by Primo Levi
These are the facts: deadly, repulsive, and essentially incomprehensible. Why, how did they take place? Will they happen again?
I don’t think these questions can be answered comprehensively, not today and not in the future; and perhaps it’s better that way. If they could be answered, it would mean that the facts of Auschwitz fit into the fabric of the works of man, that they had a motive, and thus a seed of justification. In some way, we can put ourselves in the shoes of the thief, of the murderer, but it’s not possible for us to put ourselves in the shoes of the deranged. It is equally impossible to retrace the path of those responsible for Auschwitz; their actions and their words remain, for us, shrouded in darkness, we can’t reconstruct their development, we can’t say “from their point of view. . . .” Man acts in pursuit of an end; the massacre of Auschwitz—which destroyed a tradition and a civilization—did not benefit anyone.
From this point of view (and only this one!), it is highly instructive to read the diary of Rudolf Höss, the former commander of Auschwitz. The book (the Italian edition is about to be published) is a terrifying document. The author is not a bloodthirsty sadist, or a fanatic full of hatred, but an empty man, a tranquil and diligent idiot who endeavored to carry out as carefully as possible the bestial initiatives entrusted to him, and in this obedience he seems to find every doubt or worry put to rest.
It seems to me that the facts of Auschwitz can be interpreted only in this manner—that is, as the insanity of a few men and the stupid and vile consent of many. In fact, even if we leave aside all moral judgment and limit ourselves to the sphere of “pragmatic policies,” we come to realize that efforts like Hitler’s, carried out at Auschwitz and meticulously planned for the whole of New Europe, were colossal mistakes. Everywhere, in all countries, there exists a capacity for indignation—a consensus of judgment in the face of such atrocities—that Nazism did not take into account, and to which, in the end, the German people owe the state of quarantine they currently find themselves in. Logically, a recurrence of the concentration camp shouldn’t be a threat.
But it is imprudent to base predictions on logic. Not long ago Jemolo1 observed, in these very pages, how futile it is to attribute long-range plans and diabolical acumen to our enemies; it’s like saying that stupidity and irrationality are historically active forces. Unfortunately, experience has proved it, and continues to prove it. A second Hitler could be born, maybe already has been born; we must take this into account. So Auschwitz can be repeated. All techniques, once established, take on a life of their own, retain their potential, waiting for an occasion to be applied again. In fifteen years, techniques of destruction and propaganda have progressed. Destroying a million human lives by pressing a button is easier today than it was yesterday; corrupting the memory, conscience, and judgment of 200 million people becomes easier every year.
But there is more. The Nazi massacre bears the mark of folly, but also another mark. It is the mark of the inhuman, of human solidarity negated, forbidden, shattered; of slave-like exploitation, of the shameless establishment of the law of the strongest, smuggled in under the banner of order. It’s the mark of bullying, the mark of fascism. It’s the realization of an insane dream, in which one person rules, no one thinks anymore, everyone always stays in line, everyone obeys to the death, everyone always says yes.
And so it’s good, it’s important, that, in this era of easy enthusiasms and profound exhaustion, a monument should rise at Auschwitz. It has to be a monument that is both new and everlasting, that can, today and tomorrow and centuries from now, speak clearly to whoever visits it. It doesn’t have to be “beautiful,” it doesn’t matter if it borders on the rhetorical, or falls into it. It must not be used for partisan ends; it must be a monument-admonishment that humanity dedicates to itself, in order to bear witness, to repeat a message that is not new in history but is too often forgotten: that man is, and must be, sacred to man, everywhere and always.
La Stampa, July 18, 1959
1. Arturo Carlo Jemolo (1891–1981) was a legal scholar, an anti-Fascist, and a contributor to La Stampa.
“Arbeit Macht Frei”
As everybody knows, these words could be read above the entrance gate of the Lager at Auschwitz. Their literal meaning is “Work makes you free.” Their true meaning is much less clear; it cannot but leave us puzzled, and it lends itself to a number of observations.
The Lager at Auschwitz was created quite late; it was conceived from the beginning as an extermination camp, not as a labor camp. It became a labor camp only around 1943, and only in part and in an incidental way; and so I think we must assume that that sentence—in the mind of whoever dictated it—was not intended to be understood in its basic sense, in other words in its obvious meaning as a proverb-moral.
It is more likely that the sentence had an ironic meaning, that it arose from that heavy, arrogant, grim vein of humor to which Germans hold the secret, and that only in German has a name. Translated into explicit language, the sentence, it seems, would sound something like this:
“Work is humiliation and suffering, and it is not suitable for us, Herrenvolk, a nation of gentlemen and heroes, but it is for you, enemies of the Third Reich. The freedom that awaits you is death.”
In reality, and despite appearances to the contrary, repudiation of and contempt for the moral value of work was and is essential to the Fascist myth in all its forms. Under all militarism, colonialism, and corporatism lies the precise determination of one class to exploit the work of others, and at the same time to deny them any human worth. This determination was already clear in the anti-worker character that Italian fascism assumed from the beginning, and it continued to assert itself, with increasing precision, in the evolution of fascism in its German version, up to the vast deportation to Germany of workers from all the occupied countries. But it reached its crowning achievement and, at the same time, its reduction to the absurd in the universe of the concentration camp.
The exaltation of violence has the same purpose. It, too, is essential to fascism; the stick, which quickly acquires symbolic value, is the implement used to goad pack and cart animals to work.
The experimental nature of the Lager is evident today, and gives rise to an intense retrospective horror. Today we know that the German camps, both the labor camps and the extermination camps, were not, so to speak, a by-product of a national emergency (first the Nazi revolution, then the war), nor were they a sad, temporary necessity. Rather, they represented the first, precocious buds of the New Order. In the New Order, certain human races (Jews, Gypsies) would be eliminated. Others, for example the Slavs in general and the Russians in particular, would be enslaved and subjected to a carefully planned regimen of biological degradation that would transform them into useful beasts of burden, illiterate, devoid of any initiative, incapable of rebellion or criticism.
So the camps were, in substance, “pilot plants,” harbingers of the future assigned to Europe in the Nazi plans. In light of these considerations, sentences like “Work makes you free” at Auschwitz, or like “To each his own” at Buchenwald, take on a precise and sinister meaning. They are portents of the new Tablets of the Law, dictated by the master to the slave, and true only for the latter.
If fascism had prevailed, the whole of Europe would have been transformed into a complex system of forced-labor camps and extermination camps, and those words, cynically uplifting, would be read over the entrance to every workshop and every construction site.
Triangolo Rosso, ANED (Associazione
Nazionale Ex-Deportati), November 1959
The Time of the Swastikas
The Exhibition on Deportation, which opened in Turin on a minor note (it’s fair to say), achieved an unexpected success. Every day, at every hour, a packed crowd paused with emotion in front of those terrible images; the closing date had to be postponed twice. Equally surprising was the Turinese public’s response to the two subsequent talks, intended for young people, that took place at the Cultural Uni
on, in Palazzo Carignano; the audience was large, attentive, and thoughtful. These two occurrences, in themselves positive and deserving of serious reflection, contain a germ of reproach: maybe we delayed too long, maybe we wasted years, were silent when it was time to speak, failed to fulfill an expectation.
But they also contain a lesson (not really new, because, after all, the history of customs is a series of rediscoveries): in this epoch of ours—noisy and bureaucratic, full of open propaganda and hidden suggestions, of mechanical rhetoric, of compromise, of scandals and exhaustion—the voice of truth, instead of getting lost, acquires a new timbre, a clearer prominence. It seems too good to be true, but it is so: the wide devaluation of the written and spoken word is not definitive, not general. Something has been saved. Strange as it may seem, today one who tells the truth receives attention and is believed.
We should feel heartened. However, this manifestation of faith requires, compels us all to examine our consciences. Were we also wrong when it came to the thorny issue of how to convey to our children a moral and sentimental legacy that we consider important? Yes, probably we were wrong. We sinned by omission and by commission. In keeping silent we committed the sin of laziness and of lack of faith in the power of the word; and when we did speak we sinned, often, by adopting and accepting a language that was not ours. As we know, the Resistance had and still has enemies, who, naturally, maneuver so that as little as possible is said about it. But I suspect that this suppression is also achieved, in a more or less conscious manner, by subtler means—that is, by embalming the Resistance before its time, relegating it obsequiously to the noble castle of the History of the Homeland.
Now, I’m afraid that we have contributed to this embalming process as well. To describe and convey the events of yesterday we too often adopted a rhetorical, hagiographic, and therefore vague language. Excellent arguments can be made for and against the appropriateness of calling the Resistance the Secondo Risorgimento,1 but I ask myself if it is right to underline this aspect of it, or if it is not preferable to insist on the fact that the Resistance continues, or at least should continue, because its objectives have been achieved only in part. By linking the Resistance with the Risorgimento we end up asserting an ideal continuity between the events of 1848, 1860, 1918, and 1945, to the detriment of the far more critical and obvious continuity from 1945 to today. The break of the Fascist decades loses its prominence.
In conclusion, I believe that if we wish our children to feel these concerns, and therefore feel that they are our children, we should speak to them a little less of glory and victory, of heroism and sacred ground, and a little more of that hard, dangerous, and thankless life, the daily strain, the days of hope and of despair, of our comrades who died doing their duty in silence, of the participation of the populace (but not all of it), of the errors made and those avoided, of the conspiratorial and military experience painfully acquired, through mistakes that were paid in human lives, of the hard-won (and not spontaneous, not always perfect) agreement among the supporters of different parties.
Only in this way will the young feel our most recent history as a fabric of human events and not as a “pensum” to add to the many others of the ministry’s programs.
Il Giornale dei Genitori 2, no. 1 (January 15, 1960)
1. The Risorgimento is the nineteenth-century social and political movement that led to Italian unification, in 1861.
Bear Meat
Evenings spent in a mountain hut are among the most sublime and intense that life holds. I mean a real hut, the kind where you seek shelter after a four-, five-, or six-hour climb and where you find few so-called comforts.
Not that chairlifts and cable cars and such comforts are to be looked down on: they are, on the contrary, logical achievements of our society, which is what it is, and must be either accepted or rejected in its totality—and those who are able to reject it are few. But the advent of the chairlift puts an end to a valuable process of natural selection, by which those who reach the hut are sure to find, in its pure state, a small sample of a little-known human subspecies.
Its members are people who don’t speak much and of whom others don’t speak at all, so there is no mention of them in the literature of most countries, and they should not be confused with other, vaguely similar types, who do speak, and of whom others speak: hot shots, extreme climbers, members of famous international expeditions, professionals, etc. All worthy people, but this story is not about them.
I arrived at the hut at sunset, and I was very tired. I stayed outside, on the wooden porch, to consider the frozen mystery of the seracs at my feet until everything had vanished behind silent ghosts of fog, and then I went in.
Inside it was almost dark. By the glow of a small carbide lamp one could distinguish a dozen human figures gathered around three or four tables. I sat down at a table and opened my backpack. Across from me was a tall, large man, middle-aged, with whom I exchanged a few words about the weather and our plans for the following day. This is a standard conversation, like the classic opening moves of a chess game, where what matters, much more than what one says (which is brief and obvious), is the tone in which one says it.
We found ourselves in agreement on the fact that the weather was uncertain (it always is in the mountains; when it isn’t, it is nonetheless declared to be so, for obvious magical reasons), and on the forecast for the following day. A little later, two lanky men in their twenties entered, with long beards and ravenous eyes. They had arrived from another valley and were attempting an intricate series of crossings. They sat down at our table.
After we had eaten, we started to drink. Wine is a more complex substance than one might think, and, above two thousand meters and at close to 0 degrees centigrade, it displays interesting behavioral anomalies. It changes flavor, loses the bite of alcohol, and regains the mildness of the grape from which it comes. One can take it in heavy doses without any undesired effects. In fact, it eliminates fatigue, loosens and warms the limbs, and leads to a fanciful mood. It is no longer a luxury or a vice but a metabolic necessity, like water on the plains. It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?
Once we started drinking, the conversation at our table became much less impersonal. Each of us spoke of our initiation, and we established with some surprise that we had all begun our mountaineering careers with an extremely foolish act.
As it turned out, the best of these foolish acts, and the best told, was the one recounted by the tall, large man.
“I was fifteen. A friend of mine, Saverio, was also fifteen. Another, Luigi, was seventeen. We had gone out a number of times together, to fifteen hundred, two thousand meters, without a plan or a destination; I should say, without a conscious destination, but, in essence, impelled by a subtle desire to get ourselves in trouble and then get ourselves out of it. Nothing easier: it’s enough to go straight up the mountain following your nose, in any direction, by the steepest slope, then struggle for a quarter of an hour across the mountainside, and then try to get back down. Of course, one also learns a few things in this process: that pine trees, when they’re available, make safe and friendly supports, especially during the descent, and that scree is hard to climb but easy to descend by. One learns different types of grasses, those peculiar terraced slopes, and the art of losing the trail and finding it again. Above all, one learns the limits, both quantitative and qualitative, of one’s own strength: when the breath, the legs, and the heart give out, and when, so to speak, it’s psychosomatic. It’s a great school—I wish I had attended it longer.
“September came and we felt like lions. Luigi said, ‘The G. Pass is twenty-four hundred meters high—eleven hundred vertical meters from here. According to the guidebooks, it should be a three-hour climb, but it’ll take us barely two. There’s nothing difficult, just scree and small rocks—no snow this time of year. On the other side, there’s a six-hundred-meter descent, one hour, and we arrive at the border-patrol hut; you can se
e it clearly here on the map. Then an easy return along the road. We’ll leave at two today; at four we’re at the top, at five at the hut, and home in time for dinner.’
“That was Luigi. We met at his house at two, with our good boots on our feet, but no backpacks, no rope (about whose use none of us had any real notion anyway; but we knew—having studied the Alpine Club guidebook—the theory of the double rope, the respective merits of hemp and manila, the technique for rescuing someone from a crevasse, and other fine points), a hundred grams of chocolate in our pockets, and (may God forgive us!) wearing shorts.
“We progressed well uphill. First, through a pine forest, spurning the mule trail and the shortcuts, and sampling the blueberries; then through an alluvial cone, wasting precious energy. It was the first time we had set off without grownups getting on our nerves with their advice, without uncles, without experts. We were drunk on our freedom, and because of this we delighted in the dirtiest high school slang, accompanied with lofty quotations from the classics, for example: