The sound premise underlying this study is that the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags, for all their brutality, existed in "one and the same world" as that inhabited by those of us lucky enough to live in freedom. Examining human moral behaviour in extremis, Tzvetan Todorov proposes, can help us to understand moral life in less degraded settings. The subtitle, then, is slightly misleading: Todorov does not present a complete picture of "moral life in the concentration camps", but rather uses exemplary cases from the camps to derive general principles.
He is particularly intent to rebut the view, stated in the accounts of numerous survivors, that conditions in the camps - the cold, the filth, the violence, the hunger, the imminence of death - precluded moral reasoning and action on the part of inmates. Within these same accounts Todorov finds dozens of stories which show that acts of caring and courage were in fact quite common. Todorov means to vindicate the idea that moral agency is never wholly crushed.
This is a powerful principle, but here it leads to a sort of myopia. Todorov's interest in moral behaviour increases in direct proportion with proximity to the gas-chamber door: the less difference an action can make, seemingly, the more he values it. His acknowledgement that guards sometimes committed acts of kindness as a way of emphasising their power points unwittingly to the shortcomings of this kind of moral analysis.
Todorov attributes the failure of ordinary people to oppose what was going on in the camps not to national character or ideology, but to totalitarianism, which "manages to have its subjects accomplish whatever tasks they are assigned without its having to disturb the individual's moral structure". He shrinks, however, from any serious consideration of collective politics. In response to those who have wondered how the leaders of European Jewry could have let their people go "like lambs to the slaughter", Todorov dismisses the idea of a Jewish revolt as being "impossible in a totalitarian regime".
Whatever the truth of this, it avoids the question of whether a less compliant strategy during the early years of the Third Reich could have saved lives. This is, of course, a moral question; but because it is not solely a moral question Todorov shies away from it.
For similar reasons, he also skates over the question of why, and how, Denmark and Bulgaria were able to protect "their" Jews while the rest of the countries in occupied Europe handed them over. A native of Bulgaria, Todorov is understandably reluctant to assess his own country's experience; but an examination of what happened in Denmark would have been of far greater ethical relevance than his homiletic catalogue of the moral acts of the doomed.
Todorov is a literary critic by trade, and his heavy reliance on "literary" sources - memoirs, mainly - means he has more to say about the Nazi camps than the gulags: the literature of the Holocaust is far more extensive. He is wise, however, to insist that the Holocaust was not unique, that the Nazi camps and the gulags are simply the most extensive elaborations to date of states' capacity for organised cruelty.
Facing the Extreme is a sober and fair-minded study, but it lacks the penetrating insight required to force our complacent minds to grapple with the reality of the camp experience. Todorov's tone is so even, his outlook so fundamentally optimistic, that the reader yearns, in vain, for a blast of polemic or irony. A book on this subject should leave the reader feeling unsettled. This book does not.