by Primo Levi
Now, fascism did not win: it was swept away, in Italy and in Germany, by the war that it had wanted itself. The two countries rose renewed from the ruins and began a laborious reconstruction: with horror and disbelief the world learned about the “cadaver factories” at Auschwitz, Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and at the same time felt relief at the thought that the Lager was dead, that it was a monster that belonged to the past, a tragic but unique cataclysm, the fault of a single man, Hitler, and Hitler was dead, and his bloody empire had collapsed with him.
A quarter century has passed, and today we look around and note uneasily that perhaps that relief was premature. No, gas chambers and cremation ovens no longer exist anywhere, but there are concentration camps in Greece, in the Soviet Union, in Vietnam, in Brazil. In almost every country there exist jails, reformatories, psychiatric hospitals, in which, as in Auschwitz, man loses his name and his face, dignity and hope. Above all, fascism is not dead: consolidated in some countries, in others waiting cautiously for revenge, it has not ceased promising the world a New Order. It has never repudiated the Nazi Lagers, even if it often dares to cast doubts on their existence. Books like this one, today, can no longer be read with the serenity with which we study the evidence of past history: as Brecht wrote, “The womb that gave birth to this monster is still fertile.”
For this very reason, and because I don’t believe that the respect owed to the young implies silence on the mistakes of our generation, I gladly agreed to edit a scholastic edition of If This Is a Man. I will be content to know that even just one of the new readers has understood how dangerous the road is that begins with nationalistic fanaticism and the surrender of reason.
Preface to If This Is a Man, Letture per la Scuola Media (Readings for
Middle School) series (Turin: Einaudi, 1973)
Technographers and Technocrats
The energy crisis—highlighting some absurd and crude mistakes of technological society—has brutally drawn in us science fiction writers, because all of us, consciously or not, have colored our stories with prophecy. Were we wrong? how? in quality or in quantity? Everyone noticed long ago that our predecessors and precursors—those who, to be clear, wrote radiant forecasts for the Year 2000 and for magnificent and progressive destinies—were wrong. But we, too, were mistaken, in inventing titanic, tragically glorious catastrophes. We aren’t yet at the end, but its possibility is visible, and it is a petty, sordid, prosaic end, like bankruptcy. Nothing remains for us technographer-prophets but to make amends. To our teachers, to the technocrats of all countries, is left the urgent task of reining in their mad race toward immediate profit, and to use the colossal wealth of knowledge accumulated in the past decades to present humanity with a less precarious and less painful destiny.
Corriere della Sera, January 20, 1974
“A Past We Thought Would Never Return”
If, twenty-nine years ago, when the Lagers were liberated, someone had predicted that the free world, which was about to reabsorb us, would be less than perfect, we wouldn’t have believed it. It would have seemed absurd, a hypothesis so foolish that it could not be taken seriously.
It was a naïve dream, but we all had it: our experience would have appeared utterly senseless, and therefore all the more cruel, the death of our comrades all the more unjust, if we had imagined that the fascism that we fought against—and that had made us into slaves, branded us like beasts—was defeated but not dead, and would be transplanted from country to country. Our condition as prisoners without terms, condemned without trial to an existence of hunger, beatings, cold, and exhaustion, and, in the end, to death by gas, like mice, was in itself so unjust that, we thought, it would be amply sufficient to discredit Nazi-fascism in the eyes of all, to prove its iniquity as theorems prove the truth of geometry: in fact, to make it disappear for generations, perhaps forever.
Only those who did not want to see would not have seen: the proof was so abundant and eloquent that every thinking man would have had to realize that what was called the concentrationary universe—in Nazi Germany and in the occupied and Allied countries—was not at all a marginal and accessory phenomenon but the essence itself of fascism, its crowning achievement, its ultimate and definitive fulfillment. At the cost of repeating things described many times, and attested to today by an impressive mass of documents, I would like to recall the nature and the reach of the Lager phenomenon.
The first concentration camps, around fifty of them, were established as early as 1933, right after Nazism came to power. They were abandoned barracks or factories where the political enemies of Nazism were hastily locked up. The prisoners were subjected to a regime of inhuman torture, at the discretion of the individual commanders; the original purpose was just to spread terror and to cut off every party or movement that attempted to oppose the new regime. But soon order prevailed: of the first “primitive” Lagers only Dachau and Oranienburg survived, and in 1934 they were already institutions intended to last, housing several thousand prisoners. Individual acts of bestiality were replaced by a coldly organized regime of repression and collective suppression.
In 1936–37 the proliferation began. The commanders—all of whom belonged to the SS—had set the example, and groups of prisoners were re-deported to various regions of Germany and then Austria, where, following a well-defined plan, they were surrounded with new barbed wire; Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, and many other camps were established.
In 1939, at the beginning of the war, there were about a hundred Lagers: but, with the swift occupation of Poland, the Third Reich found in its hands, according to Eichmann’s expression, the “biological source of Judaism,” and a second purpose for the Lagers emerged. Maydanek, Treblinka, and then Auschwitz were rapidly set up, and these Lagers were something new, never before seen in the history of humankind. They were no longer a cruel version of jail, where political enemies are made to suffer and die, but reverse factories, where trains arrived every day, packed with human beings, and only the ashes of their bodies, their hair, and the gold of their teeth came out.
After several experiments, the most “profitable” method was found, and the commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, boasts of it in his memoirs: gas chambers, where more than a thousand human beings at a time were killed with hydrogen cyanide, even before they were registered; and cremation ovens, where their bodies were incinerated. Auschwitz alone could destroy ten thousand lives in one day, and up to thirty thousand when necessary.
But the war gave no sign of ending, it devoured men on all fronts, and the labor necessary for the war effort in Germany became increasingly scarce. A conflict was emerging between the SS, who insisted with blind fanaticism that the massacre continue, and the industries, which needed workers. A compromise was reached: the most able-bodied men and women in each convoy would work to exhaustion, the others (the less strong, the old, the children) would leave “by the chimney.” This was the third function that the Lagers could serve, and at the same time it was a model for the New Order that the Nazis and the Fascists wished to impose on Europe. It was a New Order on an “aristocratic” basis: on the one hand, the Master Race, that is, the ruling class, who plan and command, and on the other an immense crowd of slaves, from the Atlantic to the Urals, who work and obey.
It would be the full realization of fascism, of its order, of its hierarchy: the consecration of privilege, of non-equality, of non-freedom. I don’t believe that gas chambers and cremation ovens exist anywhere in the world today, but one can’t read without apprehension that the first concern of the colonels in Greece, and of the generals in Chile, was the establishment of big concentration camps, in Yaros and in Dawson, respectively; and today in almost every country there are jails, reformatories, hospitals, in which, as in Auschwitz, man often loses his name and his face, dignity and hope.
The experience of the past, for its inherent crudeness, has turned us into accusers rather than judges: but it is for us a subject of constant meditation and horror, to
see the seeds of fascism take root in the same countries (not in the people) to which the world owes the defeat of Nazi-fascism. There are still, in the Soviet Union, labor camps whose inmates leave humiliated and broken. Indiscriminate bombing has returned in Vietnam, torture is being practiced in all the countries of South America that have puppet governments supported by the United States.
Every era has its fascism; the warning signs can be seen wherever the concentration of power denies a citizen the opportunity and the capacity to express and carry out his will. There are many ways of arriving at this point—not necessarily through the terror of police intimidation but also by censoring and distorting information, polluting justice, paralyzing schools, disseminating in many subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned supreme, and where the security of the privileged few rested on the forced labor and forced silence of the many.
Corriere della Sera, May 8, 1974
Foreword to Two Empty Rooms by Edith Bruck
Edith Bruck, the daughter of a “poor Jew,” who wandered in many countries until she landed in Italy, left us in her previous books (and particularly in Who Loves You Like This) passionate and unforgettable testimony of her descent into hell. She is among the few survivors of the Holocaust, as it is called today, by antonomasia: among those who, like Job’s messengers, escaped to tell.
The three long stories in this collection also fall under the heading of the Holocaust. They are transparently autobiographical, and this is a necessity, because the theme of the slaughter does not lend itself to elaboration and fiction: the few novels that have been published on the subject are detestable, and one reads them with disgust.
The three stories together constitute testimony about the ultimate effect of the massacre: a further dispersion, an uprooting that can’t be remedied. The three female figures, against three different backdrops—a native village in Hungary revisited; a lesser America, crude and materialistic; a ship going to Israel—are united by this theme, which pervades all the states of mind and all the dialogue: lost identity, torn-up roots.
In this regard, the first story is exemplary: nothing here is idealized, nothing is simplified—the return from nothingness to the small town, parochial and gossipy, little by little becomes a chorus of a hundred different voices in which before and after, gratitude and contempt, jealousy and compassion alternate.
By now, the author shows an admirable mastery of our language, so the story flows clear and unimpeded. For someone who wrote about the Lager with the native vigor of the wounded creature, it is moving to discover here the incurable sadness of one who closes accounts and doesn’t resign herself to emptiness.
Foreword to Edith Bruck, Due stanze vuote (Two Empty Rooms) (Venice: Marsilio, 1974)
This Was Auschwitz
There were never many of us. We were a few hundred, out of too many thousands deported, who brought back to Italy, and displayed to the speechless astonishment of our loved ones (those of us who still had any), the light blue number of Auschwitz tattooed on our left arms. So it was true what Radio London had said; it was true what Louis Aragon had written, word for word, “Marqué comme un bétail, et comme un bétail à la boucherie.”1
We are now reduced to a few dozen; maybe we are too few to be heard, and, besides, we often have the impression of being troublesome narrators. At times, even, a curiously symbolic dream that haunted our nights of captivity comes true before our eyes: our interlocutor does not listen, does not understand, gets distracted, goes away and leaves us alone. And yet we must tell the story: it is our duty toward our companions who did not return, and it is a task that gives meaning to our survival. It happened (though not through any merit of ours) that we lived a fundamental experience, and learned some things about Man that we feel compelled to expose.
We found out that man is domineering; he has remained so, in spite of millennia of laws and courts of law. Many social systems propose to curb this urge toward injustice and abuse of power; others, instead, praise it, legalize it, and point to it as the ultimate political goal. Without distorting the term, these systems can be designated as Fascist. We know other definitions of fascism, but it seems more precise, and more consistent with our specific experience, to define as Fascist all regimes and only those which deny, in theory or in practice, a basic equality of rights among all human beings. Now, because the individual or the class whose rights are denied rarely submits, in the Fascist regime violence or fraud becomes necessary. Violence, to eliminate opponents, of whom there is no shortage. Fraud, to reassure those who are loyal that this exercise of abuse is laudable and legitimate, and to convince the oppressed (within the limits, which are broad, of human credulity) that their sacrifice is not a sacrifice, or that it is indispensable in the light of some undefined and transcendent purpose.
The various Fascist regimes differ on the basis of whether fraud or violence is prevalent. Italian fascism, Europe’s firstborn and in many regards pioneering form, erected, on the original foundations of a relatively not so bloody repression, a colossal edifice of mystification and fraud (those who studied during the Fascist years retain a burning memory of it), the effects of which endure to this day. National Socialism, enriched by the Italian experience, nourished by ancestral barbarian ferments, and catalyzed by the diabolical personality of Adolf Hitler, aimed at violence from the outset, and, rediscovering in the concentration camp an old institution of slavery, an instrumentum regni endowed with the desired terrorist potential, proceeded along this path with incredible speed and coherence.
The facts are (or should be) known. The first Lagers, hastily and immediately prepared by the SA,2 beginning in March 1933, three months after Hitler’s rise to the Chancellery; their “regularization” and multiplication, up to more than a hundred on the eve of the war; their monstrous growth, in number and size, to coincide with the German invasion of Poland and the western edge of the USSR, which contain the “biological source of Judaism.”
Starting in those months, the Lagers changed in nature: from instruments of terror and political intimidation, they became “bone mills,” instruments of extermination on the scale of millions (four in Auschwitz alone), organized like industries, with equipment for collective poisoning and cremation ovens as big as cathedrals (up to twenty-four thousand corpses could be burned a day in Auschwitz alone, the capital of the concentration-camp empire). Then, coinciding with the first German military defeats and the consequent scarcity of manpower, a second transformation took place, in which the goal of creating a gigantic army of slaves, without compensation and forced to work until death, joined and coexisted with the goal (never denied) of exterminating political enemies.
At this point, a map of occupied Europe causes vertigo: in Germany itself, the actual Lagers—that is, the ones whose inmates did not get out alive—number in the hundreds, and to these we must add thousands of camps meant for other categories of people. For example, the Italian soldiers who were interned numbered around six hundred thousand. According to an estimate by William Shirer, in 1944 the forced laborers in Germany were at least nine million.
The camps were not, therefore, a marginal phenomenon. German industry was based on them, they were a fundamental institution of fascistic Europe, and the Nazis made no secret of the fact that the system would have been maintained, in fact, extended and perfected, if the Axis had won. It would have been the full realization of fascism: the consecration of privilege, of non-equality and of non-freedom.
Even inside the Lagers, a system of typically Fascist authority was established, or, rather, was deliberately installed: a rigid hierarchy among the prisoners, in which the greatest power belonged to those who worked less. All the responsibilities, even the most petty (street sweeper, dishwasher, night watchman), were assigned from above; the subject, namely the prisoner without rank, was completely deprived of rights. Further, there was a sinister offshoot of the secret police, consisting of myriad informers and spies. In short, the camp microcosm faithfully mirrored t
he social fabric of the totalitarian state, where (at least in theory) Order reigned supreme: there was no more orderly place than the Lager. I certainly don’t intend to say that this past of ours leads us to detest order per se—rather, we detest that order, because it was an order without rights.
Today, with all this behind us, talk of new orders, of black orders, is strange to us: it’s as if the things that happened had never happened, as if they meant nothing and served no purpose. And yet the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic wasn’t very different from ours; and yet, from the first rudimentary Lagers of the SA to the ruin of Germany, the disintegration of Europe, and the sixty million dead of the Second World War, only twelve years had passed. Fascism is a cancer that spreads rapidly, and its return is threatening us: is it too much to ask that we oppose it from the start?
La Stampa, February 9, 1975
1. Branded like cattle, and like cattle to the butcher.
2. Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers: the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
More Reality than Literature
In the years 1946–48, when my literary activity began, I had no intention, or perhaps even consciousness of the fact, that the writing and publication of my first book (If This Is a Man) would coincide, in the long run, with my conversion to literary activity. At the time, my attention was focused elsewhere: the suffering and privations of two years of imprisonment still weighed on me, there was the house to rebuild, a job as a chemist to find. Literature, both in the passive sense (that of reading) and, even more, in the active sense, was for me an altogether secondary factor.