The fault mostly lies with the system, the totalitarian government. The lower level workers were not the most to blame, however the case is in different for the people in the more commanding positions like the chiefs, the barrack chiefs and the clerks. They obtained secret information from the prisoners. The people in charge were punished for not being harsh enough but they did not have a upper limit, they could go to any extent. The lager was like a totalitarian state on a smaller scale. However, a complete totalitarian state has never existed. The role of the Kapo was offered to political prisoners and sadists. There are gray ambiguous people who are ready to compromise. Many of these people did doubt whether what they were doing was right. The secret squad was given privileges in form of extra food but it came at the cost of extra diligence. Initially the SS came from the prisoners in the lager, they used to handle the newcomers. Mostly the members of the secret squad were Jews and they were the ones torturing other Jews. They were kept distanced from other prisoners and the outside world. However, some information always filters through.

The organization of these squads was a demonic crime because the victims were burdened by guilt and they lost their sense of innocence. The secret squad was severely hostile to the new comers but not so much to the veterans of the squad. Levi tells of an interesting event where in one of the gas chambers the squad finds a woman who is alive and they take care of her. It shows how brutality and compassion can co-exist. However, one of the SS men called Muhsfeld later decides that she must die because she is too young to be trusted but he does not do the job himself. In 1947, Musfeld was sentenced to death. It is much harder to judge the special squad because you wonder why they accepted the task and did not prefer death instead.

Levi presents an interesting case where the situation creates a gray zone where the pre existing moral conditions come into question. Levi presents the case of the special squad and the difficulty in judging them. However, the squad cannot be cleared of all responsibility just because they were ordered. There is always a choice and they could choose death rather than committing those crimes. As the courts later held, death was a better option than carrying out the orders. The higher-ups are not the only ones responsible. The people who fall into this gray-zone also have a part to play and should be held responsible. Why they committed these crimes on a personal scale will never be known.

However, Levi says that most of them did have rights hence a certain sense of morality which should have acted as the map in this gray zone but the people preferred to cling onto their lives. The final example of the girl who was alive also shows that the people had become so habituated to death that they only saw that as an option. In conclusion, Levi raises a good point about the gray zone as to determine where the blame should be put at and how it is a difficult job to judge everyone involved in the act as they cannot be simply divided into victims and persecutors as some of the victims later persecuted other people as well. As Levi said it we would have difficulty in judging because we did not experience it ourselves.

Writer, Humanitarian, and Political Activist

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Similar with many other survivors, Wiesel found it difficult to write or discuss his horrible experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he lost many of his relatives including his parents and a sister. It would take him ten years after the end of the World War II before he was finally persuaded to write about it by his close friend François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature. He eventually wrote over 40 books, the best known of which is “Night,” an autobiographical novella describing his Holocaust experiences. In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his powerful message of peace.”

Imre Kertész (1929 – )

Hungarian Author

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Kertész was only 15 when he was deported along with other Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, Zeitz and Buchenwald. He recounted of his experiences in these three concentration camps in his best known quasi-autobiographical book, “Sorstalansag” (Fatelessness). He won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature “for writing that upholds the fragile experiences of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

Roman Polanski (1933 – )

French Film Director and Actor

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The Polanski family lived in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Being the target of Nazi persecution, his family was forced into the Krakow Ghetto with thousands of other Polish Jews. Roman Polanski’s mother was eventually gassed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp while his father almost did not survive the Mauthausen-Gusen camp. He was able to escape from the ghetto and survived the war with the aid of a farmer. He overcame his horrible war experiences and also his well known tumultuous personal life to become one of the world’s finest film directors. His impressive filmography includes the classic “Chinatown” (1974) and the Holocaust-themed “The Pianist,” for which he won the Academy Award for Directing and Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.

Viktor Frankl (1905 – 1997)

Austrian Psychiatrist and Founder of Logotherapy

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From 1942 to 1945, Frankl were sent to a series of concentrations camps together with his wife and parents, all of whom did not survived. Assigned to work in the psychiatric care ward, he noticed that most of his fellow prisoners who found a reason to live were able to survive the war. These observations became the foundational assumption for his proposed logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning to life even in the midst of extraordinary pain and sufferings. This theory was expounded in his world-famous book published in 1946 entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning” which incidentally also chronicled his three-year experience as a concentration camp prisoner.

Simon Wiesenthal (1905 – 2005)

Austrian Architect and Nazi Hunter

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By the time Europe was liberated by American forces in 1945, Wiesenthal had experienced four and a half years in twelve German concentration camps, five of which were in death camps, and had barely escaped executions on a few occasions. After the war, he dedicated most of his life gathering information on Nazi fugitives and tracking them down to bring them to justice for crimes against humanity. He also wrote the book “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness,” in which he related a life-changing encounter with a dying Nazi soldier who felt so guilt-ridden for his crimes that he was seeking the Jew’s (Wiesenthal’s) forgiveness.

Primo Levi (1919 – 1987)

Italian Chemist and Writer

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Levi was basically spared from a life of hard labor during his stay at Auschwitz as his scientific knowledge proved to be useful to the Germans, being able to secure a position as a lab assistant. After liberation in 1945, he practiced his profession as a chemist for a decade before pursuing a career as a writer. What drove him to write what would become his best known book “If This Is a Man” (published in the United States as “Survival in Auschwitz”), in which he gave an account of the year he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz death camp, was the sincere desire to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jewish people. The work is regarded by many as one of the most significant works of the twentieth century.

Alexander Grothendieck (1928 – )

French Mathematician

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Grothendieck was basically a displaced person for most of his childhood mainly due to the upheavals of World War II. Born to a Russian-Jewish father who died in Auschwitz in 1942, he, along with his mother, transferred from camp to camp until they reached Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Jews were relatively safe from their Nazi pursuers. Following the war, he pursued a career in mathematics and made significant contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, number theory, Galois Theory and functional analysis, among others. He is very much considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century,

Simone Veil (1927 – )

French Politician and Lawyer

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Born Simone Annie Jacob, her entire family was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 but only she and her sister survived when the camp was liberated a year later. As an astute politician, she served as the Minister of Health under Prime Ministers Chirac and Barre (1974 – 1979) and as a member of the European Parliament (1979 – 1982, 1982 – 1993). She was also appointed to the Constitutional Council of France in 1998 and elected to the Board of Directors of the International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims in 2003.

Bruno Touschek (1921 – 1978)

Austrian Physicist

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Since his mother was Jewish, Touschek was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945, but was able to escape the concentration camp, largely by chance. After finishing his physics studies, he began conceiving of the idea of radiation damping of electrons circulating within a betatron, a concept which is the very groundwork of all present-day powerful particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911 – 2000)

Polish Pianist and Composer

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Szpilman was an accomplished classical and jazz pianist before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. With the rest of his family deported to Treblinka extermination camp where none survived the war, he managed to run away from the transport loading station when a friend pulled him from the crowd and shooed him away from the waiting train. He resumed his rudely interrupted career performing at the Polish Radio after liberation and composed many symphonic works and about 500 popular songs, a hundred of which are still very popular today. Szpilman wrote a memoir about his survival in Warsaw entitled “Śmierć Miasta” (Death of a City), which was subsequently republished in English by his son in 1998 as “The Pianist” that became the subject matter of the Roman Polanski’s 2002 multi-awarded movie of the same title.

More Holocaust-themed articles:

·        Heroes of the Holocaust & Their Stories of Courage 1

·        Heroes of the Holocaust & Their Stories of Courage 2

·        Six Classic Holocaust Literatures