Adam Phillips’s On Balance, a book of essays, is due next year.
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Vol. 23 No. 14 · 19 July 2001
pages 25-26 | 3310 words
Extenuating Circumstances
Adam Phillips
- Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning by Paul Steinberg, translated by Linda Coverdale
Allen Lane, 176 pp, £9.99, May 2001, ISBN 0 7139 9540 8
In Primo Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz If this is a man – written, he says, not ‘to formulate new accusations . . . rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind’ – there is an account that is a kind of accusation of a man Levi calls Henri. There are several character sketches of his fellow inmates, but the two pages on Henri are unusually troubled. Levi tends to know what he thinks of the people he remembers, but something about Henri makes him hesitate: ‘I know that Henri is living today,’ he concludes. ‘I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again.’ For some reason Levi didn’t want to know the next bit of the story: what happened to Henri, or perhaps to people like Henri.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 16 · 23 August 2001
From Claude Romney
In his review of Paul Steinberg's Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning, Adam Phillips (LRB, 19 July) quotes Steinberg's remark: 'I heartily recommend to future candidates for deportation that they enter the medical and paramedical professions, which lead to cushy camp jobs and various perks.' Phillips adds: 'This might not seem a very good reason to become a doctor, but it was clearly a lucky choice of profession for those doctors who found themselves in Auschwitz.'
Although the percentage of survivors among prisoner doctors was much higher than among the general population of the camp, and although the ones who worked in the hospitals (most of them intermittently) did benefit from slightly better living conditions, a very large number still perished. I know from my father, a physician who survived almost three years in Auschwitz, and from the testimonies of others like him, that in the camp hospitals prisoner doctors worked under demoralising conditions, fighting epidemics with grossly insufficient medication, only to see most of the patients who did not die in the hospital sent to their deaths by Nazi physicians during selections. On the other hand, it has been estimated that half of all concentration camp survivors owed their lives to prisoner doctors. Theirs was hardly a 'cushy job', even if working indoors did contribute to their survival. This is why my uncle, an orthopaedic surgeon who survived ten years of Soviet gulag, forced his son to become a doctor.
Claude Romney
University of Calgary
From Axel Harvey
Adam Phillips implies that Levi would not have made as much of luck and being lucky as does Steinberg. Yet Levi wrote (in If Not Now, When?): 'To be lucky is a good thing, a guarantee for the future; to deny your own luck is blasphemy.'
Axel Harvey
Montreal
