Reflections On The Holocaust

1. Different Approaches: Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel

Two Holocaust survivors, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, take strikingly different approaches to studying the Holocaust. Levi's approach is direct, concrete, and secular. Wiesel's approach is indirect, abstract, and spiritual. Drawing primarily on Levi's first-person account of his ten months in a Nazi Concentration camp, Survival in Auschwitz (2) and Wiesel's novel, The Gates of the Forest (6), this essay considers the different approaches these two men take in bearing witness to the horrors of the holocaust.

In Survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi takes his readers by the hand and leads them into the daily life of a Nazi concentration camp and into the mind and heart of a survivor as victim. Levi alerts his readers in his prologue that his method is direct and personal. He admits that his need to tell his story is that of "an immediate and violent impulse," a necessary action he hopes will bring some measure of "interior liberation" (2: 9). Levi focuses resolutely on the facts of life in Auschwitz. Levi takes his readers with him on the transport train, through the internment initiation, and along on the daily battle for survival. Having no need for metaphors, since the experience itself is incomparable, Levi presents a factual account of what he felt and what he saw.

Taken out of its larger context, much of what Levi writes about might seem both mundane and trivial. For example, he dwells at length on the importance of shoes, and the pain and humiliation inflicted by the absence of good shoes. The reader is also given an intimate portrait of the latrines. Food is another major focus: whether one gets soup from the top or the bottom of the tureen, whether one has a spoon to eat with, whether one eats his ration of bread all at once or parcels it out over the course of the day. But it is precisely by focusing on the concrete details of everyday life, that Levi brings home the extent to which the Nazis stripped their prisoners of all humanity:

Nothing belongs to us any more: they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. (2: 27)

While Levi assaults his readers with the concrete images and feelings of the concentration camp -- the needling pains, the constant companionship of hunger, the stench of death wafting up from one's own body -- Elie Wiesel takes a comparatively indirect and abstract approach towards the study of the Holocaust. It is as if while Levi is determined to take his readers through the gates of hell, Wiesel believes that it is impossible for an outsider to directly confront and comprehend the experience of the Holocaust.

Wiesel thus tells his story through abstractions and allegories. The reader is taken to the "gates of the forest" but never directly into the forest itself. Although Wiesel like Levi is a Holocaust survivor, Wiesel does not feel right about directly telling his own story. In The Gates of the Forest Wiesel employs many storytellers to get his message across. The question of God's existence in the face of the Holocaust is presented first through the stories of Gavriel.

While Levi focuses on the concrete reality of concentration camp prisoners being systematically stripped of their humanity, on the process of killing and death, on the "resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards" (2: 51), Wiesel's concern is with the act of annihilation itself and the implications for the survivors. In The Gates of the Forest, the protagonist, Gregor, has not even been in the camps. Direct knowledge of the widespread death in the camps comes only through the elusive character of Gavriel. Even when Gavriel passes on this knowledge to Gregor, and Gregor later passes it on to Lieb and the other partisans, the central focus is on the finality of the death and the killing itself, not on the concrete details which led up to the mass executions.

While the contrast between Levi's direct, concrete approach and Wiesel's indirect, abstract approach is marked, an even more striking difference in the two authors' approach to studying the Holocaust concerns their differing views towards God and humanity. Levi's concentration camp is a world without God. Levi's disbelief that God might have any role in the Holocaust is revealed through his attitude towards the "selections." When his comrade Kuhn is mistakenly excluded from the selection and responds in thankful prayer, Levi dismisses Kuhn as being out of his senses and notes that "If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer" (2: 130). Levi is also quick to note that God had nothing to do with the fact that he was not "selected" for extermination: "The fact that I was not selected depended above all on chance and does not prove that my faith was well-founded" (2: 125).

For Levi, the only possible salvation is that which comes through the prisoners' struggle to retain some measure of their own humanity. Thus, Levi comes to view washing himself without soap in dirty water as an important instrument of moral survival (2: 41). Likewise, after the camp has been evacuated, the guards have left, and Levi and a few other survivors in the hospital begin to share food and take care of one another, Levi is only then ready to believe that they had begun to change into men again (2: 160).

Unlike Levi, Wiesel engages in a profound struggle over the implications of a God which would permit such devastation to come upon men. While Levi seems to accept immediately that God has no part in the horrors or the "selections" at the death camps, Wiesel initially seems to believe that the Holocaust provides evidence of one of two main possibilities: 1) that God has forsaken man or 2) that God is vengeful. The first theme is repeated throughout The Gates of the Forest in stories about the Messiah who never comes. The theme of abandonment is echoed in "Selections from the Night" as the prisoner witnesses to an execution ask, "Where is God? Where is He?" (3: 270).

Because he is reluctant to abandon his own spiritual inclinations, Wiesel actually appears to be more comfortable contemplating the second possibility -- that God is vengeful. Gregor's contemplation