Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

Améry thus mistrusts the attempt of “objective science” to pathologize the refusal to be reconciled. It may well be, writes Améry, that the survivors are marked by what has happened, and that this causes some to exhibit symptoms in common that can thus be grouped into a syndrome of some kind, Concentration Camp Survivor Syndrome, for example, which at a purely clinical level turns survival into an illness, but in that case it’s an illness that renders the survivors’ state morally and historically superior to the state of normality. At any event, there are no moral or historical reasons for the survivor to accept what has happened just because it has happened. The only world the survivor can be reconciled to is a world shaken to its very foundations by what has happened. Time may heal all wounds in social and biological terms, but morally it heals nothing. Morally, a human being has the right, and even the privilege, to revolt against what has happened and demand that the clock be turned back so that the perpetrator can be firmly nailed to his deed and “join his victim as a fellow human being [ als Mitmensch dem Opfer zugesellt sein ].”

Améry is naturally aware of the quixotic nature of his battle, aware that time is his enemy, and that what has happened, “such murder of millions as this, carried out by a highly civilized people, with organizational dependability and almost scientific precision,” will soon go down in history as one among many other acts of violence in “the Century of Barbarism,” and that “ We , the victims, will appear as the truly incorrigible, irreconcilable ones, as the antihistorical reactionaries in the exact sense of the word, and in the end it will seem like a technical mishap that some of us still survived.”

The irreconcilability is not there from the beginning, of course. Initially Améry, like you I believe, is convinced that the world afterward also belongs to you, and to those like you, that it can’t move on without you, that you are the traces it can’t lose sight of without losing itself.

The irreconcilability comes with the silence and the confusion of languages.

The irreconcilability, and the restlessness, and the fatigue, and the impulse to halt your steps and turn your heads and allow the shadows to catch up.

Morally to “annul time” so that the world is never allowed to forget what you’ve survived is Jean Améry’s condition for moving from surviving to living, and the longer I travel at your side along the road from Auschwitz, the more clearly do I see that this is your condition too.

The confusion of languages is exacerbated by the German reparations. In 1953, Germany (West Germany, to be more precise) decides to compensate the survivors with money. The financial reparations are provided as the result not primarily of German benevolence but of the victorious powers’ insistence that Germany provide them. To be considered for German reparations, the survivors have to prove that their time in Auschwitz, Stutthof, Wöbbelin, or their equivalents has inflicted permanent damage, rendering them wholly or partially unable to work. Those who can’t prove they’ve lost at least 25 percent of their capacity for work will not receive reparations. Those who have survived without suffering physical harm will not receive reparations. Psychological harm doesn’t count for much with the Vertrauensärzte , the medical examiners appointed and paid by the German state for the task of deciding which survivors are to receive reparations and which are not. To claim German reparations, the survivors have to fill out an extensive form on which they’re required to show, in German and in minute detail, that they have suffered more than 25 percent damage as a result of the annihilation policy of Hitler’s Germany. Along with the form, claimants are to submit certified copies of all relevant documents, certified transcripts of sworn witness statements, and certified copies of medical records, on receipt of which the authorities will allow themselves a year, or maybe two, to verify the details provided, call for supplementary information, and, above all, await the report of their Vertrauensarzt . Germany demands that a Vertrauensarzt have a license to practice medicine in the survivor’s country of residence and be able to submit his or her report in German, which turns out to mean that in practice, the physicians for whom the survivors must bare themselves, literally and figuratively, are generally German-born or of German origin.

Among the most frequent grounds for rejection of reparation claims are contradictions in the survivor’s account. Even minimal contradictions, even irrelevant contradictions in largely correct accounts can be grounds for rejecting a claim. One survivor is refused reparations because a witness claims to have seen him in 1943 when he could have seen him only in 1942. One survivor is refused reparations because he has given contradictory information about his date of birth. Paragraph 7 of the law regulating German reparations, the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (later Bundesergänzungsgesetz ), makes it possible to refuse reparation to anyone making inexact statements with the intention of simplifying his or her account, or making inexact statements unintentionally and unconsciously, or making inexact statements as a result of the confusion of languages, between German and Polish, say, or Yiddish. In applying for reparations, the claimant must submit to being treated as a suspected liar and fraud until he or she can prove the contrary. The German reparations authority is not required to prove anything or to let itself be troubled by contradictions concerning who was murdered by the German state when and where, but it can deem the slightest contradiction or inaccuracy on the claimant’s part to be grounds for throwing out the claim. In some cases, trivial inaccuracies identified at a subsequent stage trigger demands for repayment of reparations already granted. Having demonstrably survived Auschwitz carries less weight in the eyes of the reparators than a demonstrable inaccuracy in the account of an event and its consequences. Before the reparators’ court, the survivors must constantly turn and look back, recalling in detail every step along the road to and from Auschwitz and ensuring that every step along that road is substantiated by sworn witness statements and certified copies of original documents, and the slightest error can turn the survivor into a liar and a fraud.

In short, the reparations do as much harm as good and, much later, I’m better able to understand those who refuse to take up the offer. At the same time, I can’t help noticing how the reparations impose themselves on the survivors, tempting them with attention and confirmation during those very years when the silence and the confusion of languages is spreading, and the world is busy forgiving and forgetting, and the survivors are becoming more and more alone with their survival and therefore clutching at any straw liable to confirm that what happened really did happen, and that the world is a little shaken by it, after all.

Dr. Herbert Lindenbaum is the German Federal Republic’s Vertrauensarzt in Stockholm. He examines you on September 6, 1956, between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., and his report of October 15, 1956, is written in impeccable German. I slowly read through the questions and answers on the eight-page form that precedes the verdict because I want to be on my guard against unintentional inaccuracies. How, for example, will you deal with the conflicting information about your date of birth? Somewhere along the road, your date of birth has been changed from May 14, 1923, to April 14, 1922, or it might be the other way around. We celebrate May 14 as your birthday, but in the sworn affirmation in German that you enclose with your application for reparations, you explain that April 14 is in fact correct and that the discrepancy is the result of a misunderstanding. At some juncture, someone has entered the date incorrectly. On your work permit, alien’s passport, and citizenship certificate, your date of birth is April 14.