The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  I wrote this appendix in 1976 for the school edition of If This Is a Man, in order to answer the questions that were repeatedly addressed to me by student readers. Yet since they coincide substantially with the questions I get from adult readers, it seemed to me fitting to incorporate my answers into this edition as well.

  Someone wrote long ago that books, like human beings, have a fate of their own, unpredictable, different from what was wished for or expected. This book, too, has had a strange fate. It was born long ago: its birth certificate can be found on one of its pages (page 135), where you read that I “write what I could never tell anyone.” The need to tell was so strong in us that I began to write the book there, in that German laboratory permeated by cold, war, and prying glances, although I knew that under no circumstances would I be able to keep those notes, scribbled any way I could—that I would have to throw them away immediately, because if they were found on me they would cost me my life.

  But I wrote the book as soon as I returned, in a few months: the memories were burning inside me. The manuscript, rejected by some of the big publishers, was accepted in 1947 by a small publishing house run by Franco Antonicelli; 2500 copies were printed. Then the publishing house closed, and the book fell into oblivion, partly because, in that harsh period after the war, people had little desire to return in memory to the years of suffering they had just endured. The book finally found new life in 1958, when it was reprinted by Einaudi, and since then the interest of the public has not wavered. The book has been translated into six languages, and adapted for the radio and the theater.

  It has been greeted by students and teachers with an enthusiasm that has far surpassed my expectations and those of the publisher. Hundreds of students, from all over Italy, have asked me to comment on the book, in writing or, if possible, in person. Within the limits of my other duties, I have satisfied these requests, willingly adding to my two jobs a third, that of introducing and commenting on myself, or, rather, that distant self who lived through the experience of Auschwitz and wrote about it. In the course of these numerous encounters with student readers, I’ve had to answer many questions: naïve or knowing, emotional or provocative, superficial or profound. I soon realized that some of these questions recurred repeatedly—that they never failed to come up. And so they must originate in a justified and reasonable curiosity, which in some way the book didn’t satisfy. I propose to answer these questions here.

  1. In your book there are no expressions of hatred or bitterness toward the Germans, or a desire for revenge. Have you forgiven them?

  I am not by nature a person easily roused to hatred. I consider it a crude and brutish feeling, and I prefer my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, to be based, instead, on reason. And so I’ve never cultivated hatred in myself as a primitive desire for revenge, for suffering inflicted on a real or presumed enemy, or for a private vendetta. I should add that, as far as I can see, hatred is personal, directed toward a person, a name, or a face, whereas our persecutors at the time had neither face nor name, as you can understand from these pages: they were remote, invisible, inaccessible. Wisely, the Nazi system ensured that direct contacts between slaves and masters were reduced to a minimum. You will have noticed that in this book only a single encounter between the author-protagonist and an SS officer is described, and, not coincidentally, it takes place in the final days of the Lager, as it was collapsing, when the system had broken down.

  Furthermore, in the months when this book was written—that is, in 1946—Nazism and fascism seemed truly faceless: they seemed to have returned to nothing, vanished like a monstrous dream, justly and deservedly, as ghosts disappear at the crowing of the cock. How could I harbor bitterness, or desire revenge, against a crowd of ghosts?

  Not many years later, Italy and the rest of Europe realized that that was an ingenuous illusion: fascism was far from dead; it was only hidden, encysted. It was molting, and would reappear in a new guise, a little less recognizable, a little more respectable, more suited to the new world that had emerged from the catastrophe of the Second World War, which fascism itself had brought on. I have to confess that, confronted by certain familiar faces, certain old lies, certain figures in search of respectability, a certain tolerance, a certain complicity, I feel a temptation to hatred, and with some violence. But I am not a Fascist; I believe in reason and discussion as supreme tools of progress, and so I place justice before hatred. For that very reason, in writing this book, I deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the lament of the victim or the anger of the avenger: I thought that my word would be more credible and useful the more objective it appeared and the less impassioned it sounded; only in that way does the witness in court fulfill his function, which is to prepare the ground for the judge. It is you who are the judges.

  I would not, however, want my refraining from explicit judgment to be confused with an indiscriminate forgiveness. No, I have forgiven none of the guilty, nor am I disposed now or in the future to forgive any of them, unless they can demonstrate (in deeds: not in words, and not too late) that they are aware of the crimes and errors of fascism, ours and other nations’, and are determined to condemn them, to uproot them from their own conscience and that of others. In that case, yes, I, though not a Christian, am willing to follow the Jewish and Christian commandment to forgive my enemy; but an enemy who repents has ceased to be an enemy.

  2. Did the Germans know? Did the Allies know? How could the genocide, the extermination of millions of human beings, have taken place in the heart of Europe without anyone knowing anything?

  The world in which we in the West live today displays many serious flaws and dangers, but compared with the world of yesterday it enjoys a huge advantage: everyone can immediately know everything about everything. Information today is the “fourth estate”: in theory, at least, the reporter and the journalist have a clear path everywhere; no one can stop them or remove them or silence them. It’s easy: if you want, you listen to the radio of your country or any other country; you go to the newsstand and choose the newspaper you prefer, an Italian paper of any political stripe, or American, or Soviet, within a vast array of alternatives; you buy and read the books you want, without risk of being charged with “anti-Italian activities” or having your house searched by the political police. Of course it’s not easy to avoid all biases, but at least you can choose the type of bias that you prefer.

  Things are different in an authoritarian state. There is a single Truth, proclaimed from on high; all the newspapers are the same, and all repeat that same unique truth. So, too, do the radio broadcasts, and you can’t listen to those of other countries, because in the first place it’s a crime, and you risk ending up in prison, and, in the second place, your country’s transmitters emit on the appropriate wavelengths a signal that jams foreign broadcasts so that they can’t be heard. As for books, only those approved of by the State are translated and published; for others, you have to look abroad, and introduce them to your country at your own risk, because they’re considered more dangerous than drugs or explosives. If you’re found with them at the border, they are confiscated and you are punished. Books of earlier periods that are not approved or are no longer approved are publicly burned in the town squares. So it was in Italy between 1924 and 1945, and in Nazi Germany; so it is still in many countries, among which it grieves me to have to include the Soviet Union, though it fought heroically against fascism. In an authoritarian state it is considered permissible to alter the truth, to rewrite history after the fact, and to distort the news, suppressing truths and adding falsehoods—information is replaced by propaganda. In fact, in such a country you are not a citizen, who holds rights, but, rather, a subject, and as such you owe the State (and the dictator who embodies it) fanatic loyalty and servile obedience.

  It’s clear that in these conditions it becomes possible (if not always easy: it’s never easy to violate the core of a human being) to erase even large fragments of reality. In Fasc
ist Italy the assassination of the Socialist deputy Matteotti1 was carried out successfully and, after a few months, successfully hushed up; and Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, showed themselves far superior to Mussolini in this work of controlling and hiding the truth.

  Yet it wasn’t possible to conceal the existence of the enormous system of concentration camps from the German people, nor was it in fact (from the Nazi point of view) desirable. Creating and maintaining an atmosphere of undefined terror was part of Nazism’s goal: it was useful for people to know that opposing Hitler was extremely dangerous. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Germans were imprisoned in the Lagers from the first months of Nazism—Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics—and the whole country knew it, and knew that in the Lager people suffered and died.

  Nevertheless, it’s true that the great mass of Germans didn’t always know the more atrocious details of what happened later in the camps: the methodical, industrialized extermination on the scale of millions, the toxic gas chambers, the vile exploitation of the corpses—all that was not meant to be known, and few did know, until the end of the war. Among the precautions taken to maintain secrecy was the use of cautious, cynical euphemisms in the language of officialdom: not “extermination” but “final solution,” not “deportation” but “transfer,” not “killing by gas” but “special treatment,” and so on. Hitler rightly feared that this appalling information, if it was known, would compromise the nation’s blind faith in him and the morale of the fighting troops. Furthermore, the Allies would find out and use it as propaganda; this happened, but the horrors of the Lagers, which were described many times by Allied radio broadcasts, were not generally believed, because of their very enormity.

  The most convincing summary of the German situation at the time that I’ve found is in the book Der SS Staat (The Theory and Practice of Hell), by Eugen Kogon, a political prisoner at Buchenwald who became a professor of political science at the University of Munich:

  What did the Germans know about the concentration camps? Beyond the fact of their existence, almost nothing, and even today they know little. Without a doubt, the method of keeping the details of the terrorist system secret, thus making the horror vague, and therefore more profound, turned out to be effective. As I’ve said elsewhere, even many officials of the Gestapo didn’t know what happened in the Lagers to which they sent their prisoners; the majority of the prisoners themselves had a very imprecise idea of the functioning of their camp and the methods that were employed. How could the German people have known? Those who entered the camps found themselves faced with an unfathomable universe, totally new to them: this is the best demonstration of the power and effectiveness of the secrecy.

  And yet . . . and yet, there was not a German who did not know of the existence of the camps, or who considered them sanatoriums. There were few Germans who did not have a relative or acquaintance in the camps, or who didn’t at least know that this one and that one had been sent there. All the Germans had witnessed anti-Semitic barbarities: millions of them had watched with indifference, or with curiosity, or with scorn, or maybe with malicious pleasure, the burning of the synagogues or the humiliation of Jews forced to kneel in the mud on the streets. Many Germans had learned something from foreign radio broadcasts, and many had come in contact with prisoners working outside the Lagers. Not a few Germans had, on the streets or in the train stations, run into wretched groups of detainees: in a circular dated November 9, 1941, and addressed by the chief of police and the security services to all . . . police officers and commanders of the Lagers we read: “In particular, it must be stated that during the transfers on foot, for example from the station to the camp, a not negligible number of prisoners fall down dead or faint from exhaustion. . . . It’s impossible to prevent the population from knowing about such events.” Nor could a German not know that the prisons were overflowing, and that executions were constantly taking place throughout the country; the judges and police officials, the lawyers, priests, and social workers who knew generally that the situation was very serious numbered in the thousands. Many businessmen had supplier relationships with the SS in the Lagers, many industrialists who wished to hire slave workers applied to the administrative and economic officials of the SS, and many employees of the hiring office . . . were aware of the fact that numerous big companies were using the slave workforce. Not a few workers were engaged in activities near the concentration camps or even inside them. Various university professors collaborated with Himmler’s medical research institutes, and various state doctors and doctors in private institutes collaborated with professional murderers. Many members of the air force had been transferred to the employment of the SS, and they, too, must have been aware of what happened there. Many high Army officers knew of the mass slaughter of Russian prisoners of war in the Lagers, and many soldiers and members of the military police must have known precisely what frightful horrors were committed in the camps, in the ghettoes, in the cities and countryside of the occupied Eastern territories. Is it possible that any one of these statements is false?

  In my opinion, none of those statements are false, but another should be added to complete the picture: in spite of the various possible ways of getting information, the majority of the Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; rather, they wanted to not know. It’s certainly true that state terrorism is a very strong weapon, and hard to defend against; but it’s also true that the German people, as a whole, didn’t even try. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code of behavior was widespread: those who knew didn’t speak, those who didn’t know didn’t ask questions, those who asked questions didn’t get answers. In this way the typical German citizen acquired and protected his ignorance, which seemed to him a sufficient justification for his adherence to Nazism: closing his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, he constructed the illusion of not knowing, and thus of not being complicit in, what was happening on his doorstep.

  To know and to make known would have been a way (essentially not so dangerous) of distancing oneself from Nazism; I think that the German people, as a whole, did not resort to it, and of this deliberate omission I consider them fully guilty.

  3. Were there prisoners who escaped from the camps? Why were there no mass revolts?

  These are among the questions that are most frequently asked, and so they must originate in some particularly urgent curiosity or need. My interpretation is optimistic: for the young people of today freedom is a right that cannot under any circumstances be relinquished, and so for them the idea of prison is immediately linked to the idea of escape or revolt. It’s true that under the military codes of many countries the prisoner of war is bound to try to get free however he can, in order to return to his post as a fighter, and that under the Hague Convention an escape attempt is not supposed to be punished. The theme of escape as a moral obligation is a constant in romantic literature (remember the Count of Monte Cristo?), in popular literature, and in movies, in which the hero, unjustly (or perhaps justly) incarcerated, always tries to escape, even in the most unlikely circumstances, and his attempt is invariably crowned with success.

  Perhaps it’s good that the condition of the prisoner, non-freedom, is felt as unjust, abnormal: as an illness, in other words, that must be cured by escape or rebellion. But, unfortunately, this picture bears very little resemblance to the reality of the concentration camps.

  The number of prisoners who tried to escape, for example from Auschwitz, was a few hundred, and those who succeeded a few dozen. Escape was difficult and extremely dangerous: the prisoners were weakened, as well as demoralized, by hunger and ill treatment; their heads were shaved; they wore striped clothing that was immediately recognizable and wooden shoes that hindered rapid and silent movement; they had no money and, in general, didn’t speak Polish, the local language; they had no contacts in the area, and, besides, its geography was unfamiliar. Moreover, to deter escape attempts, fierce reprisals were in
stituted: anyone who was recaptured was hanged publicly in Roll Call Square, often after being brutally tortured. When an escape was discovered, the friends of the escapee were considered his accomplices and were starved to death in prison cells; the entire barrack was forced to stand for twenty-four hours; and sometimes the parents of the “guilty” person were arrested and deported to the Lager.

  SS soldiers who killed a prisoner in the course of an escape attempt were given a special leave, and so it often happened that an SS soldier shot at a prisoner who had no intention of escaping, just for the purpose of getting the leave. This fact artificially increased the official number of cases of escape recorded; as I mentioned, the real number was very small. Given the situation, only a few “Aryan” (that is, non-Jewish, in the terminology of the time) Polish prisoners managed to escape successfully—prisoners who didn’t live far from the Lager, and who therefore had a place to go and the assurance that they would be protected by the population. In the other camps the situation was analogous.

  As for the absence of rebellion, here the matter is somewhat different. First of all, we should recall that in some camps uprisings did take place: in Treblinka, in Sobibór, and even in Birkenau, one of the subcamps of Auschwitz. They did not have much numerical weight: like the analogous Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they represent, rather, examples of extraordinary moral force. In all instances, they were planned and led by prisoners who were in some sense privileged, and so in better physical and spiritual condition than the ordinary prisoners. This should not be surprising: only at first glance does it seem paradoxical that the ones who revolt are those who suffer least. Even outside the Lager, uprisings are rarely led by the subproletariat. The “ragged” do not rebel.

  In the camps for political prisoners, or where the politicals predominated, their experience of conspiracy proved valuable and often led, rather than to open revolts, to fairly effective activities of resistance. Depending on the camp and the time, the prisoners managed, for example, to blackmail or corrupt SS officials, curbing their indiscriminate powers; sabotage the work for the German war industries; organize escapes; communicate with the Allies by radio, providing news of the atrocious conditions in the camps; improve the treatment of the sick, replacing SS doctors with prisoner-doctors; “guide” the selections, sending spies or traitors to their death and saving prisoners whose survival had for some reason particular importance; and prepare to resist, militarily as well, in case, with the approach of the front, the Nazis decided (as in fact they often did decide) to totally liquidate the Lagers.