by Primo Levi
His activity as a forward-looking technology specialist, as a pacifist, and as a moralist can take a break, but these breaks are never sterile: we saw that with Greggio e pericoloso (Crude and Dangerous) (Mondadori, 1976), his previous thriller. Beneath the frantic succession of gunshots, flights, car chases, love affairs, and escapes in that novel, one recognizes, just as in this book, a solid and serious foundation.
Also, the protagonist of both books, Philip Quartara, has two personalities. He is an invincible romantic hero, an invariably (and somewhat ironically) extraordinary cybernetic Roland: he makes millions with a phone call, he is not affected by cold, fear, drugs, exhaustion; he seduces within seconds a young woman who is equally extraordinary; he is a good fighter, speaks innumerable languages, and overcomes all obstacles with cheerful self-assurance. At the same time, and without any irony, he is a solid and serious character, the model for a way of life that Vacca believes in, and urges us to believe in, the only one that can lead to the “improbable salvation” of our ever more complicated world.
This improbable Philip and his improbable adventures give us something more than entertainment. They convey to the lazy and tired reader the youthful joy of a well-functioning brain and muscles, the desire to heal the world and make it anew, according to reason, and an unforeseen, Enlightenment confidence in the future, which appears in the closing pages of the book.
This is the same confidence without which nothing can be undertaken, the confidence that Vacca likes to deny in the titles of his most successful books, to let it surface later, infused and dispersed, in the best pages of those very books.
Tuttolibri 6, no. 23 (June 21, 1980)
1. La suprema pokazuka (The Supreme Pokazuka) (Milan: Sugarco Editore, 1980).
History Spoke Through Anne Frank
The strategy always seems to be the same. Last year “someone” discovered, in France, a gullible little professor, very ambitious and slightly weird, and entrusted him with a noble mission. He was to prove that the gas chambers never existed in Auschwitz, or, rather, that they did exist but were used only to kill lice; that all the vast evidence of the Nazi genocide, papers and objects, testimonies and museums, is a forgery; that, consequently, all accusations are false. The key argument of the little professor was unusual: it had been said that there were gas chambers in Oranienburg and Dachau; in fact, there weren’t; therefore there were no gas chambers anywhere, and the slaughter was a Jewish invention.
We read now that a seventy-six-year-old retiree in Hamburg, obviously encouraged by “someone,” has taken the trouble to bring a suit against the publisher of Anne Frank’s diary, questioning its authenticity, because some passages in the famous notebook found in the secret apartment were written with a ballpoint pen, and so were added later, as there were no ballpoint pens in 1944. The strategy, as I said, is the same: to find a crack, slide a blade in, and prize it apart; you never know—even a solid building may collapse. It may very well be that additions were made to the diary: these are common editorial practices, however philologically incorrect. Those responsible may intend to clarify a connection, to fill a gap, to provide the historical background of an episode. It’s certainly regrettable that additions aren’t identified, if for no other reason than that they open the door to actions like that of the Hamburg retiree.
This initiative is disgusting. Anne Frank’s diary moved the entire world because its authenticity is self-evident. A forger capable of creating such a book from scratch can’t exist: he would have to be at the same time a historian of society, extremely knowledgeable about the smallest details of a little-known place and time, a psychologist skilled in the reconstruction of states of mind bordering on the unimaginable, a poet with the candid, fickle soul of a fourteen-year-old.
Plenty of obtuseness or bad faith is necessary to claim that these pages were made up; but, even if the experts of the Hamburg Court of Appeals had declared that the entire diary is a fake, the historical truth wouldn’t change. Anne wouldn’t come back to life, nor would the millions of other innocent people killed by the Nazis. Maybe it’s no accident that this squalid story, which brings to mind the Gospel image of the mote and the beam, came up only after the death of Anne’s father, himself a former prisoner, whom I met briefly at Auschwitz immediately after the liberation. He was looking for his two daughters, who had disappeared.
To read about this initiative is doubly alarming today, after “someone” did not hesitate to take unknowing and innocent lives in Bologna, then in Munich, and then in Paris.1 The scale is different, at least for the moment, but the method and the goals are the same, and so is the monstrous ideology that the world has been unable or unwilling to eradicate.
La Stampa, October 7, 1980
1. Three recent terrorist attacks in Europe: the bombing of the Bologna train station in August 1980; another bombing the following month at Oktoberfest in Munich; and the bombing of a synagogue in Rue Copernic in Paris in early October.
Seekers of Lies to Deny the Holocaust
In Torrance, near Los Angeles, an Institute for Historical Review has been founded for the statutory purpose of reviewing the official history of the Second World War. There would be nothing objectionable in this goal if it weren’t evident from the activities of the institute that this is a one-way review intended only to deny or minimize Nazi crimes. It’s no surprise to read that a seminar was held in Torrance with the expert participation of that Professor Faurisson who last year tried frantically to draw attention to himself by saying that the gas chambers of Auschwitz didn’t kill anyone, or, rather, that they were built after the war to defame the Nazi regime. The Torrance institute recently offered a prize of fifty thousand dollars to anyone who can prove “beyond dispute” that the Nazis were killing Jews in the gas chambers.
It’s remarkable that such a prize should be offered at the time of the trial for the events in Varese and the bomb in Rue Copernic in Paris. It’s as if someone were crying out: “The slaughter didn’t happen, but we wish it had and that it would continue,” or, “The slaughter didn’t happen, but we are doing our best to have one now,” expecting to be believed. A little consistency, for heaven’s sake! If you like the massacre, why deny it happened? And if you don’t like it, why do you imitate and defend it?
It’s safe to predict that this provocative prize will remain in the coffers of the institute. Neither much courage nor much money is needed for such initiatives; boundless arrogance and bad faith are enough. One wouldn’t risk anything by offering a prize of even $50 million to anyone who could prove “beyond dispute” that between 1939 and 1945 a bloody war was fought on this planet; if someone were to show up with testimonies, documents, invitations to on-site investigations, and demanded the prize, it would be sufficient to challenge him with arguments similar to those stubbornly supported by the predecessor Faurisson. The Maginot and Siegfried lines never existed: their ruins were built a few years ago by specialized firms based on plans provided by obliging set designers, and the same can be said of war cemeteries. All pictures of the time are photomontages. All casualty statistics are counterfeit, the work of terrorist or tendentious propaganda: nobody died in the war because there was no war. All the diaries and chronicles published in the countries involved in the so-called conflict are lies, or the work of madmen, or were extorted from their authors by torture or blackmail, or were paid for. The war widows and orphans are salaried extras or paranoids.
What can’t an institute deny? Ariosto, who knew about such things, ironically urged the Princes to befriend writers, poets, and historians, because they are the makers of truth. Those who want truth shouldn’t trust Homer, who was corrupted by the Greek establishment with donations of palaces and villas:
Yet—would’st thou I the secret should expose?—
By contraries throughout the tale explain:
That from the Trojan bands the Grecian ran;
And deem Penelope a courtezan.1
This is the historic truth that the
institute in Torrance would have restored had it existed at the time, and the kind of truth that it intends to restore today.
La Stampa, November 26, 1980
1. Orlando Furioso, canto 35; translated by William Stewart Rose.
Joseph Needham: A Strong
Will to Understand1
A few years ago, there was a polemical saying that “China is near.” This is not so in any logical sense; on the contrary, China is far from us, and not just geographically. For centuries, our Eurocentric pride diverted our attention from what was happening at the opposite extreme of our continent. And yet, separate from our civilization, but parallel to and contemporary with it, China was building a gigantic cultural structure, at least as large and complex as our own, to which it contributed much and from which it took hardly anything. In this work, so far unparalleled in the West, the scientist Joseph Needham shows that, not only in the refinements of literature, the arts, and philosophy but also in theoretical and applied sciences, China was not inferior to Europe and the Mediterranean, and often was ahead of them. We recognize on every page a strong and loving will to understand and to explain; this is not a book for specialists but, rather, as the author says, with understandable satisfaction, “a contribution to international understanding.”
Notiziario Einaudi, 1980
1. This piece was originally a blurb written for the publisher Einaudi, which was about to publish the Italian edition of Joseph Needham’s 1954 book, Science and Civilization in China.
To the Visitor
The history of deportation and of the death camps, the history of this place, cannot be separated from the history of the Fascist tyrannies in Europe. There is an uninterrupted link from the burning down of labor union offices in Italy in 1921 to the bonfires of books in German squares in 1933 and the heinous blaze of the Birkenau crematoriums. This is old wisdom, and Heine, a Jew and a German, had already admonished us: those who burn books end up burning people; violence is a seed that doesn’t die.
It’s sad but necessary to remind others and ourselves: the first European attempt to smother the workers’ movement and to sabotage democracy was conceived in Italy. It was fascism, unleashed by the early postwar crisis, by the myth of the “mutilated victory,” and fed by ancient wretchedness and guilt, and it gave birth to a contagious delirium: the cult of the man of destiny, organized, mandatory enthusiasm, every decision entrusted to the discretion of a single individual.
But not all Italians were Fascists: we, the Italians who died here, are witnesses to this. Beside fascism, another unbroken thread arose first in Italy: anti-fascism. Together with our testimony, there is the testimony of all those who fought against, and suffered from, fascism: Turin’s worker-martyrs of 1923, the prisoners, the political internees, the exiles, and our brothers of all political beliefs who died while resisting the Fascist regime reinstated by the National Socialist invasion.
And, along with us, other Italians, too, bear witness: those who fell on all fronts of the Second World War, fighting grudgingly and desperately against an enemy that wasn’t their enemy, and discovering the deception when it was too late. They, too, are victims of fascism, ignorant victims.
We weren’t ignorant. Some of us were partisans and political combatants: they were captured and deported in the last months of war, and, while the Third Reich floundered, died here, tormented by the thought that liberation was so close.
Most of us were Jews, Jews from all the cities of Italy, and also foreign Jews: Poles, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, and Germans who in Fascist Italy, which was forced into anti-Semitism by Mussolini’s racial laws, had encountered the benevolence and civilized hospitality of the Italian people. They were rich and poor, men and women, healthy and sick.
There were many children among us, and there were old people already at death’s door, but we were all loaded like freight into boxcars, and our fate, the fate of those who entered the gates of Auschwitz, was the same for everybody. It was unprecedented, even in the darkest ages, for human beings to be exterminated by the millions, like noxious insects; for children and the dying to be deliberately killed. We, sons and daughters of Christians and Jews (but we don’t like these distinctions), sons and daughters of a civilized country that returned to civilization after the night of fascism, here bear witness.
In this place, where we, the innocent, were killed, barbarity touched bottom. Visitor, look at the remains of this camp and think: no matter where you are from, you are not a stranger. Make sure that your journey was not in vain, that our deaths were not in vain. Let the ashes of Auschwitz be a warning; make sure that the hideous fruit of hatred, whose traces you have seen here, doesn’t produce a new seed, not tomorrow, not ever.
Written for the inauguration of the memorial honoring Italians who
fell in the Nazi death camps, and published in a booklet by ANED,
the National Association of Former Deportees, April 1980
CONTENTS
Present Perfect
Capaneus
The Juggler
Lilith
A Disciple
Our Seal
The Gypsy
The Cantor and the Veteran
The Story of Avrom
Tired of Fictions
The Return of Cesare
The Return of Lorenzo
The King of the Jews
Future Anterior
A Tranquil Star
Gladiators
The Beast in the Temple
Disphylaxis
Dizzying Heat
Bridge Builders
Self-Control
Dialogue Between a Poet and a Doctor
Children of the Wind
The Fugitive
“Dear Mama”
In Due Time
Tantalum
Sisters of the Swamp
A Will
Present Indicative
The Sorcerers
The Molecule’s Defiance
The Valley of Guerrino
The Girl in the Book
Guests
Decoding
Weekend
The Soul and the Engineers
Brief Dream
Capaneus
It was impossible either to love or to hate Valerio: his scarcity, his insufficiency were such as to place him, at first encounter, outside the common relations between men. He had been small and fat; small he remained, and the flaccid folds on his face and body bore melancholy witness to his former plumpness. We had worked together for a long time in the Polish mud. All of us fell down, in the deep, sticky mud of the worksite, but, owing to that trace of animal nobility which survives even in a man without hope, we made an effort to avoid falling, or at least to minimize the effects. In fact a man on the ground, a man prostrate, is in danger: he rouses cruel instincts, and inspires derision rather than pity. But Valerio fell constantly, more than anyone else. The slightest shove was enough, or not even necessary; rather, at times it was clear that he fell down in the mud on purpose, if someone merely was rude to him, or pretended to hit him—from his short stature down into the mire, as if it were his mother’s breast, as if for him the upright position were itself provisional, the way it is for stilt-walkers. The mud was his refuge, his putative defense. He was the man of mud, the color of mud was his color. He knew it; with the scant illumination that suffering had left him, he knew that he was laughable.
And he talked about it, because he was loquacious. He endlessly recounted his woes, the falls, the slaps, the ridicule, like a pathetic clown: with no inclination to salvage any particle of himself, to conceal the most abject notes, emphasizing, rather, the clumsiest aspects of his mishaps, with a hint of theatrical flair in which traces of a convivial good nature could be divined. Those who know men like him know that they are flatterers, by nature and without ulterior motive. If we had met in normal life, I don’t know on what ground he would have flattered me; there, every morning, he praised the healthy appearance of my face. Although I was
not superior to him by much, I felt pity for him, along with a vague annoyance; but at that time pity, being ineffectual, vanished as soon as it was conceived, like smoke in the wind, leaving an empty taste of hunger in the mouth. Like everyone else, I tried more or less consciously to avoid him: he was in too obvious a state of need, and in those who are needy we always sense a creditor.
One gloomy September day, the air-raid sirens sounded above the mud, rising and falling in tone like a long feral groan. It was nothing new, and I had a secret hiding place: a narrow underground passage where bales of empty sacks were piled. I went down and found Valerio there; he greeted me with verbose cordiality, which I barely returned, and without delay, as I was napping, he began to tell me his woeful adventures. After the tragic cry of the sirens, a threatening silence reigned outside, but suddenly we heard footsteps above our heads, and right afterward we saw, outlined at the top of the stairs, the vast black contours of Rappoport, with a pail in his hand. He noticed us, exclaimed, “Italians!” and let go of the pail, which rolled noisily down the stairs.
The pail had held soup, but it was empty and almost clean. Valerio and I scavenged some remains, by carefully scraping the bottom and sides with our spoons, which at that time we carried with us day and night, like Templars their swords, ready for any improbable emergency. In the meantime Rappoport had solemnly descended: he wasn’t a man to give soup or to ask it as a gift.
Rappoport must then have been about thirty-five. Polish in origin, he had got a degree in medicine at Pisa; this was the source of his fondness for Italians and his lopsided friendship with Valerio, who had been born in Pisa. He was a marvelously well-equipped man. Astute, violent, and cheerful, like the buccaneers of the past, he had easily managed to let go of everything that seemed to him superfluous in a civilized upbringing. He lived in the camp like a tiger in the jungle, attacking and extorting the weaker and avoiding the stronger, ready to corrupt, steal, fight, tighten his belt, lie, or flatter, according to circumstances. He was therefore an enemy, but neither mean nor unpleasant. He came slowly down the stairs, and when he got close we could see clearly where the contents of the pail had gone. This was among his specialties: in the general commotion at the first blare of the air-raid sirens, he would hurry to the site’s kitchen, and escape with his booty before the patrol arrived. Rappoport had done this successfully three times; the fourth, being a prudent outlaw, he remained calmly with his team throughout the entire alarm. Lilienthal, who had tried to imitate him, was caught in the act, and publicly hanged the next day.