by Primo Levi
However, despite these many adverse circumstances, in almost all the major camps there was resistance. It was easier in the camps where the political prisoners were more numerous and better organized—such as Mauthausen and Buchenwald, where powerful clandestine defense committees were set up, in which the principal parties and nationalities of the camp were represented.
It would not have been realistic to propose impossible or premature undertakings, like armed resistance or liberation of the camp from the inside. The actions of the committees were directed toward more immediate and concrete aims. Men of solid political loyalty were placed in key posts in the administration of the camp, the infirmary, the work office, the secretary’s office, the supply office. Thus it was possible to limit, or at least control, the decimation of those who were most useful politically; to save Allied parachutists, and eliminate many spies and collaborators; to carry out cautious actions of sabotage in the workshops and at the worksites, especially in the weapons factories; to listen to and spread news of the war at the front by means of secretly built radios; to maintain relations with other camps. Finally, and this was perhaps the activity most immediately useful and beneficial to fellow prisoners, it was possible to eliminate or mitigate the grave injustices and thefts in the distribution of food rations, a fundamental requirement for survival.
Nor should the morale factor be underestimated. The perception, the rumor that inside the barbed wire a friendly presence survived—a power mysterious and undefined but different from and opposed to National Socialism—was extraordinarily valuable to all the prisoners, and helped sustain their will to live.
In many cases, a real, active resistance was prepared for, which would be activated by the approach of the front and would block possible attempts by the Germans to annihilate the camp and its prisoners, or to deport them en masse toward the center of the country. In Buchenwald and Mauthausen rudimentary weapons were built with explosives pilfered from the worksites. However, in the general collapse that everywhere accompanied the German retreat, these emergency squads rarely had the opportunity to act.
Things went differently in the camps that are properly given the name (coined by the Germans themselves) Vernichtungslager, annihilation camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór. Prisoners entered these places of horror only to die; the average survival time was no more than three months. The population of these camps, continuously renewed, consisted primarily of Jews, who arrived already exhausted by months or years of ghetto life, hunger, desperate escapes, a precarious existence at the margins of human society. For the most part, these were entire families, including women, children, the old, and the sick. After a cursory selection, four-fifths of every convoy ended up in the mass-extermination machines a few hours after arriving. Only the younger men and women deemed fit for work entered the camp. However, after a few weeks exhaustion, hunger, illnesses, and beatings got the better even of those who were strongest and most determined to resist.
It’s understandable that in this wretched mass of humanity the will to resist took the form only of individual and occasional efforts—principally, on the initiative of young members of Zionist organizations. But in the death camps, too, the internal structure determined by the Germans, based on the corruption and collaboration of “chosen” functionary-prisoners, became, paradoxically, the vehicle and matrix of resistance. Mixed in with the oppressed, and the many docile and despicable instruments of oppression, men of superhuman courage acted in the shadows. At times, they succeeded in impeding and obstructing the German death machine, but most of all they succeeded in saving human dignity in the Lagers. They collected and hid documentary evidence, sometimes even photographs, taken with extreme audacity under the eyes of the SS, diaries, lists of names, copies of archival documents, that were intended to transmit (as in fact they did) to posterity an authentic image of the concentration-camp world.
The most important episode of active rebellion against Nazi authority in the extermination camps was the uprising of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. It was a tragic and sinister episode, whose exact details will never be known, because all the participants were exterminated. Beneath the reticent name of Sonderkommando (Special Squad) a monstrous institution was concealed: a group of prisoners assigned to the gas chambers and cremation ovens. It consisted of between 900 and 1000 strong young men of various nationalities who had been given the choice of serving in the death factories or dying. Their horrendous work was compensated with exceptional treatment (abundant food, tobacco, alcohol, good clothes and shoes). Yet everyone knew, and they knew it themselves, that within two or three months they, in turn, would be massacred and replaced by new men.
When the deportation of 100,000 Hungarian Jews came to an end, news spread in the camp that the systematic massacres would be suspended. The men of the Sonderkommando knew that this meant their immediate death; the Germans certainly wouldn’t leave such witnesses alive. When the Germans, on some pretext, removed and killed the first 160 men of the Kommando, the revolt, which was supposed to be coordinated with Polish partisans in the surrounding forests, flared up prematurely, under the pressure of necessity. The remaining men attacked the SS garrison with desperate audacity, armed with a single machine gun, a few pistols, and rudimentary hand grenades made with glass bottles. One of the four cremation ovens was set on fire, and it exploded. A section of the barbed-wire fence through which ran a high-tension electric current was knocked down. Only a few dozen insurgents were able to leave the camp alive. They found refuge on a Polish farm, were reported, captured again, and killed.
In this desperate fight at the doors of the cremation ovens only a dozen SS men were killed. Nevertheless, the insurrection, which immediately became known in all the camps of the Auschwitz district, was an event of enormous importance. It revealed a gap, a crack in the steely edifice of the concentration camp; it proved that the Germans were not invincible. For the Germans themselves it must have sounded an alarm, because a few days later the camp command at Auschwitz started to dismantle and blow up the workshops of death that alone had swallowed more human lives than all the other concentration camps combined. Maybe they acted in the absurd hope of destroying all evidence of the greatest crime ever committed in the entire, and yet so bloody, history of mankind.
In Il telefono della Resistenza, a booklet published by the telephone company
STIPEL on the twentieth anniversary of the Resistance (Turin: 1965)
The Engineer-Philologist and
His Forbidden Dreams
It’s natural, and in general fitting, that the writer of science fiction grows in a different, more specialized soil than the plain writer; if that’s not the case, he has to gather material, as every serious writer does or should do. Isaac Asimov’s brief preface to the collection Dodici volte domani,1 which appeared recently in Italy, seems to me exemplary in this way; exemplary in the opposite sense is the conspicuous failure of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Physicists, due precisely to a lack of research. But Roberto Vacca has no need to gather information: given the man, it seems obvious that he moves in a literary terrain that is his alone, and the only one that can give him all the freedom of expression he needs.
A militant engineer, a university teacher, polyglot by nature and by family tradition, intensely dynamic, thoroughly Roman but at home in America and elsewhere, a good mathematician and physicist and a humanist, Vacca is integrated in the best sense of the word: the world of today flows around him, variegated and friendly, full of suggestions and temptations, without inspiring distrust or anguish. His science fiction dreams are never nightmares, not even when he would like them to be: the not forgotten Robot and the Minotaur (1963), the Perengane Chronicles, and the recent Esempi di avvenire (Examples of the Future) are his portrait and his autobiography.
They depict (something unusual in our literature) a man at the peak of his strength, curious, extremely intelligent, often ingenuous, not neurotic, not abstract, engag
ed in a respectful dispute with the marvels and monsters of technological civilization. The “impious cynicism” on which he prides himself should shock no one: in spite of himself, even where he is most fiercely prepared to prove that man is a very complex sequential machine, he displays a joyous force, a youthful love of the world, that up to now no machine has produced.
The profound knowledge of cybernetics and neurology that Vacca demonstrates is both the value and the limitation of these stories. Not all are accessible to all: the most serious and conceptual, especially the essays, leave the average reader perplexed and therefore cold; Vacca demands that he find his way among alphanumeric codes and memories of the “pushdown” type. It seems to me that this excess of technicalities and, elsewhere, of calques from slang and American colloquialisms is not always useful, and reveals a certain amount of ingenuous exhibitionism. The same could be said of the complacency with which far too often details of time and place are accumulated, in open contradiction to the “prohibition against useless discourse,” and yet this nevertheless leads to one of the most amusing sketches.
Elsewhere, instead, Vacca conforms to that “prohibition” with extremist zeal: it’s really a pity that so many splendid ideas appear here as flashes, just as they were conceived—I mean, as rapid outlines, “informal stories,” as if there were others that the author could develop in a more worthwhile manner. For example: the State of Israel that claims from the entire Christian world the royalties (including arrears) on all editions, translations, and adaptations of the Bible (“private literary property”); the proposal to use bank deposits during the hours when the banks are closed (“credit extension”); the metaphysical “controversy” between red and white blood cells (“We feel we have free will, and you?”), which is criminally cut off after half a page, as if such inventions could be found at every crossroads.
In conclusion, Vacca sometimes appears to have trouble finding an equilibrium between verbosity and shorthand, but when he finds it, his privileged condition as a doctus utriusque juris, as a scientist doubling as a philologist—that is, a modern minotaur—allows him to write stories of a high quality, at once fantastic and plausible. This is, after all, the highest praise that can be given to practitioners of this literary genre. Stories like “The Neglected Senses,” “Two in a Single Flesh,” and the exemplary “Incommunicability 1,” which descends in spirals, like the vulture, toward its unexpected and chilling conclusion, kindle the imagination and make us think: they are an entertainment accessible to all, and yet at a high level.
Il Giorno, January 5, 1966
1. Dodici volte domani (Twelve Times Tomorrow) is a collection of Asimov stories, mainly from Nightfall and Other Stories, published by Mondadori and not available in English.
Foreword to The Song of the Murdered Jewish People
by Yitzhak Katzenelson
No reader can help stopping, in perturbation and reverence, at the “singing” of Yitzhak Katzenelson. It can’t be compared with any other work in the history of any literature: it’s the voice of a man about to die, one among hundreds of thousands who are about to die, and horrifically aware of his individual fate and the fate of his people. Not a distant fate but one that is imminent. Katzenelson writes and sings from the midst of the slaughter, German death is circling around him, it has already completed more than half of the massacre, but the measure is not yet full, there is no reprieve, there is no breathing space; it’s about to strike again and again, down to the last old man and woman and the last child, and the end of everything.
That in these conditions and in this state of mind the man who is about to die sings, and reveals that he is a poet, leaves us trembling with hatred and with exaltation at the same time. These are necessary poems, if ever there were any. I mean, if doubt so often seizes us, as we read a page, whether the things written should or should not be written, or could or could not be written in another way, here every doubt is silent.
Beyond the horror that grips us every time in the face of this testimony, even though it is known, we cannot repress a gesture of admiring astonishment at the purity and force of the voice.
It’s the voice of a cultural universe that was unknown in Italy and today has disappeared: the voice of a people that weeps for itself. The verses in which Katzenelson’s anguish becomes sharper and more concrete are precisely those in which the cultural world of Eastern Judaism lives again: “Rising over the Lithuanian and Polish towns the sun will never find / A radiant old Jew at the window reciting psalms . . . / the market is dead . . . / Never more will a Jew grace the market, and give it life.” This culture, whose age-old tool is the Yiddish language, is frankly popular: its verbal vein has always been more vivid than the written and has always nourished it. Into it flowed an extraordinary musical sensibility, whose roots were in the village festivals described by Babel and painted by Chagall, and which led to the finest modern schools of practitioners; into it flowed a marvelously dynamic theater tradition, which Hitler’s massacres, blow by blow, cut off. It’s a varied, lively literature, richly spiritual, with a sad humor, and a humble and strong will to life, immortalized in the small masterpiece Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman.
Katzenelson, too, like the majority of Yiddish writers, musicians, and dramatists, is a poet of the people; but he emerges and draws nourishment from a people unique in Europe and the world, a people in whom culture (whose particular culture) is not a privilege of a class or a caste but belongs to all, and in whom the book has replaced Nature as the preeminent source of every mystical, philosophical, or poetic intuition. Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised to find in Katzenelson’s desperate and sometimes crude lament the echo of eternal words, the legitimate continuation and inheritance of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Job, nor should we be surprised that he himself is proud and conscious of it: “In every Jew cries a Jeremiah, a desperate Job.”
Precisely because of this accepted and proclaimed Biblical inheritance, it seems to me that the best poem in this collection is the one entitled “To the Heavens”: it’s Job who speaks here, a modern Job, truer and more complete than the ancient, wounded to death in the things most dear to him, his family and his faith—now bereaved (why? why?) of both. But voices were raised in response to the eternal questions of the ancient Job, the cautious and respectful voices of the “miserable comforters,” the sovereign voice of the Lord; no one responds to the questions of the modern Job, no voice comes out of the whirlwind. There is no longer a God in the womb of the “null and void” heavens, which witness impassively the completion of the senseless massacre, the end of the people who created God.
Foreword to Yitzhak Katzenelson, Il canto del popolo ebraico massacrato (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People), edited by F. Beltrami Segré (Turin: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, 1966)
Note on the Dramatized Version of
If This Is a Man
Whoever wrote that “books have a destiny of their own” knew exactly what he was saying—one has only to call on memory for a moment, and strange and unpredictable itineraries immediately crowd in. Books illustrious at birth, beloved for decades, that now elicit only the interest of a few specialized readers. Books so heavy with prophecy or satire or threats that they are rejected by their first readers and reduced, perhaps for centuries, to reading for children. Others that bloomed before their time, and were incomprehensible to contemporary critics, yet are popular and famous today. Still others that, loaded with an indeterminate explosive charge, are obscure to this day, but whose sinister ticking, like that of a time bomb, can be perceived from the outside.
I don’t know (no writer ever can know) how much If This Is a Man is worth and which of the above fates awaits it in the near and distant future; but I think I can say that, up to now, it has had a curious and instructive life.
The book deals with the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and had its origin in Auschwitz. The Lager was not a place where it was easy to reflect on one’s experiences, much less capture them i
n written form. In fact, any kind of personal possession was prohibited, or, rather, unthinkable: all the more reason that the possession of a pencil and a piece of paper was impossible, and would have represented an extreme danger anyway, an absurd as well as useless act of daring. And yet for many of us the hope of surviving merged with another, more precise hope. We hoped not to live and tell but to live to tell. It is the dream in all eras of those who return, of the strong man and the coward, of the poet and the simple soul, of Ulysses and Ruzante.1
But it was, at the same time, a more profound and deliberate need—the harsher the experience, the stronger the urge to convey it. It was the same need that compelled the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto to dedicate part of their last desperate energies to writing down the drama they were living and entrusting it to a secure hiding place so that it could become history; and in fact it became history, and would not have without their superhuman diligence. It was clear to all of us that the things we had seen needed to be told, that they could not be forgotten. If it was impossible to write in the Lager, it became possible, on the other hand, for those few lucky enough to survive to communicate with the world. All of us survivors, as soon as we got home, were transformed into indefatigable, imperious, maniacal narrators. We didn’t all say the same things, because each of us had lived through imprisonment in our own way, but no one knew how to talk about anything else or could tolerate that anything else should be talked about. I, too, started to talk even before I had satisfied my hunger, and I am still not finished. I became like the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s ballad, who grabs the wedding guests on the street to inflict on them his sinister story of evil and ghosts. In a few days, I had repeated my stories dozens of times, to friends, enemies, and strangers. I then noticed that the tale was crystallizing into a fixed, constant shape; I needed only pen, paper, and time to write it. Time, so scarce today, grew around me like magic. I wrote at night, on the train, in the factory canteen, in the factory itself, amid the roar of the machines. I wrote hurriedly, without hesitation and without order. I wasn’t conscious of writing a book, I wasn’t conscious of preparing a statement, I was a thousand miles from any kind of literary scruple, and it seemed to me that these things wrote themselves. In a few months my work was finished; driven by the urgency of my memories, I had written the seventeen chapters almost in reverse order—that is, starting from the last one. Then I wrote the preface and finally I added an epigraph, a poem that had already been dancing in my head in Auschwitz and that I wrote a few days after my return.