The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  When I translate I keep two dictionaries within arm’s length, an Italian dictionary and an Italian-English dictionary. Translating Levi’s novel I found myself reaching, at least electronically, for a third kind of reference text: technical manuals and trade journals. More than definitions, I needed diagrams. I watched industrial videos and I sent queries to Italian engineers. Even the novel’s title, La chiave a stella, presented an unresolvable linguistic puzzle. Literally, it means a “star-shaped key,” or “key to the stars”; practically, however, it describes what is known in English as a socket wrench. “The Wrench” lacks the original’s celestial aspect, though it does evoke something of the novel’s linguistic complexity. Faussone’s language is frequently throwing a wrench into the narrator’s efforts to understand him.

  It was reassuring to read that Levi himself had misgivings about the novel’s language. The use of regional dialect meant that other Italians only got, by his estimation, 70 percent of the jokes. He also worried that the technical terms would be lost on most Italian readers. But he needn’t have worried. The joy of the novel lies not in understanding exactly how to float an oil derrick in the middle of a churning sea, but in sharing in Levi’s appreciation for the joy that Faussone finds in doing difficult work, and doing it well. This is a universal joy and I felt it too while translating Levi, as he translated Faussone.

  NATHANIEL RICH

  CONTENTS

  The Death of Marinese

  The Deported. Anniversary

  Monument at Auschwitz

  “Arbeit Macht Frei”

  The Time of the Swastikas

  Bear Meat

  Preface to the German Edition of If This Is a Man

  Controversial Diary of a Young Pathologist

  Preface to the School Edition of The Truce

  Resistance in the Lagers

  The Engineer-Philologist and His Forbidden Dreams

  Foreword to The Song of the Murdered Jewish People by Yitzhak Katzenelson

  Note on the Dramatized Version of If This Is a Man

  The Deportation of the Jews

  “More than Any Other Country Israel Must Live”

  Encounters in the Kibbutzim

  Foreword to Auschwitz by Léon Poliakov

  1972 Preface: To the Young

  Technographers and Technocrats

  “A Past We Thought Would Never Return”

  Foreword to Two Empty Rooms by Edith Bruck

  This Was Auschwitz

  More Reality than Literature

  Primo Levi to the Author

  From Stalin’s Lagers

  The Non-Writer Writer

  Foreword to The Night of the Girondists by Jacques Presser

  Buffet Dinner

  Movies and Swastikas

  Letter to Lattanzio: “Resign”

  The Germans and Kappler

  Exported Words

  Women for Slaughter

  Close Encounters with Astuteness

  Letter to Euge

  So That the SS Don’t Return

  Everyone Must Understand Who the Red Brigades Are

  Remembrance of Azelia Arici

  A World That Hitler Canceled

  It Started with Kristallnacht

  Jean Améry, the Philosopher-Suicide

  But We Were There

  A Lager at Italy’s Gates

  A Monstrous Crime

  Who Is Promoting Anti-Semitic Hatred

  A Secret Defense Committee in Auschwitz

  A Holocaust That Still Weighs on the World’s Conscience

  So That Yesterday’s Holocausts Will Never Return (The Nazi Slaughters, the Masses, and TV)

  Images from Holocaust

  In the Women’s Lager

  That Train to Auschwitz

  Europe in Hell

  One Night

  Racial Intolerance

  Foreword to The Two Faces of Chemistry by Luciano Caglioti

  Afterword to the New German Edition of If This Is a Man

  What a Big Mess in Moscow, in 1917

  History Spoke Through Anne Frank

  Seekers of Lies to Deny the Holocaust

  Joseph Needham: A Strong Will to Understand

  To the Visitor

  The Death of Marinese

  No one was killed. Sante and Marinese were the only ones captured by the Germans. It made no sense, it was almost incredible, that, of us all, the two of them had been taken. But the older men in the group knew that it is always those who are captured of whom it is later said “Who would have guessed!” And they also knew why.

  When the two were taken away, the sky was gray and the road was covered with snow that had hardened into ice. The truck barreled downhill with the engine off: the chains on the wheels rattled around the bends and clanked rhythmically along the straight stretches. About thirty Germans were standing in the back of the truck, packed shoulder to shoulder, some of them hanging on to the frame of the canvas roof. The tarp had come loose, so that a thin sleet struck their faces and came to rest on the fabric of their uniforms.

  Sante was wounded; he sat mute and still on the rear bench of the truck, while Marinese was at the front, standing, with his back against the driver’s cab. Trembling with fever, Marinese felt himself slowly overcome by drowsiness, so that, taking advantage of a bump in the road, he slid to the wet floor and remained sitting there, an inanimate object amid the muddy boots, his bare head wedged between the bony hips of two soldiers.

  The pursuit had been long and exhausting, and he wanted nothing more than this—for it all to be over, to remain sitting, to have no more decisions to make, to surrender to the heat of his fever and rest. He knew that he would be interrogated, probably beaten, and then almost certainly killed, and he knew, too, that soon all this would regain importance. But for now he felt strangely protected by a burning shield of fever and sleep, as if it were an insulation of cotton wool that separated him from the rest of the world, from the facts of the day and the things to come. Vacation, he thought, almost in a dream: how long had it been since he had had a vacation?

  With his eyes closed, he felt as if he were submerged in a long, narrow tunnel that had been dug into a soft, tepid substance, crimson, like the light that penetrates closed eyelids. His feet and his head were cold, and he seemed to be moving with difficulty, as if pushed, toward the exit, which was far away but which he would finally, inexorably, reach. The exit was barred by a swirl of snow and a tangle of hard, frozen metal.

  For Marinese a long time passed in this way, during which he made no attempt to break out of his cradle of fever. The truck reached the plain, and the Germans stopped to take off the chains. Then the drive resumed—faster, the jolts more violent.

  Perhaps nothing would have happened if the Germans hadn’t suddenly begun to sing. A voice, starting up in the cab, reached them muffled and indistinct. But once the first verse was over, a second burst forth like thunder from every chest, drowning out the rumble of the engine and the rush of the wind—even Marinese’s fever was overwhelmed. He found himself again able to act and therefore, in some way, obliged to take action—which was how it was for all of us at that time.

  The song was long; every verse ended abruptly, in the German manner, and the soldiers stamped twice on the wooden floor with their hobnailed boots. Marinese had opened his eyes and raised his head again, and every time they stamped their feet he perceived a light touch on his shoulder; he soon realized that it was the handle of a grenade, tucked diagonally into the belt of the man on his left. In that moment the idea took hold.

  It’s probable that, at least in the beginning, he hadn’t considered using the grenade to save himself, to open up a path with his own hands, even though, as we shall see, his final actions cannot be interpreted otherwise. It’s more likely that he was moved by hatred and rancor (feelings that had become habitual to us by then, almost an elementary reflex) toward those blond men in green, well nourished and well armed, who for many months had forced us to live in hiding.
Perhaps more than that, he wanted to take revenge and yet at the same time cleanse himself of the shame of a final escape—the shame that weighed and still weighs on our souls. In fact, Marinese had a gentle soul, and none of us thought him capable of killing, except in self-defense, revenge, or anger.

  Without turning his head, Marinese carefully groped for the handle of the grenade (the type shaped like a stick, with a timer) and, bit by bit, he unscrewed the safety cap, using the jolts of the vehicle to conceal his movements. This operation was easy enough, but Marinese never would have thought that it would be so difficult to occupy and get through the last ten seconds of his life—he would have to fight hard, with all his will and with all his physical strength, so that everything would go according to plan. He dedicated his last few moments to this alone: not to self-pity, not to the thought of God, not to taking leave of the memory of those he loved.

  With the cord firmly in his grasp, Marinese tried to imagine, in an orderly fashion, what would happen in the ten seconds between the rip and the explosion. The Germans might not notice, might simply register his sudden movement, or might understand everything. The first option was the most favorable: the ten seconds would be his own, his time, to spend as he wished, perhaps to think of home, perhaps to think of how he would manage, taking shelter at the last minute behind the man on his right, but then he would have to count to ten and that thought was strangely worrisome. Fool, he thought suddenly. Here I am racking my brains with the cord in my hand. I could have thought of it sooner, couldn’t I. Now the first son of a bitch who sees the cap missing. . . . But no, I can always pull, no matter what happens. He laughed to himself: (Even a situation like this has its advantages!) Even if they hit me in the back of the neck? Even if they shoot me? . . . But yes, thanks to some mental mechanism, evidently illusory and distorted by the imminence of the decision, Marinese felt sure he could pull the cord no matter what, even the very instant he lost consciousness, perhaps even the instant after.

  But unexpectedly, out of some unexplored depths, from some recess of his body—the animal, rebel body that has trouble deciding to die—something was born and grew beyond measure, something dark and primeval, and unfathomable, because its growth arrests and then replaces all the powers of knowledge and determination. It dawned on Marinese that this was fear, and he understood that in a moment it would be too late. He filled his lungs to prepare for battle and pulled the cord with all his might.

  Rage was unleashed. A paw struck his shoulder, followed by an avalanche of bodies. But Marinese was able to tear the bomb away from the belt and roll up like a hedgehog, facedown, his knees drawn up against his chest, the grenade wedged between his knees, his arms tight around them. The fierce blows of fists, musket butts, and heels rained down on his back; hard hands tried to violate the stronghold of his contracted limbs. But all in vain: it was not enough to overcome the insensitivity to pain and the primordial strength that, for just a few moments, nature grants us in a time of dire need.

  For three or four seconds Marinese lay under a pile of bodies writhing in violent battle, every fiber of his being contracted. Then he heard the squeal of the brakes, the truck stopping, and the rushed thuds of men jumping to the ground. At that instant he sensed that the time had come. In a final, perhaps involuntary extension of all his powers, he tried, too late, to free himself of the grenade.

  The explosion ripped apart the bodies of four Germans, and his own. Sante was executed by the Germans on the spot. The truck was abandoned, and we captured it the following night.

  Il Ponte, August–September 1949

  The Deported. Anniversary

  Ten years after the liberation of the Lagers, it’s remarkable, and sad, to have to observe that, at least in Italy, the subject of the extermination camps, far from becoming history, is starting to be completely forgotten.

  There is no need here to recall the figures; to recall that it was the most enormous slaughter in history, nearly annihilating, for example, the Jewish populations of entire nations of Eastern Europe; to recall that, if Nazi Germany had been able to complete its plan, the technique tested at Auschwitz and elsewhere would have been applied, with the notorious meticulousness of the Germans, to entire continents.

  Today it is unseemly to speak of the camps. One is at risk of being accused, in the best hypothesis, of self-pity or a gratuitous love for the macabre; in the worst, of pure and simple dishonesty, or maybe indecent behavior.

  Is this silence justified? Must we tolerate it, we survivors? Should it be tolerated by those who, stunned by fear and revulsion, by blows, curses, and inhuman shouts, witnessed the departure of the sealed freight cars and also, years later, the return of the very few survivors, broken in body and spirit? Is it right that the task of bearing witness, which at the time was felt as a need and as an immediate duty, should be considered done?

  There is only one answer. We must not forget, we must not be silent. If we are silent, who will speak? Certainly not the guilty and their accomplices. If our testimony is missing, in a not distant future the deeds of Nazi bestiality, because of their very enormity, will be relegated to legend. And so we must speak.

  Yet silence prevails. There is a silence that is the product of an insecure conscience, or even a bad conscience. It is the silence of those who, urged or forced to express an opinion, try by every means to change the subject, bringing up nuclear weapons, indiscriminate bombing, the Nuremberg trials, and the troublesome Soviet labor camps—subjects not in themselves without importance but completely irrelevant for the purposes of a moral justification for the Fascist crimes, which in method and extent constitute a monument to ferocity so great that in all human history we find no comparison.

  But it will not be out of place to allude to another aspect of this silence, this reticence, this evasion. That people in Germany are silent, that the Fascists are silent is natural, and basically we’re not sorry about it. Their words serve no purpose, we are not waiting for their laughable attempts at justification. But what to say about the silence of the civilized world, the silence of our culture, our own silence, before our children, before friends returning from long periods of exile in distant countries? It’s not due to weariness alone, to the passing of the years, to the normal attitude of primum vivere. It’s not due to cowardice. There lives in us a more profound, more creditable requirement, which in many circumstances advises us to be silent about the camps, or at least diminish them, censor the images, still so vivid in our memory.

  It is shame. We are men, we belong to the same human family that our executioners belong to. Before the enormity of their crime, we feel that we, too, are citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, and cannot be exempted from the charge that an otherworldly judge, on the basis of our own testimony, would bring against all humanity.

  We are children of that Europe where Auschwitz is: we lived in the century in which science was bent, and gave birth to the racial laws and the gas chambers. Who can say for sure that he is immune to the infection?

  And other things remain to be said: harsh, painful things that, to those who have read The Weapons of the Night,1 will not sound new. It is vanity to call the death of the innumerable victims of the extermination camps glorious. It wasn’t glorious: it was a defenseless, naked death, ignominious and obscene. Nor is slavery honorable; there were some who were able to endure it unharmed, and they were an exception, to be considered with reverential amazement. But it is an essentially ignoble condition, a source of almost irresistible degradation and moral shipwreck.

  It’s good for these things to be said, because they are true. But it should be clear that it doesn’t mean uniting victims and murderers: that doesn’t help; in fact, it makes the guilt of the Fascists and Nazis a hundred times worse. They have shown for all the centuries to come what unsuspected reserves of savagery and madness lie latent in man after millennia of civilized life, and this is a diabolical work. They labored tenaciously to create a gigantic machine that generated death and corruption: no g
reater crime can be imagined. They insolently built their kingdom with the tools of hatred, violence, and lies: their failure is a warning.

  In Torino, 31, no. 4 (April 1955, special issue devoted to the tenth

  anniversary of the liberation); a shorter version appeared in

  L’Eco dell’Educazione Ebraica (April 1955, special issue for

  the tenth anniversary of the liberation)

  1. The resistance fighter Jean Bruller (1902–1991), who was a cofounder of Éditions de Minuit, wrote this book under the pseudonym Vercors.

  Monument at Auschwitz

  Within the next two years, perhaps sooner—in a relatively short time, considering the size of the work—a monument will rise at Auschwitz, on the very site of the biggest massacre in human history. In the second round of the competition to select the designers for the project, which was held recently, a group of Polish artists and two groups of Italian architects and sculptors came in first. The working plan arose from their collaboration, and since July 1, 1959, it has been on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. To be precise, the monument will not “rise” literally, since a large part of it will be at ground level or underground. It will not be a monument in the common sense of the term, because it will occupy no less than seventy-five acres and will not be in the center of Auschwitz—that is, not in the Polish town of Owicim—but, rather, at Birkenau.

  There are few people to whom the name Auschwitz will be unfamiliar. Around 400,000 prisoners were registered in this camp, only a few thousand of whom survived. The extermination plants built by the Nazis at Birkenau, two kilometers away from Auschwitz, swallowed up almost 4 million more innocents. They weren’t political opponents; the vast majority were entire families of Jews, including children, the elderly, and women, taken from the ghettos or directly from their homes, often with only a few hours of warning, and the order to bring “everything you’ll need for a long trip,” and the unofficial advice not to forget gold, cash, and any valuables they might have. Everything they brought (everything—even shoes, underwear, eyeglasses) was taken from them when the convoy entered the camp. On average, one-tenth of every transport was sent on to forced-labor camps; nine-tenths (which included all the children, the elderly, the handicapped, and most of the women) were immediately eliminated with a toxic gas originally meant for ridding ships’ holds of mice. Their bodies were cremated in colossal facilities built specifically for this purpose by the honorable company Topf & Sons, of Erfurt, which had been commissioned to produce ovens capable of cremating 24,000 cadavers a day. Seven tons of women’s hair was found at the liberation of Auschwitz.