FOR survivors of Auschwitz, whose liberation in 1945 by the Russians has been commemorated this week, there was little solace in the knowledge that they were among the fortunate few.

Relief tainted with guilt was the common response of those who were dragged near death from that hell on earth. For what remained of their lives they would be haunted by what they had endured and seen. In time, some bore witness, testifying in print or in court to what hitherto were acts of unimaginable brutality. Such evil was banal, as Hannah Arendt famously remarked, but it was also beyond comprehension. How, we have asked ever since, could human beings do such things to other human beings? As yet we have had no satisfactory answer. We may describe but we cannot explain.

The great Italian writer and chemist, Primo Levi, was one of the few to emerge alive from the factory of the damned. Luck, it seems, was on his side. As a chemist, he was made to work in the plant laboratory where he was of use to the killers. Later, when other inmates were forced to take part in a march designed to wipe out as many of them as possible, he developed scarlet fever and was left behind to die in a hut. But Levi did not die and he lived to relate what had happened to him and his fellow Jews. After the war, and after the horror of Auschwitz was revealed, he was approached by one of his readers, a Nazi official who had given him his job and had thus saved him from the gas chamber. The man was unrepentant. On the contrary, he appeared to want Levi to thank him for what he'd done and was rather mystified when he declined.

Nothing about Hitler and his regime ought to surprise us but it does and it will for as long as we have memories. Over a couple of painful evenings recently I watched The Eichmann Show, which tells the story of the broadcast of Adolf Eichmann's trial. In a glass box sat the former oil salesman, passive and apparently unmoved, while his victims told their awful stories and images of the atrocities he had sanctioned flashed on screen. It was in 1961, 16 years after war's end, that he was finally captured in Argentina and brought to trial in Jerusalem.

Among the press corps was a 43-year-old Scottish woman who that same year had published a book with which her name would forever be synonymous. It was the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and she was Muriel Spark. As Spark - née Camberg - was keenly aware, had she been born within the Third Reich's dominion she could easily have ended up in Auschwitz with a number tattooed on her arm and her fate all but assured.

Israel was then in its formative years and Jews were pouring into it in their thousands while Arab refugees were leaving in similar numbers. It was a fraught time and Spark's movements were severely curtailed. There were spies everywhere and war did not seem far off. All eyes, meanwhile, were directed at Eichmann, looking, hoping, for a reaction, some small indication that he felt something, that behind his mask was a man like any other.

Unsurprisingly, Spark left Israel depressed and over-wrought. In the Edinburgh of the 1920s she had heard echoes of anti-Semitism. As her biographer, Martin Stannard, wrote, though she had no memory of this affecting her or her family until Hitler came to power, she had seen local Blackshirts and had always loathed Oswald Mosley and his acolytes, especially one who was a Catholic priest. "Evil," for Spark, noted Stannard, "was as much evasion as malice." Later, at a Jewish writers' congress in Paris, she was infuriated by the West's unwillingness to use the term "anti-Semitism", preferring instead more weasily words. What was this but yet another example of the kind of euphemism that was patented by those who coined "the final solution"?

Seventy years hence, we are still in the grip of anti-Semitism and its sister isms; fascism, racism, fundamentalism. Jews in Scotland and elsewhere feel threatened and unsafe and demand greater protection. Spark, the last tranche of whose papers the National Library of Scotland is launching a campaign to acquire, would have been appalled but unsurprised. For she well knew of what we are capable.