Alan writes – Pilate stood before the crowd and pointed to Jesus. ‘Behold the man’ he shouted (John 19.5). There stood Jesus tired, abused, betrayed and flogged. His body torn by gapping wounds and smeared with blood and dirt. Exposing Jesus humanity and vulnerability on stage for all to see - undeniable.
As part of the journey to Easter this year I have read Primo Levi’s book ‘If this is a Man’. It is an account of Levi’s experiences in Auschwitz. A simple account that is descriptive, objective, and factual with an almost detached manner; the way it is written reflecting the numbness and loss of feeling the prisoner experienced.
On arrival Levi ceased to be. He became a number not a man – prisoner 174517. “For the first time we become aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man...It is not possible to sink lower then this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak they will not listen to us and if they listen they will not understand. They will even take away our name; and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us as we were still remains"
Even among the fellow prisoners there is little comradeship, little community and very little caring. Levi does not show us a group of men bonded together through adversity; proud and unyielding, the systematic torture had pushed most beyond that. Each prisoner was on his own. While he does describe the occasional friendship they are expedient in nature.
He describes movingly the day the Russians arrived to set the remnants of the camp free. The healthy had been taken away to work somewhere else and only the sick, Levi among them, remained. Eight hundred in all. “Of these about five hundred died from illness, cold and hunger before the Russians arrived, and another two hundred succumbed in the following days, despite the Russians aid.”
Four young Russian troops arrived on horseback. Levi was one of the first to see them.
“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections (for the gas chamber that happened periodically in camp life), and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.
So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled, and filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them; and also with anguish, because we felt that this should never happen, that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in places where it occurred and in the stories that we should tell of it. because, and this is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. it is an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body and the spirit of the submerged, it stifles them and renders them abject; it returns as ignominy upon the oppressors, it perpetuates itself as hatred among the survivors and swarms around in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as renunciation (p188).”
Levi’s account filled me with this sense of the evil of humanity upon humanity and the crushing depths of inhumanity and suffering we can so easily subject each other. An inhumanity and suffering that Christ rode to the bottom at Easter - descending into the deepest hell and farthest extreme from the creativity and presence of God. Stretching divine love and communion to the ultimate extreme. Then drawn back by transforming love to transform humanity.
Sadly Levi had no suffering God and on a Saturday morning in April 1987 he took his own life. He had been suffering from depression from before the war and had already attempted suicide when a young man.
Of possible interest: Andrew Tate, the author of the Coupland book, is a practising Christian and has a special interest in spirituality in Coupland.
Posted by: Robin Parry | Friday, 27 April 2007 at 03:17 AM