by Primo Levi
It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgement and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their splendour or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion, and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.
It is clear that this formula is too simple to suffice in every case. A new Fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside our country and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defences. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves, and one must find the strength to resist. Even in this contingency, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as support and warning.
8. What would you be today if you had not been a prisoner in the Camp? What do you feel, remembering that period? To what factors do you attribute your survival?
Strictly speaking, I do not and cannot know what I would be today if I had not been in the Camp. No man knows his future, and this would be, precisely, a case of describing a future that never took place. Hazarding guesses (extremely rough ones, for that matter) about the behaviour of a population has some meaning. It is, however, almost impossible to foresee the behaviour of an individual, even on a day-to-day basis. In the same way, the physicist can prognosticate with great exactitude the time a gram of radium will need to halve its activity but is totally unable to say when a single atom of that same radium will disintegrate. If a man sets out towards a crossroad and does not take the left-hand path, it is obvious that he will take the one on the right, but almost never are our choices between only two alternatives. Then, every choice is followed by others, all multiple, and so on, ad infinitum. Last of all, our future depends heavily on external factors, wholly extraneous to our deliberate choices, and on internal factors as well, of which we are, however, not aware. For these well-known reasons, one does not know his future or that of his neighbour. For the same reason no one can say what his past would have been like ‘if.’
I can, however, formulate a certain assertion and it is this: if I had not lived the Auschwitz experience, I probably would never have written anything. I would not have had the motivation, the incentive, to write. I had been a mediocre student in Italian and had had bad grades in history. Physics and chemistry interested me most, and I had chosen a profession, that of chemist, which had nothing in common with the world of the written word. It was the experience of the Camp and the long journey home that forced me to write. I did not have to struggle with laziness, problems of style seemed ridiculous to me, and miraculously I found the time to write without taking even one hour away from my daily professional work. It seemed as if those books were all there, ready in my head, and I had only to let them come out and pour on to paper.
Now many years have passed. The two books, above all the first, have had many adventures and have interposed themselves, in a curious way, like an artificial memory, but also like a defensive barrier, between my very normal present and the dramatic past. I say this with some hesitation, because I would not want to pass for a cynic: when I remember the Camp today, I no longer feel any violent or dolorous emotions. On the contrary, on to my brief and tragic experience as a deportee has been overlaid that much longer and complex experience of writer-witness, and the sum total is clearly positive: in its totality, this past has made me richer and surer. A friend of mine, who was deported to the women’s Camp of Ravensbrück, says that the camp was her university. I think I can say the same thing, that is, by living and then writing about and pondering those events, I have learned many things about man and about the world.
I must hasten to say, however, that this positive outcome was a kind of good fortune granted to very few. Of the Italian deportees, for example, only about 5 per cent returned, and many of these lost families, friends, property, heath, equilibrium, youth. The fact that I survived and returned unharmed is due, in my opinion, chiefly to good luck. Pre-existing factors played only a small part: for instance, my training as a mountaineer and my profession of chemist, which won me some privileges in the last months of imprisonment. Perhaps I was helped too by my interest, which has never flagged, in the human spirit and by the will not only to survive (which was common to many) but to survive with the precise purpose of recounting the things we had witnessed and endured. And, finally, I was also helped by the determination, which I stubbornly preserved, to recognize always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things, and thus to avoid that total humiliation and demoralization which led so many to spiritual shipwreck.
TRANSLATED BY RUTH FELDMAN
Afterword: Saving the Scaffolding
PAUL BAILEY
In 1943 Primo Levi, a young chemist from Turin, helped to form a partisan band which he and his comrades hoped would eventually be affiliated with the Resistance movement ‘Justice and Liberty’. At the end of the year he was captured by the Fascist militia and sent to a detention camp at Fossoli. He stayed there a few weeks. On 21 February 1944 it was announced that all the Jews in the camp would be leaving the following day for an unknown destination. They were told to prepare themselves for a fortnight of travel. On the train the next morning – 650 ‘pieces’ crammed into twelve goods wagons – they found out where they were going: Auschwitz. ‘A name without significance for us at that time, but it at least implied some place on this earth.’
On arrival the children, the old men and most of the women were ‘swallowed up by the night’. Ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau: the rest went to the gas chamber. Of the 125 people sent to the camps only three made the return journey to Italy after the liberation. One of them was Primo Levi. Some years later, when he had adjusted himself to normal life once more, he sat down and wrote about the twenty months he spent in hell. Two short books, If This is a Man and The Truce, contain the recollections that came to him in that uneasy tranquillity.
Two books, but they should be read as one. Although a crude over-simplification, it is nevertheless essentially true that If This is a Man is about the descent into, and The Truce about the flight away from, hell. The statement is crude because the first book, despite its appalling subject, is not dispiriting. Levi does not flinch from setting down the unbelievable details of that cruelty born of the ‘mystique of barrenness’, but then neither does he paint them in lurid colours to press his point home. The facts are surely enough. Paradoxically, what finally emerges from the book is a sense of Man’s worth, of dignity fought for and maintained against all the odds:
Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. ‘
Häftling* 174517 – ‘We have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die’ – found the strength in himself to retain something of Primo Levi. But, at the beginning of his internment especially, it wasn’t easy; he was shocked into finding it by the example of others:
; … after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness completely disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth… We will all die, we are all about to die… Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson… This was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization… We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.
Levi does not say how Steinlauf died – presumably he disappeared in one of the many ‘selections’. Nor did he take all of the older man’s advice literally: many months of freedom passed before he lost the habit of walking with his eyes fixed to the ground, as if searching for bread or something to sell or exchange for it.
If This is a Man and its sequel are books about a man among men: there are no saints and no heroes in the accepted sense. Indeed, what Levi says of his friend Leonardo in The Truce could with equal justice apply to himself:
Besides good fortune, he also possessed another virtue essential for those places: an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a virile patience, which sustained him miraculously to the very edge of collapse.
And Levi did have good fortune, though the phrase is an obscenity when one thinks of the horrors that he and Leonardo and the other survivors were forced to combat. But he was not ‘selected’ and by some miracle he was ill with scarlet fever when the Germans fled from Auschwitz in January 1945, taking all the healthy prisoners with them. The healthy, who numbered almost 20,000, vanished on the march. A few of the sick survived, surrounded by corpses and tormented by the groans of dying men. ‘The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.’ The work by this time was the work of healing, of finding and sharing food with the helpless, not the humiliating drudgery imposed upon them by the SS (a sign at the entrance to the camp read Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Gives Freedom’). It is on this note of hope that If This is a Man ends: with the Häftlinge, tired and hungry, creeping out of the shadows and slowly becoming men again.
Still, the book is not all blackness, though the tone of the narrative is elegiac and those millions of accusing ghosts haunt its every sentence. Levi does not omit from his story the faint glimmers of light that came on rare occasions to shine briefly out of the evil murk. There is the story of Lorenzo, for instance:
In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward… His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.
But The Truce is almost all light. It tells of Levi’s journey home to his native Turin, and the quiet, hesitant note of hope and renewal that ends the first book is transformed into something like a trumpet blast in its pages. The reader’s eyes open with Levi’s as he becomes aware of the abundant life about him. Like the great novels he devoured as a youth (‘printed paper is a vice of mine’), it is a celebration of other men’s uniqueness. In Auschwitz he had learned a new morality, one that had made him more tolerant of the failings of others, and he draws a clear line in The Truce between the good thieves and the bad, the genuinely strong man and the vicious bully. There are unforgettable portraits of the people he met or who shared his journey with him: Cesare, from the Roman slums, making fish fatter with the aid of a syringe and selling them to gullible Russian peasants; the resourceful Greek, Mordo Nahum; Mr Unverdorben, the composer of a fantasy opera, The Queen of Navarre, praised by a fantasy Toscanini and never performed because of four consecutive bars which were identical with four in I Pagliacci; the ministering angel, Dr Gottlieb; the stately Moor of Verona, warding off friendship with obscenities. But the self-styled Colonel Rovi is perhaps the most incredible character of them all – an official interpreter at Katowice camp who cannot speak a word of German or Russian, dressed in a uniform composed of Soviet boots, a Polish railwayman’s cap and a jacket and a pair of trousers from an unknown source.
What is chastening about Levi’s writing is its freedom from self-indulgence. There isn’t even a hint of hysterical recrimination. How easy, and how understandable, it would have been for him to have adopted such a tone. He chose to build instead: out of the mud, the blows dealt without anger, out of that unique humiliation he has constructed two incomparable works of art, written in a careful, weighted and serenely beautiful prose (the quality of which Stuart Woolf has captured in his exemplary translations). In Italy they are rightly regarded as classics, but not – as yet – of the safe kind. I hope they will one day be so regarded in Britain and America. They should be required reading for the decriers of the merely human, the dazed pursuers of the Maharishis, and the armchair Jeremiahs who make a profitable business out of the dissemination of gloom. But, most of all, I hope they find their way into the hands of the practitioners of the new sentimentality – those who try to persuade us, with increasing shrillness, that Man is vile: the artists who use the terrible fact of the camps for emotional and aesthetic effect, and the critics who compare their grimmer brand of kitsch to King Lear and the paintings of Goya’s last years. Levi, who has confronted the unendurable, could not be persuaded that our short time on earth is just a matter of waste disposal. He has heard songs other than those of the crow. His books remind us that the scaffolding is worth saving. We who weren’t interned should endeavour to build things that are worthy of its support.
This preceeding article was written in the 1970s for a series published in the New Statesman about forgotten writers. The literary editor Anthony Thwaite had invited several novelists and critics to choose a book or books they considered shamefully neglected. At that time, Primo Levi wasn’t so much forgotten in Britain as totally unknown. If This is a Man had been out of print for seventeen years; The Truce for fifteen. It was my seriously pleasurable task to bring them to the attention of a new generation of readers. I was asked to produce an enthusiastic piece, and that is what I did. If I were invited to write about Levi today, my tone would be more measured and thoughtful, in the light of his suicide. But I was younger then and he was vibrantly alive, yet one thing remains constant – the fact that If This is a Man (its rightful, sceptical title, not the simplistic Survival in Auschwitz, as it’s known in America) is destined to live for ever.
Paul Bailey
April 2013
^*
Prisoner.
^*
This word ‘Muselmann’, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.
^*
‘misi me’ [translator’s note].
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‘si metta’ [translator’s note].
^*
‘alta tanto’, not ‘molto alta’ [translator’s note].
^*
Prisoner.
^*
‘Vita’ in Italian means ‘life’.
^*
A leading Italian football club.
^*
‘Segnorina’, a distortion of ‘Signorina’ (young lady), became current in Italy to describe the Allied soldiers’ girlfriends, near-prostitutes.
^*
A dialect poet of Verona of the 1920s.
^*
The descriptive ‘omicidio polposo’ (‘fleshy homicide’) is Trovati’s distortion of the technical legal term ‘omicidio colposo’ (‘homicide without malice aforethought’).
^*
Italian Army in Russia.
^*
Popular songs, originating in the Second World War.
^*
Annual cycle race around the country.
^*
Prisoner.