by Primo Levi
Then and there, those memories were worth a great deal. They allowed me to reestablish a connection with the past, rescuing it from oblivion and strengthening my sense of who I was. They convinced me that although my mind was gripped by everyday needs, it hadn’t stopped working. They promoted me, in my own eyes and in the eyes of my interlocutor. They granted me a fleeting but not foolish vacation: in fact, it was liberating and it made a difference—a way, in other words, of finding myself again. Anyone who has read the book or seen the film of Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, can imagine what it would mean to have to live in a world without books, and the value that the memory of books would take on in such a world. For me the Lager was this, too. Before and after “The Canto of Ulysses,” I remember pestering my Italian comrades to help me recover this or that fragment of my former world, without getting much out of them, indeed, seeing in their eyes irritation and suspicion: what does he want, this guy, with Leopardi and the Avogadro constant? Has he been driven mad by hunger?
Nor should I ignore the help I derived from my profession as a chemist. At the practical level, it probably saved me from at least some of the selections for the gas chamber. From my later readings on the subject (especially The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, by J. Borkin), I learned that although the Monowitz Lager was under the authority of Auschwitz, it was owned by I.G. Farbenindustrie; in other words, it was a private Lager. The German industrialists, who were somewhat less shortsighted than the Nazi leaders, realized that the specialists, the group to which I belonged after passing the chemistry exam that was administered, were not easily replaceable. I do not mean to refer here to this privileged status, or to the obvious advantage of working indoors, without physical fatigue and without Kapos always ready to beat us. I am referring to another advantage. I believe I can dispute “on the basis of personal experience” Améry’s assertion, which excludes scientists and especially technicians from the ranks of the intellectuals: for him intellectuals were to be recruited exclusively from the field of letters and philosophy. Was Leonardo da Vinci, who called himself an omo senza lettere (an unlettered man), not an intellectual?
Together with a wealth of practical notions, I had taken from my studies, and brought with me to the Lager, what for want of a better term I would call a legacy of mental habits, derived from chemistry and its related fields but with a much broader application. If I act in a certain manner, how will the substance I’m holding or my human interlocutor react? Why does it, or he, or she manifest or stop or alter a specific behavior? Can I anticipate what will happen around me in a minute, a day, or a month? If I can, which are the signs that matter and which should be ignored? Can I predict a blow, know where it will come from, shield myself from it, escape it?
But above all, and to be more specific, from my profession I acquired a habit that can be variously judged and defined as human or inhuman: the habit of never being indifferent to the people whom chance sets before me. They are human beings, but they are also “specimens,” samples in a sealed envelope to be identified, analyzed, and weighed. The cross-section of humanity that Auschwitz placed before me was abundant, varied, and strange. It consisted of friends, neutrals, and enemies, all of whom fed my curiosity, which some, then and later, have criticized as detached. Food that certainly helped to keep a part of me alive, and that subsequently provided material for thought and for writing books. As I said, I don’t know if I was an intellectual in the lower depths: maybe I was one intermittently, when the pressure let up. If I became one afterward, the experience I gained certainly gave me a hand. I know, this “naturalistic” attitude doesn’t come only or necessarily from chemistry, but for me it came from chemistry. It hardly seems cynical to say so, anyway: as for Lidia Rolfi and many other “lucky” survivors, for me the Lager was a university; it taught us to look around ourselves and take the measure of men.
In this respect, my vision of the world was different from and complementary to that of my comrade and antagonist Améry. Different interests are conveyed by his writings: the political combatant’s interest in the disease that plagued Europe and threatened the world (and still does); the philosopher’s interest in the Spirit, which in Auschwitz was empty; the interest of the demeaned scholar, stripped of his homeland and his identity by the forces of history. His gaze is directed upward, in fact, and rarely lingers on the commoners of the Lager, or on its typical character, the Muselmann, the exhausted man whose intellect is dying or dead.
So education could be helpful, if only in some marginal cases or for short periods; it could make a few hours beautiful, establish a fleeting connection with a fellow prisoner, keep the mind alive and sane. Of course it didn’t help to get one’s bearings or to understand: here my experience as a foreigner coincides with that of Améry the German. Reason, art, and poetry do not help to decipher the place from which they have been banished. In the daily life of “down there,” consisting of boredom punctuated by horror, it was healthy to forget them, just as it was healthy to learn to forget home and family. I do not mean to suggest a definitive oblivion, of which no one is capable, anyway, but, rather, an extradition to the attic of memory where we store the clutter no longer needed for everyday life.
The uneducated were more predisposed to this mental exercise than the educated. They were quicker to adapt to the “not trying to understand,” the first words of wisdom to learn in the Lager. Trying to understand, there, on the spot, was a useless undertaking even for the many prisoners who arrived from other camps or who, like Améry, knew history, logic, and morality, and had also experienced imprisonment and torture: a waste of energy that would more usefully be invested in the daily struggle against hunger and fatigue. Logic and morality impeded acceptance of an illogical and immoral reality: the result was a rejection of reality that, as a rule, quickly filled the educated man with despair. But there are countless varieties of the human animal, and I have seen and described men of refined culture, especially younger men, who cast it aside and became simpler, more barbaric, and survived.
The simple man, unaccustomed to asking himself questions, was shielded from the useless torment of wondering why. Besides, he often had a trade or a manual skill that made it easier for him to adapt. It would be hard to give a complete list, partly because it varied from camp to camp and from moment to moment. One curiosity: in Auschwitz, in December of 1944, with the Russians at the gates, daily air raids, and the freezing cold that cracked the pipes, an accounting team was established, the Buchhalter-Kommando. Steinlauf, whom I described in the third chapter of If This Is a Man, was one of the prisoners summoned to take part, which wasn’t enough to save him from death. This was clearly an extreme case, belonging to the context of general madness amid the collapse of the Third Reich. But it was normal, understandable, that tailors, cobblers, mechanics, and masons would find good jobs; in fact, there were too few. In Monowitz a masonry school was set up for prisoners under the age of eighteen (but certainly not for humanitarian purposes).
The philosopher, too, according to Améry, could reach acceptance but by a longer path. He might be able to overcome the barrier of common sense, which forbade him to accept such a brutal reality. Ultimately, living in a monstrous world, he would be able to admit that there are monsters, and that alongside the logic of Descartes exists the logic of the SS:
Were not those who were preparing to destroy him in the right, owing to the undeniable fact that they were the stronger ones? Thus, absolute intellectual tolerance and the methodical doubting of the intellectual became factors in his autodestruction. Yes, the SS could carry on just as it did: there are no natural rights, and moral categories come and go like the fashions. A Germany existed that drove Jews and political opponents to their death, since it believed that only in this way could it become a full reality. And what of it? Greek civilization was built on slavery and an Athenian army had run wild on the Island of Melos as had the SS in Ukraine. Countless people had been sacrificed as far back as the light of history reaches,
and mankind’s eternal progress was only a naïve belief of the nineteenth century anyhow. “Left, two, three, four” was a ritual just like any other. Against the horrors there wasn’t much to say. The Via Appia had been lined with crucified slaves and over in Birkenau the stench of cremated bodies was spreading. One was not Crassus here, but Spartacus, that was all.
The surrender to the intrinsic horror of the past could lead the scholar to an intellectual abdication and at the same time equip him with the defensive weapons of his uneducated comrade: “So has it always been, so will it always be.” My ignorance of history may have protected me from this metamorphosis. On the other hand, luckily for me, I was not exposed to another danger that Améry rightly mentions: by nature, the intellectual (the German intellectual, allow me to add to his formulation) tends to become complicit with Power and therefore to sanction it. He tends to follow in the footsteps of Hegel and deify the State, any State: the mere fact of existing justifies its existence. The chronicles of Nazi Germany are filled with cases that confirm this tendency: the philosopher Heidegger, Sartre’s teacher; the physicist Stark, a Nobel laureate; Cardinal Faulhaber, the supreme Catholic authority in Germany; and countless others acquiesced in Nazism.
Alongside this latent propensity of the agnostic intellectual, Améry observes something that all we former prisoners have observed: the non-agnostics, the believers in some faith, were better able to withstand the seduction of Power, provided, of course, that they were not believers in the National Socialist gospel. (This exception is not gratuitous: in the Lagers, there were also some die-hard Nazis—distinguished by the red triangle of political prisoners—who had fallen from grace for ideological dissidence or personal reasons. They were hateful to all.) Ultimately, they withstood the ordeal of the camps better and survived in proportionally higher numbers.16
Like Améry, I, too, entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and I have lived until today. In fact, the experience of the camp, its appalling evil, confirmed my agnosticism. It prevented me, and still does, from being able to imagine any form of providence or transcendental justice: Why the dying people in cattle cars? children in the gas chambers? Still, I have to admit that (only once) I felt the temptation to give up, to seek refuge in prayer. It was in October 1944, the only time I sensed clearly the imminence of death. Naked and pressed between my naked comrades, holding my registration card, I was waiting to pass in front of the “Commission” that, with a single glance, would decide whether I should go immediately to the gas chamber or if, instead, I was strong enough to continue working. For an instant, I felt the need to ask for help and asylum. Then, despite my distress, equanimity prevailed. The rules of the game don’t change when it’s about to end, or when you’re losing. A prayer in that situation would have been not only absurd (what rights could I have claimed? and from whom?) but also blasphemous, obscene, and filled with as much impiety as a nonbeliever can muster. I wiped out the temptation: I knew that otherwise, if I survived, I would have had to be ashamed.
The believers had better lives not only in the crucial moments of the selections or the air raids but also in the grind of daily life. Both Améry and I observed this. Their creed didn’t matter, whether religious or political. Catholic and reformed priests, rabbis of different orthodoxies, militant Zionists, naïve or advanced Marxists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses alike shared the redeeming power of their faith. Their universe was larger than ours, more extensive in space and time, and above all more comprehensible: they had a key and a foothold, a millenarian tomorrow that could lend meaning to their sacrifice, a place in heaven or on earth where justice and mercy had prevailed or would prevail in a perhaps distant but certain future: Moscow or the heavenly or earthly Jerusalem. Their hunger was different from ours. It was a divine punishment, atonement, a votive offering, or the wages of capitalistic rot. The pain in and around them was decipherable, and so it never overflowed into despair. They looked at us with pity, sometimes with scorn; during the breaks from our toil some of them tried to convert us. But how can an agnostic construct or provisionally accept an “opportune” faith only because it is opportune?
In the frenzied, intense days that immediately followed liberation, against a pitiful scene of the dying and the dead, of contaminated wind and polluted snow, the Russians sent me to the barber to be shaved for the first time in my new life as a free man. The barber was a former political prisoner, a French factory worker from the ceinture, the working-class suburbs of Paris. We immediately felt a sense of kinship and I made a few banal comments about our improbable salvation: condemned to death, we had been freed on the very platform of the guillotine, no? He looked at me openmouthed and exclaimed, scandalized, “mais Josef était là!”—but Josef was nearby! Josef? It took me a few seconds to realize that he was alluding to Stalin. The barber had never lost hope, not him. Stalin was his fortress, the Rock that is declaimed in the Psalms.
Needless to say, the demarcation between the educated and the uneducated did not coincide in the least with the line between believers and nonbelievers. Rather, it cut across it at right angles to create four sharply defined quadrants: the educated believers, the educated agnostics, the uneducated believers, and the uneducated agnostics—four small rocky, colored islands that stood out from the endless gray sea of the half-dead who perhaps had been educated or believers, but who no longer asked questions, and of whom it would have been useless and cruel to ask them.
Améry observes that the intellectual (the “young” intellectual, I would specify, such as he and I were at the time of our capture and imprisonment) derived an odorless, decorous, literary image of death from his readings. Here I translate “into Italian” his observations as a German philologist, who was obliged to quote the “mehr Licht!” of Goethe, Death in Venice, and Tristan. For us Italians death is the second term of the binomial “love and death.” It is the tender transfiguration of Petrarch’s Laura, Manzoni’s Ermengarda, and Tasso’s Clorinda; it is the soldier’s sacrifice in battle (“Chi per la patria muor, vissuto è assai”—he who dies for the fatherland has lived long and well); and it is, of course, Petrarch’s “Un bel morir tutta la vita onora”—to die well honors a whole lifetime. This immense archive of formulas to ward off evil did not last long in Auschwitz (nor would it, for that matter, in any hospital today). Death in Auschwitz was trivial, bureaucratic, and commonplace. It wasn’t commented on, it wasn’t “comforted by tears” (Foscolo). In the face of death, of inurement to death, the border between education and lack of education disappeared. Améry asserts that you no longer thought about “if” you would die, which was a given, but, rather, “how”:
Inmates carried on conversations about how long it probably takes for the gas in the gas chamber to do its job. One speculated on the painfulness of death by phenol injections. Were you to wish yourself a blow to the skull or a slow death through exhaustion in the infirmary?
Here my experience and memories depart from Améry’s. Maybe because I was younger or more ignorant than him, less damaged or less conscious, I almost never had time to devote to death. I had too many other things on my mind: to scrounge some bread, avoid the grueling work, patch my shoes, steal a broom, interpret the signs and faces around me. The business of living is the best defense against death, and not only in the camps.
15. “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” in At the Mind’s Limits, p. 90.
16. Levi is indirectly quoting Inferno III:63, which refers to the cowards as “a Dio spiacenti e a’ nemici sui,” hateful to God and to his enemies.
7
Stereotypes
People who have been imprisoned (and, in general, all those who have gone through severe experiences) can be divided into two distinct categories, with rare intermediate nuances: those who are silent and those who speak. Both groups have valid reasons. The ones who are silent feel more deeply the uneasiness that for the sake of simplicity I have called “shame”; they don’t feel at peace with
themselves, or their wounds are still raw. The ones who speak, and they often speak a great deal, yield to different impulses. They speak because, consciously or not, they identify imprisonment (no matter how long ago) as the center of their life, the event that, for better or worse, has marked their entire existence. They speak because they know they are witnesses at a trial whose dimensions span the planet and the centuries. They speak because, as a Yiddish saying goes, “It’s good to tell past troubles”;17 in the Inferno, Francesca tells Dante that there is “no greater pain / than to remember happy times / in misery,”18 but, as every survivor knows, the opposite is also true, that it’s good to be inside where it’s warm, seated before food and wine, and recall to oneself and others the exhaustion, the cold, the hunger, as, in the Odyssey, Ulysses immediately surrenders to the urgent need to tell his story before the feast laid out at the court of the King of the Phaeacians. They speak, perhaps exaggerating, like Swaggering Soldiers, of fear and courage, of cunning, of offenses, of defeats and a few victories;19 in doing so, they differentiate themselves from the “others,” consolidating their identity through membership in a guild, and they feel their prestige increase.
But they speak, or, rather, we speak (I may use the first-person plural: I do not belong to the silent category), in part because we are asked to. Some years ago, Norberto Bobbio20 wrote that the Nazi death camps were not “one” of the events but “the monstrous, perhaps unrepeatable event in human history.” The others, the listeners—friends, children, readers, or even strangers—are able to sense it, apart from their indignation and their pity. They understand the uniqueness of our experience, or at least they make an effort to understand it. This is why they urge us to speak and they ask us questions, sometimes embarrassing ones. Not all of their questions are easy for us to answer, since we are not historians or philosophers but witnesses, and, besides, the history of human affairs does not necessarily abide by strict logical models. Not every watershed is necessarily the consequence of a single “why.” Simplifications are good only for textbooks; there may be many “whys,” muddled or unknowable if not outright nonexistent. No historian or epistemologist has yet succeeded in proving that human history is a deterministic process.