worked in the Tel Aviv port, but there was a time when he had to sleep in a public park. He had no living connections to the rest of the world and no one to guide him, just people who seemed eager to evade what he’d been through and what it might represent. For decades, no one asked Einhorn about the numbers on his arm, or seemed to care very much about them.

In New York, Einhorn worked at a kosher butcher shop on the Lower East side and raised a family. Most of a century later, the horrors of the Holocaust are still recent enough to be able to cause nightmares in the people who experienced them, Einhorn included. “You know, I still dream of Auschwitz,” he said. “My mind is still in Auschwitz … I’m still crying. I cry in the night, I cry in the day. I’m still not finished from there.”

It is indecent, not to mention inaccurate, to imply any neat ending to the survivors’ stories, as if living through the Holocaust were a fair price to pay for getting to spend the rest of one’s life in the United States making womens’ belts or selling kosher meat. If one insists on extracting any hope from the experience of the war and the subsequent decades, it shouldn’t come from the inevitable need to salvage meaning from evil, or from the psychological impulse to vulgarize tragedy in order to make it comprehensible, but from forces beyond the merely human, far outside our meager range of understanding.

If you’ve never read Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, or its less-well-known sequel The Reawakening, about Levi’s return to the post-Holocaust world, I highly recommend both. In my opinion they are the most brilliant things ever written on the subject.

I wrote a lengthy previous post discussing Levi – and his probable suicide. It contained this quote from Survival in Auschwitz, which gives you a flavor of his work:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

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I can’t find the quote right now, but Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi—who wrote Survival In Auschwitz, which I consider the single most definitive and brilliant book on the camps from the point of view of someone who experienced them firsthand—said that for many ex-inmates, comparisons between what happened in the camps and their lives afterwards didn’t help (although it certainly did for the interviewee I quoted in Part I of this series). Levi said that even though the camps were exponentially worse than the rest of the more petty difficulties of life outside the camps, that each state (camps versus ordinary life) had its woes, and that survivors could still get annoyed and upset afterwards at the smaller frustrations and sorrows of ordinary existence.

That’s the human condition for most people; few are able to keep the contrast constantly in mind like the man in the Part I interview, and there’s no shame in that.

Levi was a scientist who wrote about the camps as though he were a scientist studying them: cool, dispassionate, analytical. He died as a possible suicide in a fall in 1987 at the age of 67. Whether he killed himself or died accidentally has been hotly debated and the answer is still unclear.

Levi is an author whose work I greatly admire, and I am hardly alone, as his biographer Carole Angier writes:

We feel we know and love him from his work, because we know and love his gentle, rigorous, witty, open mind. But the rest of him is completely closed. Primo Levi is, in fact, one of the most secretive writers who ever lived. And not only in his work. Though he gave hundreds of interviews, he used them not to lower the walls but to raise them still higher, by presenting a careful construct of himself almost to the end. He presented the same construct to most people throughout his life; even, as long as he could, to himself. That construct – the calm, rational, optimistic man – was his ideal: an ideal he managed to reach in much of his life, because it was both a moral imperative and a psychological necessity to him.

But it was not the reality. “I have no instincts,” he said, with his smile, “or if I do, I repress them.” But the more he repressed them, the more they resisted, and took their revenge. The man who loved and spoke to the whole of humanity found private, emotional life impossibly hard. And the man who chose optimism, because one must not spread despair, found he had locked the despair inside him; and more and more often it rose and drowned him.

Even though it is not known whether Levi killed himself, it is known that he suffered from depression. But his depression predated his Holocaust experience and represented a lifelong struggle. A different man, a different temperament, than the man interviewed in Part I. And yet Levi managed to live and work for about forty highly productive and creative post-Holocaust years until his death. If he did kill himself (and the preponderance of evidence is that he did; he certainly was depressed prior to his death) it was his own temperament, and his own unhappy family history, that probably led him to it:

…Auschwitz did not destroy him. It came very near at the time, and immediately afterwards. But after that it did almost the opposite, requiring him to understand and to communicate, the two things that kept him alive. “I am a talker,” he said. “If you stop up my mouth, I die.” When, in his last depression, he felt he could no longer communicate, he died. That is what killed him, not his memories of Auschwitz. Neither Alex the Kapo of If This Is A Man [the European title of Survival in Auschwitz], nor his heirs, should imagine they have that victory.

Angier also offers a few excerpts from Levi’s great masterpiece about the camps. Here is a passage that reflects with Levi’s usual brilliance and extraordinary clarity on the mindset in the camps that brought some small (very small, in this case) measure of optimism to a situation so full of nearly unfathomable misery:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

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