En el tercer capítulo de The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi, sobreviviente italiano de los campos de concentración nazi, escribió:
I believe that it is precisely due to this turning to look back at the 'perilous water' that so many suicides occurred after (sometimes immediately after) the liberation. It was in any case a critical moment which coincided with a flood of rethinking and depression. By contrast, all historians of the Lager —and also of the Soviet camps— agree in pointing out that cases of suicide during imprisonment were rare. Several explanations of this fact have been put forward; for my part I offer three, which are not mutually exclusive.
First of all, suicide is an act of man and not of the animal; it is a meditated act, a non-instinctive, unnatural choice; and in the Lager there were few opportunities to choose —one lived precisely like enslaved animals that sometimes let themselves die but do not kill themselves. Secondly: 'there were other things to think about', as the saying goes. The day was dense: one had to think about satisfying hunger, in some way elude fatigue and cold, avoid the blows; precisely because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death. Svevo's remark in The Confessions of the Zeno has the rawness of truth, when he ruthlessly describes his father's agony: 'When one is dying, one is much too busy to think about death. All one's organism is devoted to breathing'. Thirdly, in the majority of cases, suicide is born from a feeling of guilt that no punishment has attenuated; now, the harshness of imprisonment was perceived as punishment, and the feeling of guilt (if there is punishment, there must have been guilt) was relegated to the background only to re-emerge after the liberation: in other words, there was no need to punish oneself by suicide because of a (true or presumed) guilt, one was already expiating it by one's daily suffering.
What guilt? When all was over, the awareness emerged that we had not done anything, or not enough, against the system into which we had been absorbed.
Su confesión es cruda y valiosa, y leerlo es importante no solo para conocer de primera mano el horror del Holocausto, sino también para reflexionar sobre la propia naturaleza humana:
Are you ashamed because your are alive in place of another? And in particular, of a man more generous, more sensitive, wiser, more useful, more worthy of living than you? You cannot exclude this: you examine yourself, you review your memories, hoping to find them all, and that none of them are masked or disguised; no, you find no obvious transgressions, you did not usurp anyone's place, you did not beat anyone (but would you have had the strenght to do so?), you did not accept positions (but none were offered to you...), you did not steal anyone's bread; nevertheless, you cannot exclude it. It is more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion; that everyone is his brother's Cain, that everyone of us (but this time I say 'us' in a much vaster, indeed universal sense) has usurped his neighbour's place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; it is not seen from the outside but it gnaws and rasps.
After my return from imprisonment I was visited by a friend older than myself, mild and intransigent, the cultivator of a personal religion, which, however, always seemed to me severe and serious. He was glad to find me alive and basically unhurt, perhaps matured and fortified, certainly enriched. He told me that my having survived could not be the work of chance, of an accumulation of fortunated circumstances (as I maintained, and still maintain) but rather of Providence. I bore the mark, I was an elect: I, the non-believer, and even less of a believer after the season of Auschwitz, was a person touched by Grace, a saved man. And why just I? It is impossible to know, he answered. Perhaps because I had to write, and by writing bear witness: wasn't I in fact then, in 1946, writing a book about my imprisonment?
Such an opinion seemed monstruos to me. It pained me as when one touches an exposed nerve, and kindled the doubt I spoke of before: I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed.
¿Te suena familiar? A mí sí, y bastante, pero otro día te cuento sobre eso. Lee a Primo Levi, querido lector imaginario, de verdad te lo recomiendo.
