jared stark suicide after auschwitz

Jared Stark

Suicide After Auschwitz

Do you always have to be there just because you were there once?Jean Amry

It is claimed almost without exception that suicide was rare in theNazi concentration and death camps. References appear in the writ-ings of Primo Levi, Bruno Bettleheim, Jean Amry, Victor Frankl,Hannah Arendt; in studies devoted specifically to the topic of suicidein the camps; and in major studies of suicide.1

The basis for such claims is nevertheless tenuous, in part becausethey are based on either survivor testimony or Nazi records. In thecase of the former, statistical claims by survivors would seem particu-larly hampered by the fact that in the inhuman conditions to whichthey were subjected, the prisoners could barely acquire an overall vi-sion of their universe, as Primo Levi writes; it is telling that whenLevi mentions the rarity of suicides in the camps, he cites the findingsof the historians of the Lager.2 Nazi records are not only incompletebut inherently biased.3 Prisoners who decided to die by approachingthe electrified fences surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau, for instance,were commonly recorded as shot while attempting to escape, not assuicides; while the murders of certain prisoners may have beenrecorded as suicides.4 The evidence that supports the notion of a lowsuicide rate can thus easily be put to the service of the opposite argu-ment.5

Aside from the problems raised by the nature of the evidence, claimsconcerning the frequency of suicide in the camps face an inherentconstraint in that they assume a normal suicide rate as a point ofcomparison. Even if such a norm could be established for the worldoutside the camps, the question would have to be posed of the valid-ity of any comparison between that hypothetical norm and the universconcentrationnaire.6 Any argument that would see the camp as the ex-ception to the norm would then have to account for the ways inwhich the exception informs the very definition of the norm.7 In-deed, the difficulty of comparing suicide inside and outside the campsis apparent from the difference between the questions and aims thatmotivate the study of one or the other: whereas conventional studies

jar e d s tar k

The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number (): 93114 by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

of suicide attempt to understand why suicide takes place at all, usuallywith a view towards reforming or healing the conditions that en-courage or fail to discourage suicide, discussions of suicide in thecamps begin, explicitly or implicitly, with the question of why it didnot take place (or not on a massive scale) under conditions thatshould have been particularly generative of suicides.8 Such a line ofinquiry, however, cannot be put to the service of any project of ther-apy or reform, for such a project would have to assume the legitimacyof the camps. Rather, inquiries into the occurrence of suicide in thecamps seem to challenge the general validity of conventional inter-pretive frameworks.

Discussions of suicide in the camps only become significant, then,at the point where they break with conventional interpretations ofsuicide, that is, interpretations that attempt to determine the moral,psychological, or social conditions that lead an individual to choose orto reject suicide. In one of the earliest studies of suicide in the con-centration camps, Paul Citrome comments on the limitations of suchexplanations:

Some of these explanations remain valid for the concentrationary situation: strongerintegration of the individual in the collective that is undergoing a common catastro-phe, simplification of the social structure, extreme constriction of vital energy underthe pressure of a permanent threat to life, liberation and discharge of the most anti-social aggressive and sado-masochistic tendencies, reversal of traditional values, deval-uation of death in general and of suicide in particular. But behind these conditions,which are too general, too schematic, and too external, it is necessary to investigatethe particular, specific situation of life in the concentration camps.9

The characteristics of the camp listed here can be amended and chal-lenged, but Citromes point remains valid: that such generalized ex-planations fail not because they are contingently flawed but rather be-cause they strive for generalization at all. Citromes own attempt toaccount for the specific situation of suicide in the camps representsone of the more compelling of subsequent attempts to address thisproblem:If suicide is an essentially human act . . . it is not surprisingthat it decreases in the concentrationary universe, negator of man anddestroyer of liberty.10 Although Citrome still frames the question ofsuicide in terms of comparison, and although his identification of sui-cide with a human act requires further analysis, his argument mightmore radically suggest that the camps constituted not merely a set ofunique conditions that discouraged suicide but rather an event that af-fected the very possibility of suicide. It is not, in other words, that theprisoners chose to reject suicide, but that the thought of suicide, thethought of death, was itself damaged.

The question concerning suicide in the camps must then berephrased: not whether or not, how and to what degree, prisoners

t h e ya l e j ou r na l o f c r i t i c i s m

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

committed suicide, but rather what it means to speak of suicide in re-lation to the camps, what it means to speak of suicide after Auschwitz.

I here address this question along three lines. First, I consider dis-cussions of the significance of suicide in the concentration and deathcamps. This leads me to raise the question of survivors suicides andtheir implications for thinking about an ethics of suicide afterAuschwitz, with particular attention to the writings of Primo Leviand Jean Amry. Finally, I examine the implications of attempts on thepart of a secondary witness to relate Holocaust death to suicide; myfocus is on Henri Raczymows novel, Un cri sans voix (Writing theBook of Esther).

I.The End of Suicide

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt refers to the aston-ishing rarity of suicides in the camps.11 This reference occurs in afootnote to an analysis of the structure of total domination in theconcentration and extermination camps:For to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, mans power to begin somethingnew out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of re-actions to environments and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionetteswith human faces. . . .

In the footnote to this passage, Arendt attributes the rarity of campsuicides to their subversive status. What she calls spontaneous actswould interrupt or resist the total domination of the camps and hadto be suppressed.

To the extent that this concept of self-inflicted death as a sponta-neous act links suicide to the idea of resistance, it alludes to the philo-sophical tradition on which Arendt seems to rely in an essay of Janu-ary , We Refugees. In this essay, Arendt takes the frequentsuicides of European Jews prior to deportation as her point of depar-ture.12 Perhaps the philosophers are right who teach that suicide isthe last and supreme guarantee of human freedom: not being free tocreate our lives in the world in which we live, we nevertheless are freeto throw life away and to leave the world.13 But the exercise of thisnegative liberty, even if it does not constitute an act of defiance atlife and the world or an attempt to kill . . . the whole universe(), still implies a commitment to something higher than lifehere, freedomwhich, when denied, can only be expressed by sui-cide. Suicide becomes justified in this view when it serves as a last re-sort in the event of a threatened deprivation of the conditions formaintaining ones autonomy.14 Committed on the basis of rational,deliberate decisions, such suicides serve as the ultimate sign that a per-son can act autonomously.

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

We Refugees, however, intimates that this philosophically sanc-tioned view of suicide was already under siege in : Brought upin the conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatestdismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors thandeathwithout having been able to discover a higher ideal than life().15 Arendts position on the perceived lack of conscious, activeresistance on the part of the European Jews need not be rehearsedhere, but it tinges her account of Jewish suicides in Nazi Germany.16Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanations of theirdeed, no indictment, no charge against the world. . . . Letters left bythem are conventional, meaningless documents. . . . Nobody caresabout motives, they seem to be clear to all of us (). If these deathsfail to proclaim their resistance in clear, unambiguous terms, it isnonetheless significant that they are called upon here to testify tocatastrophe in the midst of the war:they seem to be clear to all of us.

To the American audience to whom We Refugees was addressedin January , this insistence on the clear motives of an act that pro-duces only conventional, meaningless documents might haveshould havesounded a warning. For it was by no means clear that asuicide committed in the name of freedom or morality, one that didissue a charge against the world, would be heard. Speaking of ShmulZygielbojm, the representative of the Bund to the Polish governmentin exile in London, Jan Karski observes: His suicide, which was tohave been a dramatic cry of protest, did not affect the fate of the Pol-ish Jews in any way.17 An exchange of letters between MahatmaGandhi and Martin Buber following the events of Kristallnacht inNovember similarly registers the recognition of the futility ofprotest suicide. When Gandhi recommended that the German Jewscommit to non-violent protest even at the price of the general mas-sacre of the Jews, Buber responded unhesitatingly that such an actwould remain utterly pointless since it would be only testimonywithout acknowledgment, ineffective, unobserved martyrdom and sowould not be meaningful as an act of protest. 18 When the possibilityof effecting historical change through suicide collapses, suicide be-comes something that would erase the possibility of registering thehistorical event at all. An act that might be committed out of the de-sire to escape from an ongoing catastrophe would end up only con-firming, redoubling that catastrophe: not only would the catastrophehave occurred, but there would be no one remaining to testify.19

Arendts attention to a form of suicide unlike others alerts her read-ers, then, to the advent of a new form of terror that calls for a new in-terpretation of acts that testify in and through their very meaninglessness.This illuminates what is striking about Arendts characterization ofsuicide as a spontaneous act. According to her definition of spon-taneity in her late philosophical writings, an act that has resistance as


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

its sole end would not be spontaneous, for it would be a pure reac-tion, even if a rationally or ethically motivated one.20 A spontaneousact is one that begins something new, that is, that cannot be ac-counted for by a cause and that therefore exceeds deliberation.This isnot to say that the only spontaneous act would be an acte gratuit, forthis would erase the distinction between act and accident. In order foran act to be spontaneous, however, it would have to risk accidentality,it would have not to know its own end, it would have on some levelto relinquish control over its meaning.What Arendt shows is that thespontaneous act must assume its own impotence, its own passivity.

But how would such an act be recognized? How could one distin-guish between a death that confirms the achievement of total domi-nation and a death that attests to a spontaneity inassimilable to theaims of domination? What is the difference between death by suicideand the destruction of spontaneity that produces ghastly marionetteswith human faces?

One way for such a recognition to take place would be in relationto authority, since it suffices that an act be prohibited for its occur-rence to be interpretable as an act of resistance. Historians of theHolocaust have sometimes focused on the tension between Jewishsuicides, whether completed or attempted, and Nazi efforts to exer-cise exclusive power over the right to die. Absolute power cannotbrook suicide.The decision to take ones own life is an offense, an in-sult it cannot permit.21 This statement is supported by a number offacts and testimonies. Although none of these can underwrite anygeneralizations, several seem pertinent here. After five women com-mitted suicide in anticipation of deportation from Wrzburg, Ger-many on August , , the Gestapo added replacements to thescheduled transport; the community was at least momentarily pun-ished for the suicide of some of its members before it was entirelywiped out.22 In Theresienstadt, those who attempted suicide unsuc-cessfully as well as relatives, friends, and physicians who knew of oraided successful suicides were subject to extreme punishments.23 Son-derkommando survivor Filip Mller reports in his memoirs that after aninterrupted attempt to join a group of fellow Czech Jews in the gaschambers, a member of the Gestapo beat him, screaming,You bloodyshit, get it into your stupid head: we decide how long you stay aliveand when you die, and not you.24 It should be remarked that to em-phasize the prohibition of suicide is also to place Nazi power in a con-tinuum with other forms of state power, if state power implies the ex-clusive right to kill.

However, it has also been suggested that one of the unique aspectsof Nazi power with regard to Jews, particularly in the camps, was notto forbid suicide.Like all other types of death in the structure of thecamp, suicide of every kind evoked unofficial acceptance on the part

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

of the functionals.25 Again, certain records pertaining to Jewish sui-cide both in Nazi-controlled Europe and in the camps support this in-terpretation. In response to the suicide of Fritz Rosenfelder, a Jewfrom Bad Cannstadt, Germany, in a suicide committed, ac-cording to Rosenfelders suicide note to shock my Christian friendsinto awarenessa Nazi publication stated that we are pleased withhim and have no objection if his racial brethren adopt the samemethod of taking leave.26 When the Nazi Ministry of Finance real-ized that it was not legally entitled to confiscate the property of Jew-ish suicides, no measures were taken to prevent suicides; rather, a pol-icy was created to treat suicides as deportees: the property wasforfeited to the state.27 A member of the SS in Auschwitz wrote in hisdiaries of incidents where, following suicides by hanging in the bar-racks,very thorough interrogations were carried out in order to findout whether the prisoner was not murdered by his companions.28The testimony of Isaac H., a survivor of Treblinka, is relevant for whatit does not say. So many times I got up in the morning and peopleright in front of me hang themselves. Quite a few, the guy I sleep nextto. People run out and didnt let him do it. Next guy came along,dont, dont interrupt him, dont make him hurt, let him do it, we allgonna be dead. Just right in front of me. I looked at it, I looked at it.I looked at it.29 There is no hint here of a fear of reprisal against thosewho witnessed without intervening or assisted this death. Bruno Bet-tleheim writes about suicide in Dachau:The stated principle was: themore prisoners to commit suicide, the better. . . . [but] prisoners whoattempted suicide but did not succeed were to receive twenty-fivelashes and prolonged solitary confinement. Supposedly this was topunish them for their failure to do away with themselves, but I amconvinced it was much more to punish them for the act of self deter-mination.30 Bettleheims personal interpretation of the motives forNazi actions retroactively makes suicide recognizable as a sign of au-tonomy and opposition. However, his testimony concerning thestated principle at Dachau as well as the other examples I have citedhere trouble any attempt to derive the significance of suicide in thecamps solely from conventional notions of the relationship of suicideto state power.To the extent that suicide no longer appears as a threatto domination, its recognition as a sign of difference, its possible spon-taneity, is called into question.

In the title essay of At the Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivoron Auschwitz and its Realities, Jean Amry discusses the implications ofthe transformation of suicide in the camps:. . . one was hardly concerned with whether, or that, one had to die, but only with howit would happen. Inmates carried on conversations about how long it probably takesfor the gas in the gas chambers to do its job. One speculated on the painfulness ofdeath by phenol injections. Were you to wish yourself a blow to the skull or a slow


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

death through exhaustion in the infirmary? It was characteristic for the situation ofthe prisoner in regard to death that only a few decided to run to the wire, as onesaid, that is, to commit suicide (Selbstmord begehen) through contact with the highlyelectrified barbed wire. The wire was after all a good and rather certain thing, but itwas possible that in the attempt to approach it one would be caught first and throwninto the bunker, and that led to a more difficult and painful dying. Dying (Sterben) wasomnipresent, death (Tod) vanished from sight.31

Although Amrys testimony here might be read to support the no-tion that suicide was punished in the camps, his remarks ultimatelylevel any meaningful distinction between running to the wire and(other) forms of murder. The situation he describes is not one inwhich the individual has the choice of either committing suicide orliving on in a debased condition; there is no question here of prefer-ring to die.32 If suicide traditionally names a specific way of thinkingabout death and of acting in relation to death, Amrys testimony reg-isters the collapse of the difference between suicide and other formsof dying. It registers the way suicide becomes meaningless.This is un-derscored by Amrys use of the word Selbstmordself-murder. ForAmry would begin his later philosophical and seminal essay on sui-cide, Hand an sich legen, by rejecting this word, Selbstmord, in favor ofthe more archaic German word Freitodfree or voluntarydeath.33 And yet even as suicide is severed from the ideas of free-dom and death, in his very testimony Amry attempts to discernthe significance of the vanishing of death and of suicide as it becomesa meaningless act.

Amry posits Auschwitz as a place where the reality of the camptriumphed effortlessly over death and over the entire complex of theso-called ultimate questions (), where death becomes almost indif-ferent to the subject:for the prisoner [death] assumed the form of amathematically determined solution (). An event that triumphsover death creates only the imminence of an omnipresent dying, andthus thwarts the possibility of experiencing and narrating this event asa historical event. Amrys testimony can therefore take place only inand through a blind spot, that is, a moment that contests or forgetsreality in order to compare suicide with other forms of death andto imagine, however ironically,a good and rather certain thing.Thatthe method of suicide Amry discusses mimics an attempt to escape,that it was often recorded as such by the camp guards, underscores theaporetic place assumed by the thought of suicide in the history towhich Amry bears witness. For to the extent that the thought of sui-cide implies the possibility of thinking outside the triumph overdeath, to the extent that it entails the possibility of a decision, herethat decision is discussed, is speculated about, only in light of its mean-inglessness. The reality of the camp renders suicide meaningless as aspontaneous act. To survive and to bear witness to this reality would

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

be to recognize the collapse of Freitod into Selbstmord, of suicide intomurder, and to realize the impossibility of suicide.

It is the realization of this impossibility that is at issue when PrimoLevi turns to Amrys testimony in the concluding paragraphs of hisparaphrase, discussion, and critique of At the Minds Limits:

Amry states that one no longer thought about whether one would die, an acceptedfact, but rather about how. . . . On this point my experience and my recollections di-verge from Amrys. . . . I almost never had time to devote to death. I had many otherthings to keep me busyfinding a bit of bread, avoiding exhausting work, patchingmy shoes, stealing a broom, or interpreting the signs and faces around me. The aimsof life are the best defense against death: and not only in the Lager.34

Levis objection focuses not on Amrys assessment of the objectivecircumstances of the victims but rather on the subjective experienceAmry describes.What does it mean to think about and discuss dyingin a situation where dying is omnipresent? Does not the very act ofreflecting on different ways of dying assume a (minimal) distance fromthis omnipresence? To be victim to the loss of the possibility of sur-vivalto the irreversible collapse from whether into howwould pre-clude the ability to know and speak of this loss.

Levis own discussion of suicide in the camps confirms this position.He offers three related explanations for the purported rarity of sui-cideone moral, that suicide is an act of a man and not of the ani-mal and so is denied to people living like enslaved animals; onepsychological, that suicide as an act of self-directed punishment be-came unnecessary under conditions that exposed the prisoner to ex-cessive and constant punishment from without; and one pragmatic,that there were other things to think about, as the saying goes ().It should not surprise us that Levis analysis points not to ways that thecamp discouraged suicide, but rather to the absence of the very con-ditions of possibility for suicide. It was not that those who did notcommit suicide had decided that the reasons for living outweighed thereasons for dying, conscious or unconsciousbut rather that the veryidea of taking ones own life in the camps underwent a radical trans-formation. Even as he closely echoes Amry, Levi displaces abstractformulation to focus on the loss of the possibility of reflection:Pre-cisely because of the constant imminence of death there was no timeto concentrate on the idea of death (). For Levi, one does not notcommit suicide because its loss of meaning is realized, but becausethere is literally no time for such a realization to occur, no time forsuicide.

In both formulations, then, suicide becomes unrecognizable: forAmry, because running to the wire can never create an end any dif-ferent from that imposed by the Nazi death sentence, for Levi becausethe collapse of reflection fragments time into a permanent present in


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

which it becomes impossible even to consider how an end might re-late or have been related to a moment of decision. In light of this un-recognizability, to interpret an act as suicide would be the most spon-taneous act imaginable; it would appear as the ultimate form ofresistance to the vanishing of death.

II. Suicide and the Survivor

If Auschwitz marks a transformation of death which affects the possi-bility of suicide, the question arises as to how a survivor can relate todeath.

Both Levi and Amry wrote of ways in which the suicides of sur-vivors seemed to be related to their histories. Levi mentions the sui-cides of Amry and Paul Celan, but in both cases declines to give anyfirm interpretation of their deaths.35 In the context of his analysis ofsuicide in the camps he also refers to suicides that took place at theend of the war:I believe it was precisely this turning back to look atthe dangerous waters that gave rise to the many suicides committedin the aftermath (sometimes in the immediate aftermath) of the liber-ation (; trans. modified). In one sense, these suicides appear as be-lated drownings, signs of an inability to escape from the past. How-ever, to the extent that they may take place in a situation of apparentsafety, they can also be regarded as autonomous responses.36

Amry, in his essay on suicide, attempts to pursue the insolu-ble contradictions of the condition suicidaire and to bear witness tothem.37 He links these efforts to his experiences both as a Holocaustsurvivor and as the survivor of a suicide attempt. Amry posits the re-lation between the act and the interpretation of suicide as mutuallycontradictory. On the one hand, it is crucial to grasp suicide from theinterior (xxiii). This is not least because suicides are also the onlyones among far too many who, sending a message into the void, un-derstand the world (). On the other hand, however, Amry charac-terizes this message as one that cant arrive at its destination becauseit does not have one ().This results in an inevitable act of mispri-sion: suicide delivers me to the other insofar as the latter can nowproceed with my terminated life according to whatever seems to begood or bad (). In a particularly violent passage, Amry comparesthe consequences of this misprision to torture and to Auschwitz: heclaims that his rescue by a medical team after his suicide at-tempt belonged to the worst that had ever been done to [him]andthat was not a little (). Although Amry admits that this compari-son will not be convincing, any conventional assumptions we mighthave concerning the value of survival and the significance of suicideas a sign of suffering and a cry for help are undermined. And yetAmry suggests that any comprehension of this undermining cannot

jar e d s tar k

be communicated intact. If suicide appears as a response to and modeof communicating the experience of history undergone by the sur-vivor of Auschwitz, if it testifies to the vanishing of death and thus toa consequent transformation of the value of life, it could do so onlyby attesting to its very meaninglessness, only by undermining its ownability to testify.Thus the tension between the thought of suicide andthe meaninglessness of suicide in the camps traverses any interpreta-tion of suicidal decisions or acts after Auschwitz.

Levi and Amrys writings on suicide after Auschwitz show that themeaning of suicide for a survivor may involve a reflection on or rela-tion to the past. However, to interpret the significance of this relationmay be less a matter of understanding suicide as a mere symptom orbelated effect of a traumatic history, than a matter of recognizing theimpact of the transformation of suicide, of suicides unrecognizability.

Primo Levi died after falling down the stairwell of his Turin apart-ment building in April .38 In recent articles in the Boston Reviewand the New York Times, Diego Gambetta suggests that the commonassumption that Primo Levis death was a premeditated suicide is theresult of a cognitive trap: if one survives Auschwitz, everything thathappens subsequently tends to be interpreted in light of that experi-ence.39 Based on a reconstruction of Levis last days, Gambetta arguesthat Levis death is most unlikely to have been lucidly planned, butwas either an unpremeditated suicide or a pure accident.40 Both ofthese explanations leave Auschwitz entirely out of the picture or, atmost, in the far margins. If the trauma of Auschwitz was pushing Levito suicide, Gambetta reasons, would not someone who was so awareof the impact of the Holocaust on survivors have made this clear, ei-ther in his writing on in private communications? Why has it been as-sumed that Levi took his own life? Although open to question, Gam-bettas argument calls critical attention to the problems that attend theinterpretation of a death in the light of traumatic survival.

It is first necessary to determine how different positions adoptedconcerning the manner of Levis death correspond to various ways ofunderstanding his life and work.Whereas a natural or accidental deathwould be unrelated to a persons prior experience, suicide calls for aninvestigation of motives, which in turn calls for an investigation of thecircumstances that have shaped a persons ways of thinking and being.Gambettas attempt to uncouple Levis Holocaust experience from hisdeath thus sets itself against interpretations that hold Auschwitz re-sponsible for Levis death, for instance, Elie Wiesels statement thatPrimo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later or Cynthia Ozicksattempt to read Levis death according the same pattern as Levis in-terpretation of Amrys suicide.41 The idea that Levi committed sui-cide as a response to Auschwitz, Gambetta writes, inspires dis-turbingly ambiguous conclusions: while it provides an additional


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

source of revulsion against the horrors of Auschwitz, it also led somepeople to interpret Levis tragic end as a delayed victory of Nazism.Gambettas suspicion of such conclusions is not unfounded. The sui-cides of several well-known survivors (the list comes to us too easilyand prompts insufficient surprise) have fostered an almost automaticassociation of Holocaust survival and suicide. To the extent that thesuicide is thought to restate the Nazi death sentence in these inter-pretations, it appears as a negation of the facts of survival and testi-mony. The present collapses into the past such that the suicide be-comes a non-event, something that does not happen of itself, or thathas always already happened. In the dramatic formulation of one jour-nalist, the efficacy of all [Levis] words had somehow been canceledby his death.42

The insistence on thinking of Levis death as either an accident oran unpremeditated suicide is aimed instead at drawing a clear linebetween past and present, between trauma and testimony, between lifeand work.The concluding sentences of Gambettas essay find comfortin the idea that somethingLevis work, Levis spiritresists or freesitself from the past: The factsor rather the lack of conclusivefactshelp us out of this anguishing quandary: we shall simply neverknow whether he committed suicide or not. One thing is certainthough. Levis last moments cannot be construed as an act of delayedresignation before the inhumanity of Nazism. He never yielded. Atmost he snapped. On that tragic Saturday only his body was smashed.At most he snapped casts Levis death as a kind of accident, whethermaterial or psychological. His death is thus not allowed to interruptor affect in any way what the interpreter takes to be the significanceof his life and work: Levis generation, and that of his children (mygeneration), perceive his writings, rightly or wrongly, as continuouswith his life. Their immense value sprang from that fusion: his lifeseemed to exemplify the possibilities of human decency explored inhis books, and to stand as evidence that those possibilities were notmere wishful thinking. In this view, Levis life is something he is ableto create from and in accordance with his work; his life is fashioned asan example and evidence of something he creates as a writer.43The implications of an insistence on authorship which separates itfrom historical witnessing are visible, for instance, in an earlier ex-change between Levi and Ferdinando Camon, a friend of Levis whocame to view Levis death initially as a Holocaust-related suicide(This suicide must be backdated to , he said in an interview)but later came to believe that the death was an accident.44 In a pub-lished interview with Levi, Camon states:Maybe without the expe-rience of the concentration camp, you would have been a writer all thesame (Im convinced of ittheres no way you wouldnt have been awriter). . . .45 From this perspective, Levis traumatic experience and

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

his writing are only contingently related, and it therefore becomes thetask of the reader to learn to separate the writer from his history. Leviis innately, essentially, autonomously a writer, who happens to havefound interesting and important subject matter in Auschwitz. Levisresponse to Camon, however, disturbs any attempt to uncouple hishistory and his writing:But for me the experience of the concentra-tion camp has been fundamental.46

The possibility, admitted by Gambetta, that Levi died an un-premeditated suicide offers another perspective on the relationshipbetween his death and his survival. According to this view, Levi wouldnot have foreseen his own suicidal act; he would have acted on im-pulse.The Italian psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti writes,Levi did notdecide to take his life lucidly. It was a raptus [a mental seizure] due toa melancholic depression of a psychotic type. It was a sudden folly thatbrought him to self-destruction. Auschwitz has nothing to do with it.The truth is that Levi was ill, because depression is a serious illness.47However one understands the aetiology of depression, the notion thata suicide results from depression frames it as a symptom that expressessomething other than a decision to die, whether this condition is atraumatic experience or psychosis. Like the accident hypothesis, thisinterpretation also leaves the writers life untouched by his death.48

To regard the survivors death as the belated effect of Auschwitz, onthe one hand, or as an impulsive or accidental event, on the other, thusequally removes the possibility of establishing a relationship to death,or, more precisely, to an impossible experience of death which calls fora witness. In the first case, in which death is as it were programmed byAuschwitz, the survivor is (again) robbed of his own death; his deathoccurs not to him as survivor, but as permanent victim, as one whonever survived. In the second case, there is no relationship to death be-cause death is purely external, caused either by an impulse uncon-nected to any autonomous decision, or by a pure accident withoutmeaning. There is in both cases an absolute divide between experi-ence and suicide.

III.The Surrogate

If the survivors suicide cannot be interpreted without denial, to speakof suicide after Auschwitz always amounts to creating a certain fiction.The links between fiction and survival, fiction and witnessing, wit-nessing and suicide, are explored by the French novelist Henri Raczy-mow in his novel, Un cri sans voix (Writing the Book of Esther).Thisnovel attempts to establish a relationship between the history of theHolocaust and a writers autobiographical self-understanding througha fiction of suicide. Hence, it can stand in for the general problem ofrelating to the Holocaust through a proxy.


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Raczymow frames his relationship to the Holocaust as one thatboth defines and disrupts the establishment of his identity:In every-one there is an unfillable symbolic void, but for the Ashkenazic Jewborn in the diaspora after the war, the symbolic void is coupled witha real one. There is a void in our memory formed by a Poland un-known to us and entirely vanished, and a void in our remembrance ofthe Holocaust through which we did not live.We cannot even say thatwe were almost deported.49 The recognition of this void results in adouble bind between the imperious need to speak and a persist-ent, insurmountable doubt concerning the writers right to speak ofevents of which he was not a victim, survivor, or witness.50 The au-thor discovers a discrepancy between his perceived status as a sec-ondary witnessas one who feels compelled to testify to historyand his autobiographical understanding. He cannot find himself in thehistory to which he must testify, which is to say that to testify to thathistory is to undermine his own authority.

The situation faced by the narrator of Raczymows novel, Mathieu,is analogous. The history of the Holocaust is alluded to in the firstsentences of the novel as a fatality we were possessed by and couldnot, by definition, possess.51 The principal fruit of this fatality, ac-cording to Mathieu, was the suicide of his sister, Esther, who was bornin France in the middle of the war, who bore the name of an auntmurdered in Auschwitz, who had lived her imaginative life in theWarsaw ghetto and the concentrations camps, and who, until herdeath in , had been writing a book based on this imagined expe-rience. In Mathieus view, it is through forgetting or repressing Esthersdeath that his family sought to escape possession by the past. ForMathieu, to attempt to possess or repossess the past therefore meansfirst to recover his sisters story and, through that, to bear witness tothe history that haunted his sister: The pages I wrote that eveningwere not a posthumous homage to my sister. With those pages, Irather made it my obligation to experience what I believe she had ex-perienced in spiritthe extermination of the European Jews by theNazis. . . . I discovered all at once that I had had a sister, a sister whohad committed suicide by putting her head in the oven, and that thissister, this ghost, was the surrogate of other ghosts. Ghosts who, at thevery moment that Esther was born, were identified by the striped pa-jamas that hung on their barbed-wire bodies (; translation modi-fied). The suicide of Esther thus provides the immediate pretext forMathieus writing, which takes place in two parts.The first consists ofa narrative focusing on the experiences of a young woman in theWarsaw ghetto; although never made explicit, it is suggested that thisis Mathieus attempt to recreate the Holocaust narrative that his sisterEsther might have produced had she not committed suicide.The sec-ond part of the novel, deeply indebted to Raczymows involvement in

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

the questions concerning literary self-reflexivity explored in the nou-veau roman, retraces Mathieus reflections on the writing process itself,both as it brings Mathieu into contact with his sisters experiences andas it leads him to reflect on the implications of his own investment inthe history of the Holocaust.52 In attempting to respond to the sui-cide of Esther, Mathieu must confront not only the relationship be-tween suicide and the Genocide, not only the way in which oneseems to produce the other, but also the persistent questions that ariseconcerning the very possibility of bearing witness to one, the other,or both.What does it mean, Raczymows novel asks in alluding to thedilemma evoked by all the authors I have cited so far, to respond tothe history of the Holocaust through the intermediary, the surrogate,of suicide?

Un cri sans voix poses these questions amid a broader reflection onhow the history of the Holocaust is transmitted and on the conditionsthat inform speaking, writing, living, and dying in its aftermath. Sui-cide becomes a surrogate not only for the ghosts of the Shoah but forthe very possibility of surrogacy, the very possibility of actively as-suming responsibility in the present for a history one has not experi-enced personally. Thus Mathieu is prompted to write on his sisterssuicide only after a seven-year silence following her death, only afterhis disbelief on reading accounts of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon inthe summer of where Beirut is compared to the Warsaw ghettoand where you could read and hear that Israel = SS (). How,Mathieu asks, are such comparisons possible? Unable to rely on directexperience to weigh the legitimacy or illegitimacy of such compar-isons, the narrators exploration of the relationship between his sisterssuicide and the Holocaust comes to stand in for the more generalproblem of responding to a history that is not ones own.

This exploration takes place both as the narrator considers his sis-ters imaginative investment in the Shoah, an investment itself born ofthe sense that she was contemporary with this pure and simple pos-sibility, that people could die in gas chambers, herself included (),and as he considers his own investment in Esthers life and death. Herdeath thus appears as a replica in miniature of what the Jewish peoplehad experienced forty years earlier (), a belated, displaced execu-tion of the Nazi death sentence. It is not surprising, then, that Estherturns out to have shared the name of an aunt deported to Auschwitzor that she is imagined as impersonating another, perhaps fictional Es-ther, a Polish Jew imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto and killed in Tre-blinka. Nor is it surprising to find that these two Esthers died in theHolocaust, that Esther, even before her self-gassing, is always alreadydead. Her suicide only corrects the mistake of her survival, onlyconfirms the inescapable logic of Auschwitz and Treblinka. As if to


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

live on, as if to die any other way, would be to deny the occurrence ofthe Holocaust.

In this regard, Esthers suicide marks the conversion of a fictionher imagined experience of the Holocaustinto reality; although sheattempts to write about the Holocaust, she instead ends up (re)livingit. Her death becomes a kind of littraturicide, a self-silencing in the faceof a reality too powerful for literary expression. This amounts to say-ing that for Esther the Holocaust is the most powerful fiction one canimagine, a fiction that collapses into reality. It is for this reason that Es-thers suicide, in turn, imposes itself on Mathieu in the form of anoverwhelming reality that mustyet cannotbe fully grasped. For tograsp this reality fully would be in some way to bear witness to thecollapse of fiction into reality to which Esthers suicide testified: itwould be for Mathieu to commit suicide himself. Thus her decisionto die for and as a Holocaust victim is contrasted with Mathieus sur-vival, which can never be adequate to the deaths it survives:Mathieu does his utmost to prolong the last breath of a dead woman. But more andmore he has the feeling of speaking in her place and, like a poor ventriloquist, beingthe only one whos speaking. This is the way, he thinks, to keep himself alive. So hespeaks of a dead woman to let himself know that he exists, that he is alive. And then,its obvious that Esther Litvak is important only because shes dead. Alive, there wouldhave been nothing to say about her.The living are prey to banality, that is, to evalua-tion, comparison. Only the dead escape that fate. They are immeasurable (incommen-surables). ()

To survive is to become implicated in an asymmetrical comparisonbetween the living and the dead. Esthers death, like the deaths of theimmeasurable dead, both obligates Mathieu to speak and exposes theinevitable reliance of his speaking on inadequate comparisons andjudgments. To speak is to compare; to speak of and as the living is tocompare ones own life, ones own ability to compare, to somethingthat is incomparable, to something that can never be evaluatedthrough any comparison whatsoever. When Mathieu thinks of Es-thers death as a result of the Holocaust, as a response to the Holo-caust, he evaluates an action that lies beyond evaluation, he comparestwo immeasurables. This enterprise emerges on one level from hisethical concerns regarding the legitimacy of comparison, regarding anethical obligation to become a surrogate for the dead who cannot de-fend their own incomparability. But it also risks a certain perverse nar-cissism in which the writer identifies with the dead only to findsomething to write about, only to find himself as a writer: This ishow it works: Mathieu imagines that something in him, which he callsEsther, is dead. His murky desire to kill this thing mingles with thevery desire to write about death (). The tenuous, uncertain re-sponse of Mathieus book to this dilemma is to acknowledge openly

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

the double bind that entraps Mathieu between the need to writeabout the Holocaust in order to understand his sisters suicide and therisk of thereby reducing the Holocaust to his own measure.To dareto speak of either event constituted the worst of indecencies. Hewould write the book of shame, the very book Esther could not,would not manage to complete, to which she had preferred a defini-tive silence (). Esther commits suicide because she felt no wordscan be adequate to the Holocaust. Faced with this silence, this optionthat it refuses, writing must confront the possibility of its own inde-cency, must risk betraying even the silence it takes as its cause.

Yet Raczymows narrator also faces doubts both about the legiti-macy of the connection he draws between the suicide and the Holo-caust and about the legitimacy of Esthers habit of impersonatingHolocaust victims and survivors. Even as Esther challenges the narra-tors right to speak, her own status as a witness is called into question:Only survivors had a right to speak.The others, especially those bornafter the war, should keep quiet, be silent. Their words are obscene,impudent. Thats what Esther would have said. But what about her?Even though Esther was born during the war, what did she know ac-tually? . . . She and [her mother] Fanny had escaped the convoy to theEast. As for the rest, she had been told. Or she had read it. Or she hadimagined it. Just like Mathieu, nothing more ().To the extent thatit is based on an imaginative, inauthentic relationship to the Shoah,Esthers suicide becomes radically ambiguous. It threatens to becomea form of obscenity or impudence (a replica in miniature) equal toMathieus writing; or, what amounts to the same thing, her suicidemight be viewed not as an achieved effort to bear witness to history,but rather as an attestation only of the failure or transgression of hav-ing tried to impersonate the victims and of having tried to write theirstory. Suicide and living on, silence and speaking, intersect as compa-rable ways of comparing oneself to the dead, of attempting to becomeimportant:Maybe thats why someone commits suicide, to pretendshe has a secret. . . . A person dies before her time and with her secretintact. One dies to disturb others ().

Whereas suicide at first appeared to challenge the writer to commitan act of equally extreme testimony, it now appears as a challenge tothe writer to confront his own pretensions, his own investment in asecret that is not his. This leads to the radical possibility that Esther,the figure who has stood in for reality, who has provided him with anexternally granted right to speak, may herself be a fiction:Sometimeshe thinks that Esther is only the fruit of his imagination. That shenever existed except inside himself. . . . Sometimes he feels that thewords he puts down on paper are digging his own grave. And hewonders if Esther was writing. Basically he knows nothing about her.Nothing (). The attempt to account for something immeasurable


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

itself becomes a self-destructive task, destructive both in that it con-fronts the writer with his own death, his own possible suicide, and inthat it severs his connection to the reality in relation to which he at-tempted to establish his own authority. If the writers task seemed tobe to convert a possession by the past into a possession of the past, toallow for a radical ignorance of this past is to undermine the possibil-ity of this conversion.This means as well that the writer can no longereven claim a right to admit to the inadequacy of his speaking; he canno longer even compare the weakness of his book of shame to thepowerful definitive silence that precedes it.

Paradoxically, however, just as Mathieu appears to lose touch withthe reality of Esthers suicide and the reality that suicide was thoughtto belong to, he might also be said to approach the suicides gesturefrom another directionnot as a survivor and witness from the out-side but as one who experiences suicide from within, who transformshis own writing into suicide. Such a transformation would hold out acompelling promise. For if Esthers suicide transforms an imaginativeexperience (of having died in the Holocaust that she escaped) into areality, to make this reality subject to anothers imaginative experiencewould be to see the transformation of fiction into reality as itself a fic-tion.The suicidal writing imagined by Mathieu would therefore marka break from the question of reality altogether. It would no longerhave to be explained by Auschwitz, or by suicide. It would be a formneither of witnessing nor of betrayal.This is the future Mathieu imag-ines in the final pages of the novel:My child will be spared the past. He wont carry its stigma. Hell really be an afterwardchild. . . . Never will I talk to him about Esther. Her name will be dead. My book willhave blotted her out. . . . My child must live, not simply survive. . . . No direct linefrom Esther to this child. Except maybe through this book. But only a book, nothingmore. And if someday he asks me who this Esther was, this sister Im talking about,Ill tell him that I never had a sister. . . . Or Ill tell him something else. Ill find some-thing to tell him. Ill tell him, yes, its true, I had a sister. She died in an auto accident.Thats life. In life there is also death. Its a part of it. ()

The only fiction that could live, not simply survive would be a fic-tion that no longer had anything to do with the Holocaust, here thefiction of an auto accident. In this fiction, death is no longer fused toAuschwitz, is no longer opposed to life, no longer creates a doublebind.The auto accident would enact a kind of suicide that would notbe recognizable as suicide, a death by auto that would create a fictionsevered from reality but without leaving any trace of that severance, inorder to become its own sole reality.

Ultimately, however, Raczymows novel refuses the possibility ofsuch a suicidal fiction, of fiction as suicide, both because the gestureof speaking about such a fiction must finally subvert its possible real-ization and because the self-producing, self-destructive event that

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

would produce such a fiction, the auto-event of the auto accident,cannot but recall the suicide, the auto-killing, that it sought to erase.The fiction of the accident thus returns the novel to its beginning,where the possibility of a living that is not a survival, of a livingwithout bearing witness, depended on the repression of Esthers his-tory: We didnt speak about it. It was a little as if by her suicide shehad sacrificed herself for us, so that we might live (). Although at thebeginning of the book Esthers death is understood as something pro-grammed by the Holocaust and at the end of the book her death inthe fiction of the accident is caused by an event wholly exterior tohistory, in both cases her death becomes the vehicle for an attemptedredemption of the present from the pasta sacrifice. It is against thissacrifice, as a sign of its illegitimacy, that the novel is writtenas tes-timony to the impossibility of taking anothers death as the origin ofones own life. The novel in the end might imagine repeating thissame sacrificeof killing its own fiction of suicide to give birth to anafterward child. But this very phrase risks continuing the childs rela-tionship to a before, and marks afterward only as the time of a pos-sible repetition in which the child will read this book and ask whoEsther is, where the child will find himself in the gap between twohistories, or two fictions.

Raczymows literary attempt to bear out the consequences ofthinking about suicide in relation to Auschwitz thus posits suicide asthe figure for a commitment to history that risks abandoning thiscommitment, a figure for the absolute convergence of past and pres-ent, witnessing and fiction, dead and living, ghost and surrogate. If onthe one hand this convergence produces the threat of a continual andungraspable possession by the past, on the other hand it makes it im-possible to relate autonomously to the past except by repeating thisconvergence, either by becoming the past through suicide, or by sev-ering yourself from the past through suicide. But in the novels pageafter the last, an unassigned voice confronts an ultimate limit to, or re-fusal of, its own autonomy:Let me here thank my aunts and uncles,Fanny Grouman, Charles Rapoport, Noch Oksenberg, as well as myfather, for their testimony.53 With this acknowledgment Raczymowsnovel effectively offers itself as a fiction that cannot compare to theconcrete specificity of the proper names with which it concludes,which cannot compare to the testimony to which it still owes an ex-cessive debt.54 In one sense, it repeats the gesture of self-erasure that itimagined in its last pages. This statement of gratitude, however, nei-ther reinstates the writers possession by an experience of history inwhich he has no place nor gives him the right to testify in the placeof those whose experience, like Esthers, remains in silence. Becausehe thanks his relatives for their testimony, it instead marks the differ-ence between the novel and testimony, even as it retroactively defines


Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

the novel as nothing but the product of this difference and thereforeas itself a form of testimony. Rather than seek to become a sacrifice,to efface itself in order to give birth to new meaning, to abrogate thepast in the name of an autonomously or spontaneously produced fu-ture, to become a fiction as powerful and thus as real as the fictionsand realities to which it responds, the novel thus assumes the place ofa surrogate. As a surrogate, however, it does not stand in for an expe-rience that is not its own. Rather, the novel becomes a surrogate forthe immeasurable differences that produce the surrogate as such, thatproduce survival. As such, it seems to realize the impossibility, or themeaninglessness, of its own suicide.

IV. Coda

To speak of suicide in or after Auschwitz, to attempt to determine therelationship of Auschwitz to the meaning of suicide, or of suicide tothe meaning of Auschwitz, is thus to create or maintain fictions ofmeaning. To speculate about the frequency or rarity of suicide in thecamps, to confer upon suicide the power to resist an assault on hu-manity, to reduce suicide to a mere symptom of history, to make sui-cide into a sacrifice in the service of history, is to attribute a determi-nate meaning where no determinate meaning can be attributed.Auschwitz, then, would mark the end of suicidethe end at whichsuicide succumbs and testifies to an event that renders it meaningless,or the end at which suicide may always prove to be meaningless. Atthis point, a more general question seems to impose itself, a questionwhich will remain unanswered here. A suicide to which no determi-nate meaning can be attributed, and which for this very reason pro-vokes attributions of meaning, withdraws from and precedes the onewho commits suicide, or the one who speaks of suicide. Is this with-drawal of suicide exposed by Auschwitz, or does it result fromAuschwitz?

NotesI owe the utmost thanks to Alexander Garca Dttmann for his crucial and generous com-ments on this essay. I am also grateful to the participants of the Draper Faculty Forum fortheir critical questions and insights.

References in writings: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosen-thal (New York: Vintage, ), p. ; Bruno Bettleheim, The Informed Heart:Autonomy ina Mass Age (Glencoe, IL:The Free Press, ) pp. , , ; Jean Amry, At the MindsLimits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella Rosenfeld (New York: Schocken, ), p. ;Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning, th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, ), p. ; HannahArendt,Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps in Essays inUnderstanding, 19301954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., ) andThe Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, ), p. n. References in

jar e d s tar k

Ryan Conrath

Ryan Conrath

studies devoted specifically to the topic of suicide in the camps:Thomas Bronisch,Suici-dality in German concentration camps, Archives of Suicide Research (): ; PaulCitrome,Conclusions dun enqute sur le suicide dans les camps de concentration, Cahiers inter-nationaux de sociologie (): ; Konrad Kweit, The Ultimate Refuge: Suicidein the Jewish Community under the Nazis, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook vol. (London:Secker and Warburg, ): .

Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, pp. , . Kweit,The Ultimate Refuge, p. . Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 19391945 (New York: Henry Holt, ), p. and

passim. Benedykt Kautsky, Teufel und Verhammte: Erfahrungen und Erkentnisse aus sieben Jahrenin deutschen Konzentrationslagern cited in Zdis l/aw Ryn,Suicides in the Nazi Concentra-tion Camps, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior . (Winter ), .

See, for instance, Ryn,Suicides in the Nazi Concentration Camps. For a salient critique of the use of statistics in the study of suicide, see Jack Douglas, The

Social Meaning of Suicide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), esp. pp. . A compelling articulation of this logic in relation to the Holocaust can be found in Gior-

gio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, ), pp. . Agamben identifies Auschwitz as preciselythe place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extremesituation becomes the very paradigm of daily life (). See also Agamben, Homo Sacer:Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, ).

Citrome,Conclusions, . Citrome, Conclusions, . This point is more recently confirmed by Ryn: In the

whole literature dealing with suicide, it would be difficult to find any analogies to manyfactors typical of suicide in the concentration camp (Suicides in the Nazi Concentra-tion Camps, ). For an attempt to apply a sociological framework to suicides duringand after the Holocaust, see Jack Nussan Porter,Holocaust Suicides, in Problems Uniqueto the Holocaust, ed. Harry Cargas (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press,), pp. .

Citrome,Conclusions, . Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. . See Kweit,The Ultimate Refuge, for a detailed discussion of Jewish suicides in Germany

during the war. In an essay based on personal experience as well as archival research, Char-lotte Opfermann suggests that many such suicides might also be considered as (indirect)murders.Suicides or Murders? in Problems Unique to the Holocaust, pp. .

We Refugees in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Mod-ern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, ), p. .

E.g. Kant:If a man cannot preserve his life except by sacrificing his humanity, he oughtrather to sacrifice it. . . . The preservation of ones life is, therefore, not the highest duty,and men must often give up their lives merely to secure that they shall have lived honor-ably in Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, ), p. .

Arendt thus anticipates Theodor Adornos well-known assertion that In the camps deathhas a novel horror: since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death (Neg-ative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, ], p. ).

See, among others, Die Kontroverse: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Juden (Munich:Nymphenburger, ).

Interview with Jan Karski by Maciej Koz l/owski published as Maciej Koz l/owski, TheMission that Failed: A Polish Courier who Tried to Help the Jews in My Brothers Keeper?:Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Anthony Polonsky (London: Routledge, ),p. . I thank Ulrich Baer for alerting me to this episode and for his comments on earlierversions of this essay.

Mahatma Gandhi, Harijan, Nov. , included in Martin Buber and J.L Manges,TwoLetters to Gandhi, The Bond (Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, ), p. . Martin Buber, openletter to Mahatma Gandhi, in Buber and Manges,Two Letters to Gandhi, p. .

In her pathbreaking essay on Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, Shoshana Felman makes a related


point in relation to the suicides of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Judenrat, andFreddy Hirsch, the leader of the so-called Family Camp at Auschwitz who committedsuicide when he learned that the inmates in the camp, including the children, would begassed. Both suicides are elected as the desperate solutions to the impossibility of wit-nessing, whose double bind and dead end they materialize. To kill oneself is, in effect, atonce to kill the witness and to remain, by means of ones own death, outside the witnessing.Both suicides are thus motivated by the desire not to be inside. It then becomes the task ofShoah to testify from inside . . . the suicide of the witness (Shoshana Felman and DoriLaub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History [New York:Routledge, ], p. ; emphasis in the original).

The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or thedeliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of spontane-ity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but anillusion (Postscriptum to Thinking, from The Life of the Mind, in Hannah Arendt,Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner [Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, ], :).

Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer(Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .

Kweit,The Ultimate Refuge, p. . Kweit,The Ultimate Refuge, p. . Filip Mller, Eyewitness Auschwitz:Three Years in the Gas Chambers (New York: Stein and

Day, ), p. . Ryn,Suicides in the Nazi Concentration Camps, p. . See also Jean Baechler, Suicides,

trans. Barry Cooper (New York: Basic Books, ), p. . This assumption also underliesattempts to explain the rarity of suicide based on psychological or sociological determi-nants. Raul Hilberg writes that accounting for the life of an inmate (even a German in-mate) was defined as a complete and accurate report of his death. . . .When a Jew died, nospecial report had to be made; a death list sufficed.Whether an individual Jew lived or dieddid not matter at all (The Destruction of the European Jews rev. ed., vol. [New York:Holmes and Meier, ], :).

Kweit,The Ultimate Refuge, p. . Kweit,The Ultimate Refuge, p. . See also Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews,

:. Cited in Ryn,Suicides in the Nazi Concentration Camps, p. . Isaac H. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testi-

monies, Yale University Library. Quoted with permission of the Yale University Library. Bettleheim, The Informed Heart, pp. . Amry, At the Minds Limits, p. . All citations of Amry refer to this text unless otherwise

noted; page numbers follow in parentheses. Originally published as Jean Amry, Jenseits vonSchuld und Shne: Bewaltigungsversuche eines berwltigten (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, ).

See Jean-Franois Lyotard: Public authority (family, state, military, partisan, denomina-tional) can order its own addressees to die. Or, at least, to prefer to die. The die needs tobe modalized: Die rather than escape (Socrates in prison), Die rather than be enslaved (the ParisCommune), Die rather than be defeated (Thermopyles, Stalingrad). Death is prescribed as analternative to another obligation (civic duty, freedom, military glory) if the latter is revealedto be impracticable. This is not the case for Auschwitz. It is not a Die rather than. . ., butsimply, a Die, that the SS authorities address to the deportee, with no alternative (The Dif-ferend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele [Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, ], p. ). The dictum Lyotard derives from this situationAuschwitz is the forbiddance of the beautiful death (The Differend, p. )echoes andradicalizes the consequences of Amrys testimony to the total collapse of the esthetic viewof death (At the Minds Limits, p. ).

Amry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (Hand an sich legen []) trans. JohnBarlow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), p. . For the lexical history of sui-cide, in German and other European languages, see David Daube,The Linguistics of Sui-cide, Philosophy and Public Affairs, . (Summer ): .

jar e d s tar k

Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. . All citations of Levi refer to this text unless oth-erwise noted; page numbers follow in parentheses.

Levi discusses the death of Celan in On Obscure Writing, in Other Peoples Trades, trans.Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, ), p. ; and that of Amry in TheDrowned and the Saved, p. and passim.

Levis borrowing of the phrase acqua perigliosa from the first canto of Dantes Inferno un-derscores this point, for it positions those who look back at a moment of reflection im-mediately after an escape from danger:And just as he who, with exhausted breath,/ hav-ing escaped from sea to shore, turns to look back at the dangerous waters he has quit . . .(Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum [New York: Bantam, ], l. ). Nicholas Patrunotakes this allusion as a veiled statement of a plan to commit suicide out of a sense that[h]istory is proving the Nazis right (Understanding Primo Levi [Columbia, SC: Universityof South Carolina Press, ], pp. ). Risa Sodi implies a contrasting reading of thesame allusion when she suggests that his death and writings show that it is equally dan-gerous not to look back at the acqua perigliosa now that the Holocaust is past (A Dante ofOur Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz [New York: Peter Lang, ] p. ).

Amry, On Suicide, xxivxxv. Page references to this text will follow in parentheses. See Myriam Anissimovs biography of Levi, Primo Levi:Tragedy of an Optimist, trans. Steve

Cox (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, ), pp. and passim. Diego Gambetta,Primo Levis Plunge: A Case Against Suicide, New York Times, Aug.

, sec. B. Diego Gambetta, Primo Levis Last Moments, Boston Review . (Summer ). All

further citations from Gambetta refer to this article unless otherwise noted. La Stampa, Apr. , cited in Gambetta, Primo Levis Last Moments; Cynthia Oz-

ick,The Suicide Note, The New Republic ( Mar. ). Cited in Gambetta,Primo Levis Last Moments. See also Lisa Lieberman, Tragic Artists, The Gettysburg Review . (Autumn ):

. The first view can be found in Panorama (Apr. ), as cited in Gambetta, Primo

Levis Last Moments; the second in Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi,trans. John Shepley (Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, ), p. .

Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, p. . Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, p. . Cited in Gambetta,Primo Levis Last Moments. It is this perspective that allows Levis biographer Myriam Anissimov to subtitle her book,

The Tragedy of an Optimist. Henri Raczymow, Memory Shot Through With Holes, trans. Alan Astro, Yale French

Studies (), . Raczymow,Memory Shot Through With Holes, . Henri Raczymow, Un cri sans voix (Paris: Gallimard, ).Translated by Dori Katz as Writ-

ing the Book of Esther (New York: Holmes and Meier, ), p. ; translation modified. Allcitations from the novel will be to this edition; page references will follow in parentheses.

For an illuminating discussion of Raczymows life and work, see Ellen Fine,The AbsentMemory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature, in Writing and theHolocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier, ), pp. .

Raczymow, Un cri sans voix, p. , my translation; not included in English translation. The fact that this acknowledgement is missing in the English edition of the novel is only

one sign of how easily this debt can be erased and forgotten.


jared stark suicide after auschwitz

Documents