I finished Robert Antelme’s The Human Race last night. This is definitely one of the most excellent memoirs of the concentration camp experience (or perhaps of any individual’s experience within an unelected community of strangers). It definitely ranks up there with the work of Jorge Semprún and Primo Levi.
I know this literature is vast, but I have no doubt that Antelme’s version is unique. On the one hand there is his French ‘taste,’ for lack of a better word. I don’t mean merely the rich cultivation of his own character as a consequence of having imbibed French intellectual culture, something Semprún—a Spaniard—also gained from, since he too was educated in France (from about the age of sixteen). Both of these writers partake in the French literary tradition, that of sometimes exquisite intellectual acuity and emotional sensibility. Primo Levi’s work is amazing insightful, and he too is part of a rich literary heritage—that of Dante, among others. Like Levi, Antelme’s work is immensely humane. But whereas Semprún maintains a decidedly melancholy and philosophical distance from his subject, despite his emotional and intellectual commitment to the experience; and whereas Levi likewise is capable of writing at a certain intellectual and emotional remove, enough to provide him with remarkably sound judgments: Antelme, though providing throughout any number of invaluable reflections and considerations (particularly under the circumstances), succeeds more than either of these other writers in placing the reader in the skin of the inmate.
Above all, Antelme is the one writer who has most enabled me to vicariously feel the constant and inescapable humiliation and the brutal and merciless degradation, accompanied always by the nagging and dehumanizing hunger which, though it led to innumerable deaths and always represented the same threat for everyone—that of going up in smoke in Buchenwald, or merely being beaten up or hung in Gandersheim, or being shot and left in a ditch after the SS had begun their desperate circular wanderings in a bid to move away from the front that was advancing in every direction—nonetheless provided the men who had been reduced to the lowest possible common denominator, that of being obliged to struggle for their lives over a crumb of bread (and I mean, literally, one single crumb), with the opportunity to redeem themselves in their own eyes and those of their comrades by sharing with them what very little they might have had.
The dignity that survived—not in any pristine state, not as a Platonic virtue, but as just one more cold hard bit of reality, of the existential experience of these men doomed to suffer continuously in the most absurd and demeaning way imaginable; that dignity, as ragged, torn, debilitated and infected with oozing sores and parasites as the relatively few non-privileged (not Prominenten) survivors themselves—that remnant of human dignity is what The Human Race is all about.
And that’s why Antelme chose to end his account not with his being discovered in a near-comatose state by the future Prime Minister of France, François Mitterrand, someone he had previously known in Paris, but with his sitting on a bench in the cramped dark barracks where the other lice-infected members of his transport were being quarantined—where neither he nor the man sitting next to him could find enough space to lie down, only days after the Americans had entered Dachau (the first of all concentration camps to be established by the Nazis, and among the last to be liberated), in the spring of 1945, when men as weak as themselves were finally giving up and surrendering to death, despite the news of having been liberated—with a scene in which he can’t even see the Russian’s face, but only the ember of the cigarette the Russian shares with Antelme without being asked:
“The cigarette’s out and I can’t see him. I won’t recognize him tomorrow. The shadow of his body has leaned forward. A moment passes. Some snoring comes from the corner. I bend forward too. Nothing now exists but this man I cannot see. I put my hand on his shoulder.
In a low voice: “Wir sind frei.” We are free.
He straightens up. He tries to see me. He shakes my hand.