The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  In the camps that were predominantly Jewish, like the ones in the Auschwitz zone, any sort of resistance, active or passive, was particularly difficult. Here the prisoners, in general, were without any organizational or military experience; they came from all the countries of Europe and spoke different languages, and so didn’t understand one another; above all, they were more starving, weaker, and more exhausted than the others, because their conditions of life were harsher, and because often they had already had a long life of hunger, persecution, and humiliation in the ghettos. As a result, their sojourn in the Lager was tragically short; they were, in other words, a fluctuating population, continually thinned by death, and renewed by the ceaseless arrival of new convoys. It’s understandable that in a human fabric so deteriorated and so unstable the seed of revolt did not easily take root.

  One might ask why the prisoners who had just got off the trains, and waited for hours (sometimes for days) to enter the gas chambers, didn’t rebel. To what I’ve already said I should add here that for this feat of collective death the Germans had perfected a diabolically clever and versatile strategy. In the majority of cases, the new arrivals didn’t know what they were facing: they were greeted with cold efficiency but not brutally, invited to strip “for a shower,” sometimes given a towel and soap, and promised hot coffee afterward. The gas chambers were camouflaged as shower rooms, with pipes, taps, dressing rooms, clothes hooks, benches, etc. However, if the prisoners gave the least sign of knowing or suspecting their imminent fate, the SS or their collaborators moved in brutally and without warning against these baffled and desperate people, racked by five or ten days in sealed freight cars, shouting, threatening, kicking, firing shots, and unleashing against them dogs that were trained to kill.

  Given the situation, the statement, sometimes put forward, that the Jews didn’t rebel out of cowardice seems absurd and offensive. No one rebelled. It need only be recalled that the gas chambers of Auschwitz were tested on a group of three hundred Russian prisoners of war, young men trained as soldiers, politically sophisticated, and not hindered by the presence of women and children: and they did not rebel, either.

  I would like to add a final consideration. The deep-rooted awareness that one must not bow to oppression but, rather, resist was not widespread in Fascist Europe, and was particularly weak in Italy. It was the heritage of a small circle of politically active men, but fascism and Nazism had isolated them, expelled them, terrorized and even destroyed them. We must not forget that the first victims of the German Lagers, numbering hundreds of thousands, were the members of the anti-Nazi political parties. Without their expertise, the popular will to resist, to organize a resistance, did not arise until much later, with the help of the European Communist parties, which, after Germany, in June 1941, suddenly attacked the Soviet Union, breaking the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, threw themselves into the fight against Nazism. Finally, to reproach the prisoners for failing to rebel represents an error of historical perspective: it means expecting from them a political consciousness that today is a nearly common heritage but at the time belonged only to an élite.

  4. Have you returned to Auschwitz since the liberation?

  I returned to Auschwitz in 1965, on the occasion of a ceremony commemorating the liberation of the camps. As I’ve mentioned in my books, the concentration-camp empire of Auschwitz was made up not of just one Lager but of some forty: the camp of Auschwitz itself was constructed on the outskirts of the city of that name (Oświęcim in Polish), had a capacity of around twenty thousand prisoners, and was, so to speak, the administrative capital of the complex. Then, there was the Lager (or more precisely the group of Lagers, from three to five, depending on circumstances) of Birkenau, which held as many as sixty thousand prisoners, of whom around forty thousand were women, and where the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens were situated; and, finally, there was a constantly varying number of labor camps, some as far as hundreds of kilometers away from the “capital.” My camp, called Monowitz, was the biggest of these, and held as many as twelve thousand prisoners. It was situated about seven kilometers east of Ausch-

  witz. The entire area is at present part of Poland.

  I didn’t have a strong feeling upon visiting the Central Camp: the Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national monument, the barracks have been cleaned and painted, trees have been planted, flower beds laid out. There is a museum in which pitiable relics are displayed: tons of human hair, hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, dolls, children’s shoes. But still it’s a museum, something static, arranged, manipulated. The whole camp seemed like a museum to me. As for my Lager, it no longer exists; the rubber factory it was attached to is now in Polish hands and has expanded to occupy the area completely.

  And yet when I entered the Birkenau Lager, which I had never seen as a prisoner, I felt a violent anguish. Here nothing is changed: there was mud, and there is still mud, or suffocating dust in summer; the barracks (the ones that weren’t burned during the passage of the front) remain as they were, low, dirty, constructed of loose planks, with a floor of packed earth; there are no bunks but bare wooden boards, up to the ceiling. Nothing has been beautified here. With me was my friend Giuliana Tedeschi, a survivor of Birkenau. She showed me that on every board of 1.8 by 2 meters as many as nine women slept. She pointed out that from the small window the ruins of the crematorium were visible; at that time, you could see the flame at the top of the chimney. She had asked the older inmates: “What is that fire?” And they answered: “It’s we who are burning.”

  Faced with the grim evocative power of those places, each of us survivors behaves in a different way, but two typical categories can be identified. The first category is made up of those who refuse to return, or even talk about the subject; those who would like to forget, but can’t, and are tormented by nightmares; and those who, instead, have forgotten, have repressed everything, and who began to live again from zero. I’ve noticed that in general these are individuals who ended up in the Lager “through bad luck,” that is, without a precise political commitment. Their suffering was a traumatic experience, but it had no meaning, taught them nothing, like an accident or an illness: for them the memory is something alien, a painful body that intruded on their life, and which they have tried (or are still trying) to eliminate. The second category is made up of former “political” prisoners, or people who had had some political education or religious conviction, or a strong moral conscience. For these survivors, remembering is a duty: they don’t want to forget, and above all they don’t want the world to forget, because they understand that their experience was not without meaning, and that the Lagers were not an accident, an unforeseeable historical event.

  The Nazi Lagers were the apex, the crown of European fascism, its most monstrous manifestation; but there was fascism before Hitler and Mussolini, and, in forms both open and disguised, it has survived the defeat of the Second World War. Anywhere in the world, if one begins by denying the fundamental freedoms of Man, and equality between men, one is heading toward a concentration-camp system, and this is a trajectory that is difficult to stop. I know many former prisoners who understand clearly what a terrible lesson their experience holds, and who every year return to “their” camp leading groups of young people. I would gladly do that if I had the time, and if I didn’t know that I could achieve the same goal by writing books and discussing them with students.

  5. Why do you speak about only the German Lagers, and not the Russian ones?

  As I wrote in response to the first question, I prefer the role of witness to that of judge: I have testimony to offer, about the things I endured and saw. My books are not history books: in writing them I limited myself strictly to reporting the facts of which I had direct experience, and excluded those that I learned later from books or newspapers. You will note, for example, that I haven’t quoted the figures for the massacre of Auschwitz, nor have I described the details of the gas
chambers and the crematoriums. I didn’t know those facts when I was in the Lager, and I learned them only afterward, when the whole world learned them.

  For the same reason I don’t generally speak about the Russian Lagers: luckily for me I wasn’t there, and would be able to repeat only what I’ve read—that is, what everyone who is interested in the subject knows. And yet it’s clear that by saying this I neither can nor wish to avoid the duty, which every man has, to make a judgment and form an opinion. It seems to me that, besides the obvious resemblances, substantial differences can be observed between the Soviet Lagers and the Nazi concentration camps.

  The main difference consists in the purpose. The German Lagers constitute something unique in the admittedly bloody history of humanity: to the old goal of eliminating or terrifying political adversaries they added a modern and monstrous goal, that of annihilating from the world entire peoples and cultures. Starting around 1941, they became gigantic machines of death: gas chambers and crematoriums were planned deliberately to destroy lives and human bodies on a scale of millions; the horrific record belongs to Auschwitz, with 24,000 dead in a single day, in August 1944. The Soviet camps certainly were not and are not places for a pleasant stay, but not even in the darkest years of Stalinism was the death of the prisoners explicitly sought. Death was frequent, and tolerated with brutal indifference, but not in essence deliberate; it was, in other words, a by-product of hunger, cold, disease, exhaustion. In this grim comparison between two models of hell it should also be added that in the German Lagers, in general, one entered not to come out: no end other than death was expected. In the Soviet camps, on the contrary, there was always an end: in Stalin’s time the “guilty” were sometimes given very long sentences (even fifteen or twenty years), with frightening carelessness, but a hope of freedom, however slight, existed.

  From this fundamental difference others emerge. The relations between guards and prisoners in the Soviet Union are less inhuman: they all belong to the same people, they speak the same language, they are not “supermen” and “submen,” as under Nazism. The sick are attended to, if poorly; in the face of work that is too hard a protest is conceivable, either individual or collective; corporal punishment is rare and not so brutal; it’s possible to receive letters and food packages from home—in other words, the human personality is not repudiated, and totally lost. By contrast, at least regarding Jews and Gypsies, in the German Lagers the slaughter was almost complete: it didn’t even stop at children, who were killed in the gas chambers by the hundreds of thousands, something unique among the atrocities of human history. As a general rule, the mortality rates are very different between the two systems. In the Soviet Union, it seems that in the harshest periods mortality was around 30 percent, including all who entered, and that is certainly an intolerably high figure; but in the German Lagers the mortality rate was 90 to 98 percent.

  The recent Soviet innovation in which certain dissident intellectuals have been abruptly declared insane, shut up in psychiatric institutions, and subjected to “treatments” that not only cause terrible suffering but distort and weaken mental functions seems very serious to me. It demonstrates that dissent is feared: the intent is no longer to punish but to destroy it, by means of drugs (or the fear of drugs). Maybe the technique isn’t so widespread (it seems that in 1975 there were no more than a hundred of these political inmates), but it’s odious, because it entails a vile use of science, and unforgivable prostitution on the part of the doctors who slavishly comply with the wishes of authority. It indicates an extreme contempt for democratic debate and civil liberties.

  By contrast, regarding the quantitative aspect, the Lager phenomenon in the Soviet Union at present appears to be in decline. Around 1950, it seems, there were millions of political prisoners; according to data from Amnesty International (an apolitical organization whose goal is to help all political prisoners, in all countries, and independent of their opinions), there are today (1976) around twelve thousand.

  Finally, the Soviet camps remain a deplorable manifestation of illegality and inhumanity. They have nothing to do with socialism, and stand out as an ugly stain on Soviet socialism; they should instead be considered a barbaric remnant of tsarist absolutism, from which the Soviet rulers are unable or unwilling to free themselves. Anyone who reads The House of the Dead, written by Dostoyevsky in 1862, would have no difficulty recognizing the same features in the prison described by Solzhenitsyn a hundred years later. But it’s possible, in fact easy, to imagine a socialism without Lagers; in many parts of the world it has been realized. A Nazism without Lagers, on the other hand, is unthinkable.

  6. Which of the individuals in If This Is a Man did you see again after the liberation?

  Unfortunately, the majority of the individuals who appear in these pages died, either during the days in the Lager or during the tremendous evacuation march mentioned in the last chapter of the book. Others died later from diseases contracted while in prison, and there are still others I’ve never been able to trace. A few survived, and I was able to maintain or reestablish contact with them.

  Jean, the Pikolo of “The Canto of Ulysses,” is alive and well. His family was destroyed, but he married after his return, now has two children, and leads a quiet life as a pharmacist in a provincial French city. We sometimes meet in Italy, where he comes for vacations; other times I’ve gone to see him. Oddly, he has forgotten a lot about his year in Monowitz; predominant are the atrocious memories of the journey of evacuation, during which he saw all his friends (including Alberto) die of exhaustion.

  I see the person I call Piero Sonnino quite frequently, and it is he who appears as Cesare in The Truce. He, too, after a difficult period of readjustment, found a job and has a family. He lives in Rome. He recounts willingly and vividly the hardships he endured in the camp and during the journey home, but in his narratives, which often become like dramatic monologues, he tends to highlight the adventures in which he was the hero rather than the tragic events he witnessed.

  I’ve also seen Charles again. He was taken prisoner in the hills of the Vosges, near his home, where he was a partisan, in November 1944, and had been in the Lager for only a month; but that month of suffering, and the savage events he witnessed, marked him profoundly, destroying his joy in life and the wish to build a future for himself. Returning home after a journey not that different from the one I recounted in The Truce, he took up his profession as a teacher in the tiny school in his village, where he also taught the children to raise bees and plant a tree nursery, of firs and pines. He’s been retired for a few years; he recently married a colleague, a woman his age, and together they’ve built a new house, which is small but comfortable and pretty. I went to see him twice, in 1951 and 1974. The last time, he told me about Arthur, who lives in a nearby village: he is old and ill, and doesn’t wish to receive visits that might reawaken former anguish.

  Dramatic, unexpected, and joyful for both of us was a reunion with Mendi, the “modernist rabbi” who is mentioned briefly in the chapter “Chemistry Examination.” He recognized himself when, in 1965, he happened to read the German translation of this book: he remembered me, and wrote me a long letter, addressing it to the Jewish Community of Turin. We corresponded at length, informing each other of the fates of our common friends. In 1967, I went to see him in Dortmund, in West Germany, where he was then a rabbi: he was the same as he had been, “stubborn, courageous, keen,” and also extraordinarily cultured. He married an Auschwitz survivor and they have three grown children; the entire family intends to move to Israel.

  I never again saw Doktor Pannwitz, the chemist who subjected me to a cold “state examination,” but I learned about him from that Doktor Müller who is the subject of the chapter “Vanadium” in my book The Periodic Table. With the arrival of the Red Army imminent, he behaved like a bully and a coward: he ordered his civilian workers to hold out to the end; he forbade them to get on the last train that was departing for the area behind the lines but got on it him
self at the last moment, taking advantage of the confusion. He died in 1946 of a brain tumor.

  7. How do you explain the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews?

  Hatred of the Jews, improperly called anti-Semitism, is a specific case of a wider phenomenon, and that is aversion toward those who are different from us. Undoubtedly, it originates in a zoological phenomenon: animals belonging to different groups of a single species manifest signs of intolerance toward one another. This happens even among domestic animals: we know that a hen from one henhouse, introduced into another, is pecked for several days, as a sign of rejection. The same happens among rats and bees and, in general, all species of social animals. Now, man is certainly a social animal (Aristotle confirmed it), but we would be in trouble if all the zoological urges that survive in man were tolerated! Human laws are useful precisely for this: to restrain animal impulses.

  Anti-Semitism is a typical instance of intolerance. For intolerance to develop, there must be a perceptible difference between the two groups that come into contact: it can be a physical difference (blacks and whites, dark-haired people and blonds), but our complicated civilization has made us sensitive to more subtle differences, such as language, or dialect, or even accent (southern Italians forced to move to the north are well aware of this); religion, with all its external manifestations and its profound influence on daily life; ways of dressing or gesturing; public and private habits. The tortured history of the Jewish people has meant that Jews almost everywhere display one or more of these differences.