by Primo Levi
Shortly before his death, in 1984, Ryle formulated a drastic proposal: “Stop science now”—let’s cease all scientific research immediately, even that which is called “basic.” Since we are incapable of predicting how any discovery might be distorted and exploited, let’s just stop: no more discoveries.
While I understand the spiritual torment from which this appeal sprang, it seems to me to be extremist and utopian at the same time. We are what we are: every one of us, even the farmer, even the most humble craftsman, is a researcher, and always has been. We can and we must defend ourselves in other ways from the danger undeniably inherent in any new scientific knowledge. It is quite true, as Ryle says (and I quote), that “our cleverness has grown prodigiously—but not our wisdom”; but I wonder how much time, in all the schools, in every country, is devoted to increasing wisdom, that is, to moral issues?
I would like to see (and it doesn’t seem either impossible or ridiculous) all scientific faculties emphasize this point to the utmost: that whatever you do when you practice your profession can be useful for mankind, or neutral, or harmful. Don’t become enamored of dubious problems. Within the limits allowed, try to learn the purpose for which your work is intended. We all know that the world is not made up solely of black and white, and your decision may be probabilistic and difficult; but you will agree to research a new medicine, and you will refuse to devise a nerve gas.
Whether you are a believer or not, whether you are a “patriot” or not, if given a choice, don’t let yourself be seduced by material or intellectual interests but choose from among those which can render the journey of your contemporaries and of your descendants less painful and less dangerous. Don’t hide behind the hypocrisy of neutral science: you know enough to be able to assess whether a dove or a cobra or a chimera or perhaps nothing at all will emerge from the egg that you are hatching. As for basic research, it can and must continue; if we were to abandon it, we would betray our nature and our nobility as “thinking reeds,”2 and the human species would no longer have any reason to exist.
September 21, 1986
1. Bruno Pontecorvo (1913–1993) was an Italian nuclear physicist who worked in Canada during the war and then became a British citizen. In 1950, he defected to the Soviet Union.
2. Pascal, Pensées.
Translator’s Afterword
I came to Levi’s Stories and Essays having read only his more sobering works. So when I read the Stories it was like meeting an old friend after a long time and being surprised by aspects of him that I hadn’t noticed. What struck me as most refreshing was the playfulness and whimsy I found in some of the pieces I worked on—so very different from the Lager encounters—along with a touching humility. The fanciful tale of the girl who grows wings (“The Great Mutation”) and the interview of the ant queen by the journalist (“The Ant’s Wedding”) seem like lighthearted flights of the imagination.
There are darker notes, to be sure. Along with the touches of irony and humor, echoes of the Lager experience are not absent among the pieces that make up the collection. In “The Commander of Auschwitz” we get a glimpse of man’s monstrous nature: the blindly loyal lackeys who slavishly carried out orders, without whom brutal savages like Hitler would have been impotent. In “That Quiet Town of Auschwitz” Levi refers to those flunkeys as “the lords of evil.” Mertens, who is at once Levi’s opposite and twin, a doppelgänger turned upside down, an “almost-me,” is one of them.
Signs of the man of science are also prominent in the stories, and not just in lexical choices like “parachrono” or “rubidium maleate” or “pipette.” In “Hatching the Cobra” Levi makes a case for individual responsibility. Noting that science is not always neutral, and that the results of scientific research are just as likely to be injurious to mankind as they are to be beneficial, he urges conscientious engagement. The scientist should know whether he is developing a new medicine or formulating a nerve gas; he should be able to assess whether a dove or a cobra will emerge from the egg he’s hatching.
In “An Erector Set Made with Love” we see a tender side: an eleven-year-old Levi in love with nine-year-old Lidia, whose magical rapport with a German shepherd, aggressively intimidating to everyone else, enchanted him. He might have been Dante catching his first glimpse of the girl Beatrice when he was nine and she was eight.
Humility may be the feature that most consistently marks Stories and Essays. Stylistically, the unassuming nature expresses itself in the conversational, sometimes almost chatty, spirit of the narration. It is also expressly articulated in the Foreword. From the outset Levi invites tolerance for the variety of subjects addressed in the pieces, asking the reader to indulge his latitude. An equally clear note of modesty is sounded in Levi’s request not to look for messages in the stories, not to assign him a role that he felt didn’t fit him. Levi did not want to wear the clothes of a visionary or a prophet: I sensed that he considered himself an ordinary man, maybe only a survivor.
—ANNE MILANO APPEL
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.
S. T. COLERIDGE
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
LL. 582–85
CONTENTS
PREFACE
1. The Memory of the Offense
2. The Gray Zone
3. Shame
4. Communication
5. Useless Violence
6. The Intellectual in Auschwitz
7. Stereotypes
8. Letters from Germans
Conclusion
WORKS CITED
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Preface
The first reports of the Nazi death camps began to circulate in the crucial year of 1942. Vague yet concordant, they described a massacre of such vast proportions, such deliberate cruelty, and such tangled motivations that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity. It is telling that this rejection had been predicted well in advance by the perpetrators themselves. Many survivors (including Simon Wiesenthal, in the last pages of The Murderers Among Us) recall that the SS soldiers used to enjoy taunting the prisoners with a cynical warning: No matter how this war ends, we have won the war against you. No one will be left to testify, but even if one of you does survive, the world will not believe you. There might be suspicions, discussions, historical research, but there will be no certainty, because we will destroy both you and the evidence. And even if some evidence should remain and some of you do manage to survive, people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will call them exaggerations of Allied propaganda, and they will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We are the ones who will dictate the history of the concentration camps.
Curiously, this same thought (“Even if we told, no one would believe us”) emerged from the despair of the prisoners in the form of nocturnal dreams. Almost all the survivors, orally or in written memoirs, remember a recurrent dream from the nights of imprisonment, varying in its details but in substance the same: they had returned home and were relating their past sufferings to a loved one with passion and a feeling of relief, and they were not believed, not even listened to. In the most typical (and cruelest) form, the other person turned and walked away in silence. This is a theme to which we shall return, but from the outset it is important to emphasize that both sides, victims and oppressors, had a vivid awareness of the enormity and thus the unbelievability of what had happened in the camps: and not only in the camps, we now know, but also in the ghettos, behind the lines of the Eastern front, at police stations, and in the asylums for the mentally disabled.
Fortunately, things did not go as the victims feared and the Nazis hoped. Even the most perfect organization has its flaws, and the machinery of Hitler’s Germany was far from perfect, especially in the months leading up to its collapse. Much of the material evidence of the mass exterminati
ons was destroyed or attempts were made to destroy it, with varying success. In the fall of 1944, the Nazis blew up the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz, but the ruins are still there, and, despite the contorted explanations of the epigones, it is hard to justify their purpose by resorting to wild hypotheses. After the famous uprising in the spring of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto was razed, but the superhuman efforts of a few historian-combatants (historians of themselves!) ensured that other historians would recover the testimony—buried beneath huge piles of rubble or smuggled outside the walls—of how, day after day, the ghetto lived and died. All the records of the Lagers were burned in the final days of the war, a loss so great and so truly irreparable that the debate continues today over whether there were four or six or eight million victims: the figure is always in the millions, however. Before the Nazis started using the gigantic multiple crematoriums, the countless bodies of the victims—who had been deliberately killed or had succumbed to deprivation and disease—might have been evidence and had to be somehow disposed of. The first solution, so macabre one hesitates to describe it, was simply to stack the bodies, hundreds of thousands of them, in large common graves. This was done chiefly in Treblinka, in other smaller camps, and behind the lines in Russia. It was a temporary solution, adopted with brutal nonchalance at a time when the German armies were triumphant on every front and the final victory seemed certain: they could decide what to do about them later, since, in any case, to the victor goes possession of the truth, which he can manipulate as he pleases. Some way could be found to justify the common graves, make them disappear, or blame the Soviets (who had shown at Katyn that they weren’t much better anyway). But after the Battle of Stalingrad, the turning point of the war, there were second thoughts: better to get rid of everything immediately. The prisoners themselves were forced to dig up the pitiful remains and burn them on open fires, as if an operation of such proportions, and so out of the ordinary, could completely escape notice.
The SS commanders and the security services went to great lengths to make sure that not a single witness would survive. This is the meaning (it is hard to imagine another) behind the deadly, and seemingly insane, transfers that brought the story of the Nazi camps to a close, in the early months of 1945: the survivors of Majdanek were transferred to Auschwitz, those of Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen, and the women of Ravensbrück to Schwerin. The point was that all of them had to be removed from the liberation and redeported toward the heart of a Germany under invasion from east and west. It didn’t matter whether the prisoners died on the way; what mattered was that they not tell the story. In fact, after operating as centers of political terror, then as death factories, and subsequently (and simultaneously) as bottomless pools of ever-replenished slave labor, the Lagers had become dangerous for a dying Germany, because they contained the secret of the Lagers themselves, the greatest crime in the history of humankind. The army of skeletons rotting away there were Geheimnisträger, bearers of secrets, who had to be got rid of. After the destruction of the extermination compounds, eloquent in themselves, the decision was made to transfer the prisoners to the interior, in the absurd hope that they could still be locked up in Lagers that were less vulnerable to the advancing armies, and that their final capacity for work could be exploited. The other, less absurd hope was that the torments of those Biblical marches would reduce their numbers. And, indeed, the numbers were shockingly reduced, but still some people had the good fortune and the strength to survive, and they have remained to bear witness.
The fact that there were also many bearers of secrets on the other side, that of the oppressors, is less known and has been less studied, although many knew only a little and few knew everything. No one will ever be able to establish precisely how many in the Nazi apparatus could not have not known about the dreadful atrocities being committed; how many knew something but were able to pretend that they didn’t know; and how many more might have known everything but chose the more prudent path of keeping their eyes, ears, and, especially, their mouths shut. Whatever the case may be, since one cannot assume that the majority of Germans accepted the massacre lightheartedly, the failure to spread the truth about the Lagers is clearly one of the greatest collective faults of the German people and the most explicit demonstration of the cowardice to which they had been reduced by Hitler’s reign of terror: a cowardice that penetrated their behavior, and so deeply, that it kept husbands from telling their wives, and parents from telling their children. Without this cowardice, the worst excesses would not have happened, and Europe and the world would be a different place today.
Those who knew the horrible truth because of their own past or present responsibilities undoubtedly had good reasons to be silent, but as keepers of the secret they had no guarantee of safety even if they stayed silent. Take the case of Franz Stangl and the other butchers of Treblinka, who, after the uprising at the camp and its dismantling, were transferred to one of the most dangerous areas of partisan activity.
Willful ignorance and fear also determined the silence of many potential “civilian” witnesses of the infamies of the Lagers. During the last years of the war in particular, the Lagers constituted a system that was widespread, complex, and deeply ingrained in the daily life of the country. This system has been described, correctly, as the “univers concentrationnaire,” but it was not a closed universe.1 Large and small industrial firms, farms, and weapons factories took advantage of the almost costless workforce provided by the camps. Some companies exploited the prisoners ruthlessly, adopting the inhuman (and stupid) SS principle that one prisoner had the same value as another and anyone who died of exhaustion could be immediately replaced. A handful of other companies made cautious efforts to alleviate the prisoners’ suffering. Still others, or even the same ones, made a profit by providing supplies to the Lagers: lumber, construction materials, fabric for the prisoners’ striped uniforms, dehydrated vegetables for soup, and so forth. The multiple cremation ovens were designed, built, assembled, and tested by a German firm, Topf, of Wiesbaden (which was still in business in 1975, building crematoriums for civilian use, and saw no need to change the company name). It is hard to believe that the people who worked at these companies did not appreciate the significance of the quality or quantity of the items and systems that were being ordered by the SS. The same can be said about the supply of poison used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz: the product, basically hydrogen cyanide, had already been used for years to fumigate the holds of ships, but the sudden increase in orders starting in 1942 cannot have gone unnoticed. This must have raised questions, and indeed it did, but they were suffocated by fear, by the desire to make money, by the blindness and willful stupidity we have described, and, in some (probably not many) cases, by fanatical Nazi obedience.
Of course, the most substantial material for reconstructing the truth about the camps is the survivors’ memories. Regardless of the pity and indignation they arouse, they should be read with a critical eye. The concentration camps themselves were not always the best vantage point for knowing the camps: the prisoners, subjected to inhuman conditions, were rarely afforded a comprehensive view of their universe. In some cases, especially among those who did not understand German, they did not even know the exact location in Europe of their Lager, where they had arrived after a grueling and tortuous journey in sealed boxcars. They did not know that there were other Lagers, sometimes only a few kilometers away. They did not know for whom they were working. They did not understand the meaning of the mass transfers and of certain sudden changes in conditions. With death all around, the deportee was often unable to judge the extent of the massacre taking place before his eyes. The comrade who worked by his side one day was no longer there the next: he might be in the barrack next door, or erased from the world; there was no way to know. He felt dominated, in other words, by a huge edifice of violence and menace, but he could not construct a representation of it, because his eyes were glued to the ground by the needs of every minute.
&nb
sp; This limitation has influenced the testimony, oral and written, of the “ordinary” prisoners, the non-privileged ones, those, in short, who constituted the backbone of the camps and escaped death only through a combination of unlikely events. A majority in the Lager, they were a small minority of the survivors, and among them most enjoyed some privileges. Today, many years later, we can safely say that the story of the Lagers has been written almost exclusively by people who, like me, did not plumb the depths. The ones who did never returned, or if they did their capacity for observation was paralyzed by pain and incomprehension.
On the other hand, the vantage point of the “privileged” witnesses was certainly better, if only because it was situated higher and therefore looked out over a broader horizon; but it, too, was falsified, to a greater or lesser extent, by privilege itself. Privilege is a delicate subject (and not only in the Lager), and I will explore it later in this book as objectively as possible: for now I will say only that the largest category of privileged persons par excellence—namely, the ones who earned privileges through subservience to the camp authority—did not bear witness at all, for obvious reasons, or their testimony was erratic, distorted, or completely false. Therefore, the best historians of the Lagers came from the ranks of the very few who had the ability and the good fortune to attain a privileged vantage point without stooping to compromise, and the ability to relate what they had seen, suffered, and done with the humility of a good chronicler, mindful of the complexity of the Lager phenomenon and the variety of human destinies that played out in the camps. It is in the logic of things that these historians were almost all political prisoners. This is because the Lagers were a political phenomenon, and because the politicals—to a far greater extent than the Jews and the common criminals (the three main categories of prisoners, as we know)—were equipped with an educational background that enabled them to interpret the events they witnessed; because, being former combatants, or continuing to be anti-Fascist combatants, they realized that bearing witness was an act of war against fascism; because they had easier access to statistical data; and, finally, because often, in addition to occupying important posts in the Lagers, they were members of secret defense organizations. In the last years, at least, their living conditions were tolerable enough to permit them, for example, to write notes and to save them, which was unthinkable for the Jews and of no interest to the common criminals.