Reviews for Inside Auschwitz, written in blood

The average rating for Inside Auschwitz, written in blood based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-05 00:00:00 Gitte Peulecke The Idolatry of Power Levi reports a recurrent dream that he and many others had in the camp: He is at home among close family and friends to whom he is speaking about his life in the camp; but no one is listening. A realisation perhaps that his experiences, the intensity of his suffering, are not merely inhuman but ultimately uncommunicable or at best inexpressible. No one who hasn't been present could appreciate the extent of loss of oneself, the reduction of a person to a consciousness of utter hopelessness, pure pain in its infinite variations of distress, hunger, exhaustion. Nevertheless these two books are protests against this very hopelessness of the incomprehensible. In this they are paradoxical. How can his cool description of the atrocities that he endured do anything but provoke despair for humanity while simultaneously demanding admiration of Levi's immense personal humanity? There is no heroism here - no one could willingly undergo such torture - but there is some sort of life-persistence (it cannot be accurately called courage) as pure as the pain that it accompanies. The fundamental instinct to survive as it confronts what is an absolute, opposing power, a universe composed of only these two essentials. The camp becomes then a sort of theological enactment of the idolatry of power. Theological because absolute power is how God is defined in all Western religions; idolatrous because if this is so, the only response possible is relentless (and ultimately futile) participation in the hope of stealing the smallest bit of this power in order to survive. The camp creates, or merely shows, an ontological reality from which there is no escape so long as power is the essence of being. Getting and keeping power is all there is. To refuse participation - if indeed that verb isn't too active a description of the act of withdrawal - is to become an unresponsive 'musselman', one merely awaiting death. This is a system of enacted metaphysical nihilism. The title of the piece therefore becomes ironic. It could equally aptly be 'If This Is God'. Could it be that our idea of God as absolute power creates the idolatrous ideal of the deification of man through power; and through that ideal fosters the camp as its apotheosis? Mankind as the object of infinite power to which submission (in form but not an impossible substance) is required. To become part of this society is to accept death; to refuse is to merely accept a quicker death. Which could be called more courageous? If there is any hope within the hopelessness of the universe that Levi describes, and he makes this our universe if we can overcome the indifference of his dream-characters, can it be other than the rejection of the quest for power, the ability to coerce, by those who are without power as well as those who have it? Of what use is Levi's witness unless we appreciate not just his condition in the camp but our own as trapped by a system of power that we impose and have imposed on us? What would the world be like if God were weak, weak to the point of complete passivity to human action? (This is, I suggest precisely the point of John Caputo's theology which is also reviewed on GR; see The Weakness of God: )

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-09 00:00:00 Ronkie Edrob "However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed - they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you." This is such a stunning statement. Levi puts it into the mouth of a contemptuous SS officer speaking to a Jewish kapo some time in 1943. Reading it in the 1980s I was thinking well, at least Primo Levi and all the other great writers and historians have made sure that this greatest of horror stories has been documented and believed. Reading the same speech 20 years later, I'm not so sure. Now we have many people telling us well, you know, the Holocaust was just one amongst many - they happen all the time. Which is not so, and misunderstands, even from well-meaning motives. And tragically the Holocaust is inextricably bound into the DNA of the creation of the state of Israel, so that Israel is accused of using the Holocaust to prop up its own ultra-defensiveness and expansionism. (Remember the "Eleventh Commandment" : "Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories.")And so this infests the whole pro-Palestinian rhetoric which has a vile tendency to shade over towards Holocaust denial (our current but by no means only example being Ahmedinejad). Just another grand example of the hideous knots us human beings love to tie whilst living on a beautiful little planet on the edge of a galaxy, itself one of millions of others, spinning in the glistering vastness of this universe.