There is yet another kind of guilt that the Holocaust produced. This is the moral guilt that those who survived the genocide eventually suffered from. Many times, this has been called ‘survivor guilt’ or the feelings of people who survived a disaster that killed others. If guilt is defined as an awareness of having done wrong or committed a crime, accompanied by feelings of shame and regret, then the feelings of shame and regret felt by survivors of the Holocaust are both difficult to fathom and not justified. Guilt becomes the anger directed toward the self.  In some twisted logic, guilt becomes the penance one pays for the gift of survival.

Survivor guilt may also motivate an individual to bear witness and to remember those who were murdered, in a bid to educate the world about the Holocaust. This kind of guilt, and the subsequent recollection, was explored most painfully in Primo Levi’s survivor memoir entitled The Drowned and the Saved. This kind of guilt cannot be called sin of omission because sin of omission still implies responsibility or accountability.

Those afflicted with moral guilt, though the phenomenon is inescapable for those who survived the Holocaust, did not have the prerequisite of accountability in the act. If they failed to do something because they were powerless to have done something at all, it can be said that they did not commit any wrong. The kind of guilt they had is of those who suffered the trauma of the Holocaust. They were victims themselves. Their dilemma was not knowing if surviving was, indeed, less tragic than dying during those times.

Guilt is the topic that runs through Levi’s book, with an entire chapter devoted on the question of guilt. He explains that it was the recognition of one’s own moral dwindling that led to so many post-Liberation suicides, as the survivors came to realize that “our moral yardstick has changed” (Levi 57). A pall of gloom and sadness permeates Levi’s recollection as he himself tries to surmount the moral guilt, justifying that those who lived were not necessarily the best but who usually demonstrated the worst human qualities.

This may be the height of self-hatred for outliving one’s loved ones. While regarding himself as innocent, Levi finds himself in a never-ending quest for justification of survival, only because he was one of those who survived. He writes, “Is the shame of that time justified or not? I couldn’t sort it out then, and I still can’t today, but the shame existed and exists, concrete, heavy, everlasting” (Levi 62).

Levi characterizes this guilt as that which “gnaws and shrieks” (Levi 63). These noises have been kept in his head because he felt the possibility that, maybe, he survived at the expense of another person, and this person was perhaps someone more worthy of survival. Liberation was not joyous. In anguish, the survivors returned to their former lives and lived among their former friends and family knowing that they had lived for a prolonged period “at an animal-like level” (Levi 57). What they did not return to were their former selves.

In mankind’s recent history, the Holocaust is the most painful and costliest reminder that bad men can do everything when good men do nothing. It also showed us that in a time of extreme trauma, the ones who survive are not necessarily better off than the ones who perished.  The Holocaust also redefines the concept of guilt and places it at several levels, with many variegated hues. Guilt has never been the same since.

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