by Primo Levi
I don’t know if or to what degree that verdict is valid; certainly it constitutes only one aspect of the book, and not one of the most interesting. Tomatis is a young Turinese pathologist, and his diary is not taken up by argument, or at least not by that one, but springs from another kind of suffering, loftier and more solemn than frustration, and from a conflict broader than that between Italian and American universities. The Laboratory is an important document because it penetrates to the heart of the modern conflict between “the two cultures”: this is its true polemical charge, of which the other, mentioned above, is only the surface wave. Its very publication has a precise meaning: a young scientist entrusts to paper, recklessly, his anxieties, hopes, illusions, and disappointments as a researcher transplanted to Chicago, and the book is made; rough and sometimes slack, but vivid and worthy, accessible to all, full of ideas to ponder; debatable, but never abstract, never vulgar, never obvious. The phenomenon is unusual, I would say revolutionary: it reproduces, with greater seriousness and purity of intention, the same sort of upheaval as pop art.
This could happen, evidently, because the researcher Tomatis is an intelligent and open-minded man, brought up on good reading, and principally honest. He knows—in fact, he encounters every day—“the effort it costs to be rigorous and strict”: the reading of his diary guides us to the discovery of that very demanding, painful honesty of the researcher, whose ambition is exposed to the most violent temptations, whose conscience must resist the slightest indulgences (see for example the discussion with Lopez. Since honesty is often frustrated, the words of Ecclesiastes cited here acquire new strength: “For in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.” That Ecclesiastes is dear to Tomatis should not surprise us: failure, error, and the resulting acute sense of the void are an integral part of the life of the man who is seeking. They are inevitable, his daily bread. The researcher is in the situation of one who, in roulette, bets obstinately on a single number. If he wins, the jackpot is large, but how many times does he win? The recurring, necessary defeat does not make up for the rare victories; it burns up days and years, consumes youth. Why fight, then? To “rescue mankind” from the scourge of cancer? The latter purpose does not seem to be the source from which Tomatis draws the large dose of energy he needs for his work. The human race with its sufferings is not forgotten, but it’s distant, remote from the laboratory environment, glass and metal, electron microscopes and air-conditioning. What moves him is something else—a lucid, constant obsession, noble in itself, reward and end in itself, rooted in the essence of man. From these pages the condition of the researcher appears to us as typical of mankind, symbolic of its being and its becoming.
The text is not terribly refined—it’s often heavy and digressive—but there is a constant awareness of that tension, of that belonging to the sole genuine human aristocracy, even if it’s expressed only occasionally, in strong, concise observations that illuminate like flashes the pages of gray reporting. “Not to know some side of the problem . . . makes me feel a sense of guilt, providing a powerful stimulus to try to make up for my ignorance”; “It’s not the moment, it’s never the moment to be distracted, lazy, and indolent.” From this awareness arises his intransigence, his anger against the “blasphemers,” the merchants in the temple; this is also the source of the fundamental power and value of his writing. This laboratory diary, apparently dry, stripped of every rhetorical or dramatic artifice, is not “beautiful” in the ordinary sense, but it’s important, and much literature seems pale in comparison. It documents a courageous way of living and a persistent way of working, against enemies of every sort: against the elusive secret of living matter, against the incomprehension and the laziness (which appears cynical to Tomatis) of his colleagues in Italy and in America, against one’s own weariness, one’s own haste and one’s own ambition. It brought to mind Aschenbach’s statement, in Death in Venice, that everything great that exists owes its existence to “als ein Trotzdem,” an “in spite of,” because it originated as a resistance to suffering, to poverty, to weakness, to passion, to a thousand obstacles: in a word, more than a scientific document, this is a moral document.
Il Giorno, March 31, 1965
Preface to the School Edition of The Truce
I was born in Turin in 1919, to a moderately well-off family of Piedmontese Jews. There are many different ways of being a Jew: from strict compliance with religious rules and traditions to total indifference, and to acceptance of the majority’s way of thinking and living. For me, being Jewish meant something vague, and not really problematic: it meant a tranquil awareness of the ancient history of my people, a sort of benevolent incredulity in the face of religion, a pronounced tendency toward the world of books and abstract discussions. For the rest, I didn’t feel any different from my Christian friends and schoolmates and was at ease in their company.
As a boy, I wanted to follow many different paths. From the age of twelve to the age of fourteen, I wanted to become a linguist, from fourteen to seventeen an astronomer. At the age of eighteen, I enrolled in the university, to take a degree in chemistry. I certainly would not have thought of becoming a writer had I not been led there by a long chain of events. It is easy to infer from the year of my birth that I grew up and finished my studies during the Fascist era. I didn’t fully comprehend the oppressive nature of fascism, but I felt an indefinable irritation with and aversion toward the more vulgar and illogical aspects of so-called Fascist culture. In 1938 the racial laws were passed in Italy. They were not like the severe measures that, in Germany, were enveloping the Jewish minority, along with other “enemies of the state,” in a deadly net. However, they separated the Jews from the rest of the population and rekindled in our minds sad memories of the ghettos, which had vanished only ninety years before. Absurd, unjust, and oppressive laws followed. Every day the newspapers were full of lies and insults. It was an inversion, a ridiculous and cruel reversal of the truth. The Jews had “always” been not only enemies of the people and the state but also foes of justice and morality, destroyers of science and art, the woodworms whose hidden activity undermines the foundations of the social edifice; they were to blame for the now imminent conflict. Yet this persistent campaign of defamation caused a reaction in the conscience of Italians, who had been put to sleep by fifteen years of fascism: it created a distinct demarcation line between those who believed and obeyed and those who refused loyalty and obedience, and it opened people’s eyes (not just the Jews’) to the true nature of fascism and Nazism.
When, in the summer of 1943, fascism fell, I felt joy and enthusiasm for what seemed to me a spontaneous act of historical justice, but I was by no means prepared for the hard struggle that followed, and had to follow. I felt undecided, inexperienced, and the prospect of combat frightened me. Nevertheless, I went up into the mountains and joined a group of partisans from the Justice and Liberty movement, a newly formed group, as yet unarmed and very poor. A few weeks later, we were trapped in a Fascist Militia roundup. Many managed to escape; I and a few others were captured. When I was interrogated, I admitted that I was Jewish, in the hope that the Fascists would merely send me to a concentration camp in Italy, or to prison. Instead, in February 1944, I was handed over to the Germans.
In those years, being in German hands meant, for any Jew, a terrible destiny. Hatred of the Jews, which had been latent for centuries in Germany and in the rest of Europe, had found in Hitler its prophet and advocate; and Hitler had found, in millions of Germans, an army of obedient and willing collaborators. For years already, Jews had been excluded from the life of the country, driven to hunger, to confinement in new ghettos, to forced labor for the war industry. But around 1943, secretly, an unprecedented program began to be implemented, so horrible that, even in official documents, it was mentioned only in sinister allusions: “appropriate treatment,” “final solution to the Jewish problem.” This program was simple and terrifying: all the Jews w
ere to be eliminated. All of them, without exception: even the old, the sick, the children; all the millions of Jews who, with the successive invasions in Europe, now found themselves in the hands of the Nazis—German, Polish, French, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Greek, Yugoslav Jews. But to silently kill millions of people, even if they are helpless, is not an easy undertaking, and here the celebrated German technical and organizational ability came into play. Special structures were built, new machines that had never been thought of before: real death factories, capable of exterminating thousands of human beings in an hour with toxic gasses—like mice in cargo holds—and incinerating their corpses. The biggest of these centers of destruction was called Auschwitz. Every day three, five, ten trains loaded with prisoners would arrive at Auschwitz from all the corners of Europe. Within a few hours of arrival the work of extermination would be complete. Very few were saved from an immediate end: only the younger and stronger men and women, who were sent by the Germans to labor camps. But in these camps, too, death was always lurking, death from hunger or cold, or from illnesses caused by hunger, cold, and exhaustion. Furthermore, all those who were no longer considered able to work were immediately sent to the extermination camps.
The Germans deported me to Auschwitz. I was deemed suitable for heavy work and was sent to the labor camp of Buna-Monowitz; all the prisoners in this camp worked in a huge chemical factory. I lived in Buna for a year, during which three-quarters of my companions died, to be immediately replaced by new prisoners—these, too, destined to die. I survived thanks to an unusual series of fortunate occurences. I didn’t get sick, I received food from a “free” Italian laborer, in the last months I was able to put my training as a chemist to use and work in a laboratory inside the huge factory, rather than outside, in the mud and snow. In addition, I knew a little German and I forced myself to learn this language as quickly and as well as possible, because I had understood that it was essential if I was to find my bearings in the ruthless and complicated world of the concentration camp.
The camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945, but our hope for a rapid return to Italy was frustrated. For reasons that are unclear—perhaps simply as a consequence of the extreme chaos that the war had left in its wake in the whole of Europe, and especially in Russia—our return home did not take place until October, and it followed a very long, unpredictable, and illogical route through Poland, Ukraine, White Russia, Romania, Hungary, and Austria.
Back in Italy, I had to look for work immediately, to support myself and my family. However, my uncommon experience, the infernal world of Auschwitz, the miraculous rescue, the words and faces of my companions who had died or survived, the freedom regained, the exhausting and astonishing return trip, all this pressed inside me with urgency. I needed to tell these stories: it seemed important that they not remain lying inside me, like a nightmare; they should be known, not just to my friends but to everyone, to the broadest possible audience. As soon as I could, I started to write, furiously and at the same time methodically, almost obsessed by the fear that even one of my memories might be forgotten. Thus my first book was born. If This Is a Man describes my year of captivity in Auschwitz; I wrote it with no effort, and with no problems, with profound satisfaction and relief, and with the impression that these things “wrote themselves,” somehow finding a direct path from my memory to the page.
If This Is a Man was a success, but not to the extent that it made me feel like a “writer” in full. I had said what I had to say, I had returned to my profession of chemist, I didn’t feel that need anymore, that necessity to tell, which had forced me to pick up my pen. However, this new experience—so foreign to the world of my daily job—the experience of writing, of creating from nothing, of looking for and finding the right word, of creating a balanced and expressive sentence, was too intense and joyful for me not to want to try again. I still had a lot to tell, not terrible, fateful, and urgent things but happy and sad adventures, vast and strange countries, the swashbuckling exploits of my countless travel companions, the multicolored and fascinating maelstrom that was postwar Europe, intoxicated by freedom and yet troubled by the fear of a new war.
These are the subjects of The Truce, the book of my long return journey. I think it is easy to see that it was written by a different man, not just older by fifteen years but more serene and tranquil, more attentive to the texture of a sentence, more aware—in short, more of a writer in both the good and the not so good senses of the word. Yet I cannot consider myself a writer, even today. I am satisfied with my double condition, and conscious of its advantages. It allows me to write only when I want to, and it doesn’t oblige me to write for a living. On the other hand, my daily profession has taught me (and continues to teach me) many things that every writer needs to know. It educated me to concreteness and precision, to the habit of “weighing” each word with the same scrupulousness as someone carrying out a quantitative analysis. Above all, it accustomed me to that state of mind we call objectivity; that is to say, to acknowledgment of the intrinsic dignity not just of people but of things, and to their truth, which needs to be recognized and not distorted if one does not want to fall into vagueness, emptiness, and falsehood.
Preface to The Truce, Letture per la Scuola Media (Readings for Middle School) series (Turin: Einaudi, 1965)
Resistance in the Lagers
It’s hard to perceive the true significance and weight of a historical event while it is taking place, or even a few years after its conclusion: just when the traces are freshest, the wounds most painful, the voices of witnesses and survivors most numerous and agitated—this is exactly when it is arduous, almost impossible, to proceed with the necessary objectivity in the patient and thorough work of historical reconstruction. Time is needed for the full picture to take shape, for the distortions and errors to be erased—even in this epoch of ours, in which the pace of history seems to accelerate with each passing year.
Only in the past few years has the grim phenomenon of slaughter and slavery—restored to modernity in the concentration camps—found a historical perspective in the collective conscience of Europe and the world. Only now is it possible to evaluate its importance and to measure its dangers, to understand what would have been the fate of our civilization if Hitler had prevailed. If this not preposterous hypothesis had come true, we would live in a monstrous world, a world divided, between masters and slaves: of masters above all laws and slaves deprived of all rights, subjected to all sorts of abuses, condemned to an existence of grueling work, of ignorance, of isolation, and of hunger.
In fact, the condition of the prisoner in the modern concentration camp re-creates (dare we write “re-created”?) an intensified, aggravated condition of slavery. The master wants to turn his slave into a contemptible individual, one who knows himself to be, who feels, contemptible: an individual who not only has lost his freedom but has forgotten it, no longer feels the need for it, and maybe not even the desire. Usually the master succeeds; and then superimposed on material oppression is a bleaker victory, the victory of complete oppression, in the flesh and in the spirit, the destruction of the man as such.
The fact that the seed of European resistance against fascism took root in spite of this inhuman situation, within this discordant, disconnected jumble of humanity, exhausted by hardships and periodic massacres, is extremely important and unprecedented. It deserves careful study, so that we may clarify its limits and its significance. Resistance in the concentration camps, like that which developed in the Polish ghettos, should be counted among the greatest victories of the spirit over the flesh, among the most heroic endeavors in human history—which are also the most desperate, the ones where people fight without any support, where no hope of victory sustains the fighters or renews their strength.
The organization of resistance in the concentration camps was difficult not just because of the constant hunger, the hard work, and the consequent physical exhaustion—there were other, equally grave
obstacles.
It was impossible, or very dangerous, to communicate with the outside world, not only to maintain relations with the centers of resistance that had been set up everywhere in the countries occupied by the Germans but even just to receive news from the outside or send it. Of course, there were no weapons, nor was there the money or the means to procure them. Every camp had a branch of the dreaded Gestapo, disguised under the name “Political Department” or “Work Office”; it relied on the services of numerous spies, chosen from among the prisoners, so that any word, any mention of an organization of defense could lead to accusations and extremely harsh collective reprisals. This atmosphere of suspicion, of mutual distrust, poisoned any attempt at human relations and contributed to the erosion of any will to opposition. Finally, the population of the camps was very diverse. Unsurprisingly, the SS commanders in charge of the concentration camps strove to maintain a permanent Babel of languages and nationalities. But that wasn’t all. We must remember that the prisoners in the camps belonged to three main categories (not to mention many minor ones): political prisoners, Jews, and common criminals.
The last, the so-called green triangles, because of the color of their identification badges, were for the most part hardened German criminals, repeat offenders, who had been removed from prison and offered positions of privilege in the concentration camps. In spite of their unruliness and lack of discipline, in the hands of the SS they turned out to be the most useful tools of oppression, corruption, and espionage, and the most immediate enemies of the political prisoners and the Jews. Significantly, after the defeat of Stalingrad, a large number of the greens were released en masse from the camps and enrolled in the SS fighting units. Since the internal management of the camps was assigned to the prisoners themselves, many camps witnessed a secret power struggle between the greens and the reds (that is, the political prisoners). The reds were strengthened by their conspiratorial experience and their strong anti-Nazi determination, the greens by their better physical condition and by the support of the SS. Self-defense or opposition cells could be established by the other two categories only in those camps where the greens had lost out.