My mind, too, is filled with mysteries. One of them haunts me, I think about it all the time, it is the mystery of the survivor. How is it possible to live after the camps? Is there life after Auschwitz? Of all the witness accounts I’ve read, particularly those written in the heat of the moment, when the camps were liberated and during the first war trials, not one expressed hate or anger, not one clamoured for revenge. I didn’t understand, I don’t understand. It is a mystery to me. Calmly, shyly, these women, these men, simply explained what it had been like, answered the questions asked of them by investigators, by judges. ‘My name is X, I arrived in the camp on such and such a day, month, year . . . I was posted to the clothing workshop . . . Yes, I knew prisoners were being gassed . . . Yes, I was beaten by the Kapos . . . I witnessed punishments . . . One day they had us all assemble for the execution of five prisoners accused of stealing a remnant of material . . . another day, a friend of ours, Y, threw himself against the electric fence, we were all beaten for not stopping him . . . He wanted to kill himself, we could understand that.’ What about you? ‘Me? I was lucky, I was posted to “Canada”.’ Can you tell us what you mean by ‘Canada’? ‘That was the name for the huge warehouses near the camp where they sorted through the belongings of new arrivals, we’d put all the money in one pile, jewellery in another, and we would sort the clothes and make large bundles of them that the trucks took to the station. The work was exhausting, but it wasn’t so bad . . . Canada was like paradise for those who had to slog away outside in the cold and the mud.’ I read and reread the books of the famous survivors of Auschwitz – Charlotte Debo, Elie Wiesel, Jorge Semprun, Primo Levi – and I didn’t find a single word of hatred, the hint of a desire for revenge, the least expression of anger. They simply described their day-to-day life in the camp with all the detail they could remember, and this is their artistry, they related what they saw, what they heard, what they smelled, what they touched, the heaviness and the tiredness in their backs, their legs. They replicated it as a camera replicates an image, as a tape recorder replicates a sound. When they talk about their torturers, they say, ‘Officer X said this or that on such a day at such a time.’ When they talk about their companions, they say, ‘So-and-so said this, he did that, one morning he was going, we never saw him again.’ Why this detachment? Where is the rage? Where is the hatred, the cry for revenge, where is the longing to destroy everything, to reject humanity, to turn your back on God, to run and keep on running, to stop listening? The experience of the camps is unlike any other, all the noise in the world cannot drown out the suffering that rose up from this place. This is how we talk about it, like a sunless day that by chance was visited upon the world. We talk about pure evil, about the incalculable suffering it inflicted on us. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realise that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again. If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer. This is the only note of anger I can find in Primo Levi’s book If This is a Man. He notes that nothing, not prayers, not pardon, not the expiation of the guilty, nothing that is within man’s power to do can ever make this right, nothing more. I don’t understand. In my own way, I am a survivor, but I cannot find the words, I haven’t the strength within me to express my rage, my shame, my hate, and I know that nothing can ever staunch the longing for revenge I carry inside me. To discover that you are the son of a murderer is worse than having been a murderer yourself. The murderer has his justifications, he can hide behind language, he can deny, he can brag, he can take responsibility for his crime and proudly face the gallows, he can claim he was only following orders, he can run away, change his identity, find new justifications, can mend his ways, he can do anything. What can the son do but enumerate his father’s crimes and drag the millstone with him all through life? I hate my father, I hate this country, the system that made it what it was, I hate humanity, I hate the whole world, I hate all the famous people who coldly wrote their books describing what my father did as though it were a job, nothing more, a job he was being paid to do, they stripped him of what humanity he might still have had and portrayed him as a witless automaton obeying the orders of the Führer, I hate them for sparing him, for not hating him as one should hate a tormenter, for not insulting him, I hate them for their detachment, I hate them for their restraint. I know my father – he was aware of what he was doing, he was a man of conviction, a man of duty, he deserves all the anger in the world. You are scum, Hans Schiller, you are the vilest murderer that ever lived, I loathe you, I despise you, I would have your name obliterated, I would have you burn in hell until the end of time and those you gased come and spit in your face! You had no right to live, you had no right to give us life, I want nothing to do with this life, this nightmare, this unending disgrace. You had no right to run away, Papa. I have to take it upon myself, I will pay for you, Papa. May you be cursed, Hans Schiller. I sat down and, like a camp prisoner who has witnessed too much in a single day, I cried waterless tears.