The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Today the “arts” are more numerous and even a person who doesn’t have a driver’s license understands when someone laments that his “battery is low.” No one should therefore be surprised if a term like “disposal,” in the sense (the exact and concise equivalent of which doesn’t exist in Italian) of “elimination, destruction of garbage, rubbish, harmful or troublesome by-products,” not only enters, Italianized or not, our daily language but reappears in derivatives and permanent and vital metaphors. In conclusion, for anyone interested in seeing the wall that separates the so-called two cultures pierced—and which atrophies them both, and in Italy is higher and more solid than elsewhere—reading this book will be useful and agreeable: he will find a gift and a surprise on every page.

  La Stampa, February 17, 1978

  1. Giacomo Elliot is the pseudonym of Roberto Vacca.

  Women for Slaughter

  When David Rousset coined the now famous term “concentration-camp universe” (univers concentrationnaire), he knew what he was doing—it was in fact a universe, infinite and diverse, still not fully explored. This book1 fills (at least in Italy) a gap, the gap of female deportation, and, together with Il mondo dei vinti (The World of the Vanquished), by Nuto Revelli, and Compagne (Companions), by Bianca Guidetti Serra—both made up of testimony that wasn’t tampered with—constitutes an important trilogy. In all three books one discerns the muted and solemn voices of those who acted and endured with incredible strength, of those who were demurely silent for decades, of those who could not speak.

  The book’s structure is complex: there are two authors, Lidia Beccaria Rolfi and Anna Maria Bruzzone; the first testimony is that of Lidia, who was herself deported, and it is also the longest and most organic. The testimony of four female Italian political deportees follows. Bruzzone edited the book and wrote the dense and terse introduction.

  All these witnesses were deported to Ravensbrück, as were the majority of the female “politicals” from all the countries occupied by the Nazis: in fact, it was for this purpose that Ravensbrück was built. Built out of nothing, an artificial city that can’t be found, and couldn’t be found at the time, in any atlas, it was the product of a monstrous plan, the only Lager populated exclusively by women, who were, from the beginning, “rented out” by the SS to the war industries and the neighboring farms, as if they were farm animals. On page 16 an appalling calculation is reported in detail: how much a human being can yield when made to work until death by exhaustion. On average, the yield (according to SS sources) is 1631 marks, to which should be added the “proceeds from the use of the bones and ashes.”

  The comparison with farm animals isn’t coincidental, nor is it coincidental that the deported women were deliberately treated worse than the men. In Nazi ideology, equality between men and women was ridiculed as decadent and bourgeois. A short book that I think is impossible to find today, Education for Death, by Gregor Ziemer, published in London (but in Italian) in 1941, is enlightening in this regard; the subtitle is The Making of the Nazi, and the book contains a lucid summary of how young men and women were brought up and educated in Hitler’s Germany.

  The first duty of the German man was to fight and die for the homeland and that of the German woman to sweeten the warrior’s repose and give birth to new generations of fighters. The foreign woman, especially if she is assumed to be an enemy or “of inferior race,” has no other purpose than, precisely, to be used as a draft animal; when her productivity declines or ceases, there is the crematorium, and her ashes, mixed with the contents of the Lager’s cesspools, are distributed to farms.

  The long silence was helpful for all the witnesses. Lidia speaks of it explicitly on the last page of her deposition: she hesitated to tell her story, her experience was too inhuman to be accepted by a normal listener, she was afraid she wouldn’t be believed, she felt around her a “wall” of incomprehension or of easy pity. An eighteen-year-old teacher in a valley of Cuneo, nourished on Fascist rhetoric in school, she quickly understands the tragedy of the Albanian and Russian fronts and, after the armistice, naturally becomes a partisan.

  After the trauma of her arrest, of prison in Turin, and the sealed freight car, this provincial girl, without political experience, sympathetic companions, or linguistic knowledge, is thrust into the fortress of Ravensbrück, where she seems “to have fallen onto another planet.” She hasn’t had the time or the means to realize that it is precisely this horrendous alienation that is the ultimate goal of the concentration-camp city, “conceived, planned, and structured deliberately to rape the person, humiliate her, destroy her, reduce her to a beast.”

  But she’s young, intelligent, gifted with a miraculous will to resist, to understand, to figure out the whys. She learns a little French, orients herself, and manages to take the great step: from subproletarian, from Schmizstück (“piece of trash” is what, in the crude language of the camp, women at their limits, destined to rapid collapse owing to hunger, humiliation, and mistreatment, are called), to “proletarian,” that is, worker in the Siemens factory.

  It’s the first step toward salvation. The second, definitive one is the encounter with Monique, a remarkable character: a lucid, hard, and experienced French “political” prisoner, who takes on the “social and political education” of the young Italian woman, constructs her, forces her to study, to exercise her brain, explaining “why washing yourself . . . is part of the Resistance in the camp.” Monique transforms the victim into a fighter, attentive and aware, capable of registering internally the horrors amid which she lives, of identifying a logic, the paranoid logic of profit above all else, of exploitation without restraint, of man reduced to instrument. I believe that, on this subject, no reader will ever be able to forget the atrocious pages on the children born in Ravensbrück. The teacher from Val Varaita, in Cuneo, became the historian of Ravensbrück. R. was her university.

  The testimony of the other witnesses is briefer and more personal. As is true of all survivors, each one experienced the Lager in a different way. Bianca Paganini, a young anti-Fascist from La Spezia, with Catholic roots, although she strenuously refused any compromise, identifies (significantly) the signs of compassion in the desperate women who surround her, and she herself feels compassion for the German political prisoners. Her faith, which sustained her at first, for the most part crumbles before the piles of cadavers: “It was difficult to start believing again: a little at a time, though, I succeeded.”

  Livia Borsi, born in 1902, a socialist “by birth” (she’s the daughter of a dockworker in Genoa, illiterate but evolved), is sustained not only during her imprisonment but before and after by a native, almost savage energy that allows her to insert herself into the savage life of the Lager and to survive. She endures everything, almost naturally: there isn’t a trace of self-pity in her words, as if she had drawn strength from an atavistic experience of combat. She is generous and extroverted, she cries and sings, suffers and helps those who suffer more than she does, she “invents” the sabotage of the Germans’ work, and at no point does she approach breakdown and surrender.

  The final testimony, given in the two voices of the Baroncini sisters, is perhaps the most moving: the entire family is deported, father, mother, and three daughters, and in the innocent and courageous words of the two survivors the most atrocious pain emerges, the pain of seeing family members die in front of you, day by day, beyond any possible aid.

  This book arrives just in time to corroborate the unscrupulous, fraudulent nature of the commercial operation that is flooding all the screens with Nazi-sex movies, and how inadequately these, even the less vulgar, reflect the true condition of women in the Lager. No, the deportees were not sexual objects: they were, in the best of cases, exhausted draft animals, and, in the worst, ephemeral “pieces of trash,” precisely. This is confirmed by the very few whom strength, intelligence, and luck allowed to bear witness.

  La Stampa, March 10, 1978

  1. The book referred to is Le donne di Ravensb
rück (The Women of Ravensbrück) (Turin: Einaudi, 1978).

  Close Encounters with Astuteness

  Dear Soldati1

  I have not forgotten our only encounter under a timid Venetian sun, or our unspoken pride in continuing to address each other formally in an environment where everyone else was using first names: like a secret sign of recognition between two specimens of a race on its way to extinction, reserved, dignified, and a little strange—curious and objects of curiosity.

  I’m writing to you regarding your observations of Sunday, March 26, on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I, too, have seen the movie; I enjoyed it, admired its spectacular tricks, and regretted that I have never had (or sought) access to this amazing gymnasium of games, science-fiction movies; but I didn’t believe in the encounters, not for an instant did I feel transported, not for an instant was I unaware of the fact that I was watching a very carefully prepared circus show, in which nothing is left to the imagination or to the impulse of the moment. Everything was studied, practiced, and tested infinite times, in fact, constructed by a patient and methodical group effort—the sociologist, the psychologist, the folklorist, the moralist, the theologian (not the astronomer or, alas, the biologist), all sitting around a table. Not poets but good artisans, all intent on telling a story best suited to surprise, excite, and satisfy the maximum number of spectators.

  In sum, the movie seemed to me more a work of astuteness and market research than of profound inspiration; the type of viewer it is aimed at, or rather, on whom it is modeled, is more American than European, is generous and inexperienced (like the electrician), solid and tender (like the mother), naïve and clean (like the child).

  2001: A Space Odyssey, which you cite, was aimed at a sophisticated viewer; this Encounters, instead, is aimed at an eager and simple viewer, who is devoted to a religiosity so innate that it borders on heresy, who is perplexed and tired but not desperate, who turns to the sky because he is tired of terrestrial vices and sins and because he confuses the sky of Our Father with the sky of the galaxies and spaceships. He waits for an outstretched hand and an eager and naïve smile like his own to emerge from this sky: the movie has the cynical astuteness to give them to him, the viewer, who, in his simplicity, is not surprised if the hand is threadlike and the smile is green.

  It is exactly in this final revelation of the alien that the cold, didactic-moralistic intent of the movie is revealed. These space-fetuses are different beings, ugly by necessity, because the different are always ugly, but they, too, are your brothers; and you must not withdraw from the one who is different, even if it is green, even if it knows how to build missiles embroidered like cathedrals, even if it rains down from the abysses of outer space. Sacred words, but of little use: it’s not outer space that makes us acrimonious but this flower bed of ours. It’s easy to love the alien, harder to love your neighbor.

  Thus, your statement “the greatest results, in art and life, are always, more or less, involuntary and unconscious” seemed vaguely improper. In fact, I don’t believe in the unconsciousness of Spielberg and Truffaut, nor do I see great results in these encounters, if not, precisely, as a spectacle and as a (not to be underestimated) cleverly calculated commercial success. Nevertheless, this axiom of yours is memorable, and debatable in the best sense of the word, that is, worthy of being debated.

  Personally, I think that it would be serious and sad if it were always like this, if the greatest results were always and completely involuntary: there would be nothing to do but sit down, or lie down, and wait for the results to arrive, gracious gift of the unconscious—ours or the collective. No, I don’t think that your Capri Letters are involuntary or unconscious.

  Please accept my most cordial greetings.

  YOURS,

  Primo Levi

  La Stampa, March 29, 1978

  1. Levi is responding to an article in La Stampa by the novelist Mario Soldati.

  Letter to Euge

  Dear Euge,1

  Communicating with you in this unusual way, in an open letter in a newspaper, “after everything that has passed between us,” seems odd and fun: let’s hope it’s fun for those who read it as well. I’d like to add to and correct something regarding the episode that you recounted in the February issue of this paper (“The Resistance Began in Via Roma”).2

  First of all, I wasn’t there, rather, “I wasn’t there” (“Oh forever pained is he who / . . . Telling his children one day [about those times] / Will have to say with a sigh: ‘I wasn’t there’ ”)3: at the time, I was working outside the city and also my father was dying, so Franco Momigliano, who I believe was the promoter of the enterprise, had excused me; but I nevertheless remember several details that I think are worthy of description. On the part of the Fascists, putting up those posters wasn’t an isolated initiative: a little earlier there had been a clumsy attempt to set fire to the portal of the temple, and anti-Semitic phrases appeared in tar on many neighborhood walls. As a result, in the classrooms of the Jewish school we had organized surveillance shifts, in at least one of which I participated. The posters—vulgar, fanatical, and full of inaccuracies—presumably came from the German consulate: Emanuele Artom mentions them in his diary (Three Lives, brought out by the publisher Israel, 1954), and adds that he saw “agents of the authorities” removing some of them. This episode should probably be set in the context of the profound disagreement that existed between the Fascists and the Nazis on the question of race.

  The removal of Fascist posters, seen in the light of those times, was a rather audacious enterprise, and the spectators in Via Roma did not fail to kindly point out to the youths at work on this unusual task, “Watch out, it’s dangerous: if they catch you you’ll end up in jail.” Apparently, reactions of outrage or of open solidarity were rare: to Italians at the time, dazed by propaganda, opposing fascism seemed strange rather than heroic or criminal. You remembered correctly that you worked in pairs, and I’d like to add that these were pairs made up of a boy and a girl, which, given the times, I think, is significant, almost a preview of the role that women later had in the Resistance; and that not all the participants were Jews. Certainly Bianca Guidetti Serra and Juanita Pautasso were there, in addition to other “Aryans,” whose names I don’t recall. This was not coincidental, either; the question of race was so obviously unjust, stupid, and copied from the other side of the Alps that it functioned as a detonator for many consciences, and not only of the young. Nuto Revelli shook off his Fascist loyalty precisely when he saw, from the troop train taking him to the Russian front, the treatment that the Germans reserved for the Jews.

  It seems to me that the removal of the posters continued for several evenings without provoking more than fearful curiosity on the part of the public. The police intervened only on the last evening, but not very severely: they scattered the crowds, asked a few people for their documents in a pro forma fashion, and basically tried to send everyone home, demonstrating (perhaps on that occasion for the first time) a revelatory weakness and a noticeable fear of possible complications. I think that Guido Foa’s inspiration contributed to this fear: Guido, blond and almost six feet tall, didn’t look very Jewish, nor did he share the fatal Jewish tendency toward intellectualism—he would have liked to be a comic actor, and in fact I think he had already appeared onstage in some sketches he had made up. Towering above the crowd, he started to ask people, mimicking a southern accent, for their “dogumends,” including the policemen themselves, who were in plainclothes, and to call out nonsensical orders, adding to the confusion. It’s unbearably sad now to recall this imaginative and happy entrance of his, because a few years later Guido, like many others among our companions at the time, ended up at Auschwitz.

  The Community Council issued a protest to police headquarters, and it all ended there. The harsh ordeal of the French front had already passed, and the disaster of the earlier intervention on the Greek front. This modest undertaking, which may well have been the first public manifestation of antifas
cism in Turin, after the Matteotti crime,4 must have convinced the zealots that the time for a Kristallnacht in Turin was still far away.

  YOURS,

  Primo

  Ha Keillah 4, April 1978

  1. Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, a friend from Levi’s youth.

  2. A group of young people tore down posters against Jews that had been put up along Turin’s Via Roma; this was the first act of resistance in the city.

  3. The lines are from “March 1821” by Alessandro Manzoni.

  4. The Italian Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated by Fascists on June 10, 1924.

  So That the SS Don’t Return

  The violence we breathe around us today mustn’t allow us to forget the violence of a recent past, the one that under the sinister insignia of the death’s head and the runic double S devastated Europe: because violence begets violence and there is not a good violence that can be opposed to a bad one. I don’t believe that the events in Germany (and in Italy!) in recent months can be fully understood if one ignores the fact that, in 1977 alone, there were at least thirty meetings of former SS members: not only in every corner of West Germany but in France, in the very places where they shed blood; and also in Italy, on May 28, in Varna, near Bressanone.

  This news is disseminated via a publication of the group HIAG, the Mutual Help Association of Former Waffen-SS Members, a pious screen behind which ex-SS soldiers hide, duly organized into veterans associations. Because a HIAG does exist, in the Germany of the Berufsverbot, the occupational purge, in the Germany of well-being, and it seems that no one, or very few, has found anything to object to: even though it is, precisely, with the HIAG that the profanation of Jewish cemeteries, the threatening swastikas on walls, the attacks on democratic institutions originate, and not just in Germany.