A Note of Thanks

A huge debt of gratitude is owed to all the authors, writers and publishers from whose material the quotations in this book have been drawn, and without which the conclusions reached in it could never have been adequately supported or defended. Their combined contribution to this work has made it possible to further advance the science of mankind, and it is sincerely hoped that each will gain some sense of satisfaction, pride and accomplishment from that knowledge.

Finally, sole credit for getting this book published is owed to Professor Fawaz A. Gerges, holder of the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. After having read the manuscript, Professor Gerges declared that it should be published and that he, personally, would do everything in his power to accomplish that end. This he has now done, and the author/compiler is immensely grateful and forever indebted to him for his constant encouragement, wise advice and practical help during all the stages leading to its publication. Without the tremendous and selfless dedication Professor Gerges gave to this project, the manuscript upon which this book is based would still be languishing in obscurity.

—J. Michael Mahoney

Child Hurbinek

         Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralysed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish....
         During the night we listened carefully: …from Hurbinek’s corner there occasionally came a sound, a word. It was not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on a name.
         Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm - even his - bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.³⁴

—³⁴Primo Levi, “The Reawakening,” pp. 25-26.