Currently re-reading Primo Levi’s account of his experience of Auschwitz, The Drowned And The Saved. The pages have yellowed since I first read it back in 1987, the year Levi killed himself .
We’re not good at reading books by victims. We seem to prefer protagonists, be they vain, wicked or shameless.
In the chapter Shame, he describes his liberation and the ‘oppressed’ look of the Russian soldiers who discovered the camp.
Levi says the Russians, like he and his fellow prisoners, were shamed by their inability to prevent the appalling crimes that had occurred:
…the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defence.
Postscript: Levi’s glimpse of Russian humanity is itself a strange contrast to Antony Beevor’s account of the Red Army in Berlin – The Downfall 1945 where the Soviets are portrayed as drunken rapists in pursuit of Hitler’s disillusioned murderers. History and testimony sit awkwardly together.