How, in the face of unimaginable horror in the deepest pit of a dystopian nightmare, surrounded by mass death, do you maintain a scintilla of faith and hope? That horror, the Nazi Holocaust and its factories of industrialised human slaughter, featured in several conversations at last weekend’s Franschhoek Literary Festival.

The most direct and extraordinary answer was provided by a 101-year-old grandmother from Sea Point, Ella Blumenthal, who survived places and concentration camps in her native Poland whose names are infamous mileposts on the road to Hitler’s “final solution”: the Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek, Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz.

Blumenthal, in conversation with her biographer Joanne Jowell and filmmaker Jordy Sank, explained with extraordinary clarity and even humour how her deep faith in God, her abiding memories of a happy childhood and sheer luck saved her from an almost certain death. That was the fate of 23 of her relatives. But she survived and relocated to South Africa. And as her recent book I am Ella testifies, she bears witness.

Her abiding optimism and sheer gratitude to be alive and surrounded by her large family, a feisty centenarian with zest and appreciation that life’s wonders are a matter of daily celebration, was balm to her enthralled capacity audience. It also provided some perspective on surviving the objectively lesser precarities of state dysfunctionality in Blumenthal’s adopted land.

An altogether different account of a survivor from Auschwitz, Rudi Vrba, was the subject of a discussion, which I moderated, with award-winning British journalist and author Jonathan Freedland. His blockbuster book The Escape Artist is a riveting account of the life and times of one of only two Jews to escape from the concentration camp. The real story, beyond the pared down quotidian account of living in the shadow of death and the great escape story which follows, is provided in the subtitle The Man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the World. This desire, to warn the world — and especially, in 1944, the last remaining Jewish community in Europe, in Hungary — that the Nazis were liquidating people at an industrial rate was Vrba’s animating purpose in hazarding the terrors of capture to blow the whistle.

The most poignant part of the incredible story is that neither the community in question nor the world leaders in the Allied cause acted on the warning and on Vrba’s closely detailed report of what was really happening at Auschwitz. The key reason, according to Freedland, such an enormity of pending peril was not a call to immediate action and response or even flight, lies simply in sheer incomprehensibility.

As Vrba discovered on telling his tale to various eminences who often declined to act: “It was a difficult but stubborn fact: that human beings find it almost impossible to conceive of their own death.” Or as the French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say of the Holocaust, “I knew it but didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”

The Escape Artist contains one line which suggests we can usefully, with necessary subtractions, apply some of the lessons of unheeded warnings to our contemporary condition. Freedland writes: “How people can refuse to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even perhaps when that destruction is certain. Those notions were stark and vivid in Europe in the 1940s. But they seem to have a new, fearful resonance in our own time.”

The question of the Doomsday Clock ticking for South Africa was subjected to scrutiny at Franschhoek in many sessions. One I attended, addressed by local commentators, suggested Julius Malema — who, as the subsequently disgraced Prince Mashele stated,  believes in both “socialism and nationalism” — will likely enter the Union Buildings in a governing capacity of some sort next year.

Then this week came the report that the EFF, in an actual governing coalition with the ANC in the municipality of Ekurhuleni, is demanding that 75% of the debt owed by residents (R20bn) be written off in exchange for its continued support. How this will be achieved is unmentioned, an impossibility which likely will be replicated at national level. Then all bets are off: no more independent Reserve Bank, no more bond buyers for sovereign debt, and the rand at 20 to the dollar will be the stuff of dreams.

Andre de Ruyter’s account of his three years helming Eskom is a publishing sensation. A bookseller told me that it sold 10,000 copies in just three days last week. Tickets to his (virtual) event at Franschhoek were sold out in minutes. It’s almost as though buying his book or attending his talks is an act of defiance against the misgovernance he reveals. The accounts of political machinations, embedded corruption, weak-kneed government responses and crass failures to act on the knowledge of “imminent destruction” cause even the most hardened cynic to weep in despair and disbelief.

He cites famed Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who, in Mans’ Search for Meaning, said “the most important thing is giving someone a sense of purpose”. Beyond its own re-election — in the face of the death of at least 21 people due to cholera this week, yet another sign of state collapse — what, we can legitimately ask, is this government’s sense of purpose? Is mere survival at any cost, even ours, its remaining principle?