by Primo Levi
Her father had just returned home when Thomas Mann spoke on the radio about Auschwitz, the gas, and the ovens:
We listened in horror, and for a long time none of us spoke. My father paced up and down the room, saying nothing, brooding, until I finally asked him, “Do you think it is humanly possible that people could be gassed and burned, and their hair, skin, and teeth used?” And he, who had been in the Dachau camp, answered, “No, it’s unthinkable. Someone of Thomas Mann’s stature should not let himself be swayed by these stories of atrocities.” . . . We first learned that it was true a few weeks later.
In another long letter she described their life in “internal emigration”:
My mother had a close Jewish friend. She was a widow and lived alone, her children had emigrated, but she could not make up her mind to leave Germany. We were persecuted, too, but we were “politicals”: for us it was different, and we had some luck despite the many dangers. I will never forget the night the woman came to us, in the dark, to tell us, “Please don’t come to see me anymore, and forgive me if I don’t come to you. Do you understand? It will put you in danger.” . . . We continued to visit her, of course, until she was deported to Theresienstadt. We never saw her again, and we didn’t “do” anything for her: what could we have done? Yet the thought that nothing could be done still torments us: please try to understand.
She told me that she had witnessed the euthanasia trials in 1967.30 One of the defendants, a doctor, stated in court that he had been ordered to personally inject the mentally ill with poison, and that he had refused because of professional ethics. On the other hand, turning the gas tap had seemed unpleasant but tolerable. When she got home, Hety found the cleaning woman, a war widow, busy with her work, and her son, who was cooking. All three of them sat down at the table, and she told her son what she saw and heard at the trial. All at once:
The woman put down her fork and spoke out very aggressively. “What is the point of these trials they’re holding now? What else could our poor soldiers have done if they were given these orders? When my husband came home from Poland on leave, he told me, ‘Almost the only thing we did was shoot Jews: always shooting Jews. We did so much shooting that my arm hurt.’ But what else could he have done if they gave him those orders?” . . . I fired her, repressing my temptation to congratulate her on her poor husband who had died in the war. . . . There you have it, how here in Germany we are still living surrounded by people like this.31
Hety had worked for many years at the Ministry of Culture for the state of Hessen: she was a diligent but impulsive official, the author of controversial reviews, a “passionate” organizer of conferences and meetings with young people, and equally passionate about the victories and defeats of her party. After her retirement, in 1978, her cultural life became even richer: she wrote to me about her travels, her readings, and her language courses abroad.
Above all, and for her whole life, she was avid, even starved, for human relationships: her rich and lasting relationship with me was only one of many. “My destiny pushes me toward people with a destiny,” she once wrote to me, but she was driven not by destiny but by a vocation. She sought them out, found them, and put them in touch with one another, curious about their encounters or confrontations. It was she who gave me Jean Améry’s address and gave my address to him, but on one condition: that both of us send her carbon copies of the letters that we exchanged (and we did). She also played an important part in helping me track down Dr. Müller, the chemist at Auschwitz, and later my provider of chemical products and penitent, whom I wrote about in the “Vanadium” chapter of The Periodic Table. He had been a colleague of her ex-husband. She also asked for the carbon copies of the “Müller file,” and with good reason. She later wrote intelligent letters to him about me and to me about him, dutifully sending each of us carbon copies of the letters she had written to the other.
On only one occasion did we (or, at least, I) sense a disagreement. In 1966, Albert Speer was released from the interallied Spandau prison. He was notoriously the “court architect” of Hitler, but in 1943 he was appointed minister of war production, and in that capacity he was largely responsible for the organization of the factories in which we died of exhaustion and starvation. At Nuremberg he was the only defendant to admit his guilt, even for things he did not know; indeed, precisely for not wanting to know about them. He was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, during which he wrote his prison diaries, published in Germany in 1975. At first Hety hesitated, then she read them, and was deeply disturbed by them. She asked for a meeting with Speer, which lasted two hours. She gave him Langbein’s book on Auschwitz and a copy of If This Is a Man. He gave her a copy of his Spandau: The Secret Diaries to send to me.
I received and read his diaries, which bear the mark of an educated and lucid man and of a change of heart that seems sincere (but an intelligent man knows how to simulate). In the book, Speer emerges as a Shakespearean figure, with boundless ambitions, so great that they blinded and corrupted him, but not as a barbarian, a coward, or a slave. I would have been happy never to have read it, because for me it is painful to judge someone, especially Speer, not a simple man, a guilty person who had paid for his crimes. I wrote to Hety with a touch of irritation: “What drove you to see Speer? Curiosity? A sense of duty? A mission?”
She wrote back:
I hope you took my sending of the Speer book in the right way; but your question is of course legitimate. . . . For the moment I only wanted to acquaint you with and give you an impression of what kind of a man allowed himself to be “enslaved” by and become a “creation” of Hitler. . . . He says (and I believe him) that he was traumatized by the whole concentration-camp complex and especially by the “extermination machinery” in Auschwitz and elsewhere. In his books he dedicates a lot of space to the ever-recurring question of how it was possible for him to “neither want to see nor to know” . . . and that in those days he was able to simply “repress” everything. . . . I do not have the impression that he is trying to justify himself: he would like to learn to understand what is so impossible to understand (also for him). . . . He impressed me as a person without “falsehood,” who sounds earnest and who is tormented by the past. For me he became a key: he is a symbolic figure, the symbol of Germany losing its way! . . . In the meantime he has read Langbein’s big Auschwitz book, which must have been very hard for him; and he will be reading your book in the next few days—I will write to you then to let you know of his reactions.
These reactions never arrived, to my relief: it would have been hard for me to have to reply to a letter (as is customary among civilized people) from Albert Speer. In 1978, apologizing to me because of the disapproval she sensed in my letters, Hety went to see Speer a second time, and she came back disappointed. She found him aged, egocentric, pompous, and stupidly proud of his past as a pharaonic architect. After that, the content of our letters shifted toward themes that were more alarming because they were closer to the present day: the Aldo Moro kidnapping; Herbert Kappler’s escape from an Italian hospital; the simultaneous deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists in the high-security Stammheim prison. She tended to believe the official thesis of suicide. I was skeptical. Speer died in 1981, and Hety, suddenly, in 1983.
Our friendship, which was almost exclusively epistolary, was long and rich, and often joyous. Strange, when I think about the enormous difference between our paths through life and our geographic and linguistic distance. Not so strange when I acknowledge that she, of all my German readers, was the only one who was pure of heart and therefore unencumbered by feelings of guilt; and that her curiosity was and is mine, and she struggled with the same ideas that I have explored in this book.
22. The translator was Heinz Riedt, a resident of East Berlin. Among the many things he shared with Levi was a common birth date, July 31, 1919.
23. Marchesi became the rector of the University of Padua on September 7, 1943, right after the armistice and before the formation of the
Republic of Salò, and he was one of the architects of Italy’s postwar constitution. Meneghetti, head of the pharmacological institute of the university, was a Socialist member of Justice and Liberty, the Italian anti-Fascist movement to whose military arm, the Action Party, Levi himself belonged. Pighin was an active member of the Resistance who was tortured and killed by the Fascist security irregulars on January 10, 1945.
24. Levi is referring to a peculiar use of the word “Einer,” inflected by Yiddish, in an episode that he relates in the chapter “Kraus” of If This Is a Man and in “Communication” in the present volume (see page 2482).
25. Unless otherwise noted, the letters have been translated directly from the German originals, as reproduced in the German edition of the book, Die Untergegangenen und die Geretteten, trans. Moshe Kahn (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990), pp. 175–209.
26. In 1956, the Hungarian people revolted against the Soviet-controlled government, but the USSR sent in troops and tanks and crushed the uprising.
27. Narses (c. 478–573) was the legendary Byzantine general under Justinian who led the emperor’s forces in a series of victories against the Goths in Italy.
28. This letter was translated from Italian.
29. After the war, when national boundaries were redrawn, the province of East Prussia became mostly Polish territory, and its German inhabitants fled westward or were expelled.
30. In 1967, a trial was held in Frankfurt of doctors who carried out the Nazi program of killing the mentally and physically handicapped.
31. The two excerpts from this letter are translated from the Italian, both here and in the German edition.
Conclusion
The experience that we survivors of the Nazi concentration camps bear witness to is alien to the younger generations in the West, and becoming more so with each passing year. For the young people of the 1950s and ’60s, these matters belonged to their parents: they were talked about in the family, and the memories still preserved the freshness of things seen. For the young people of the 1980s, they belong to their grandparents: distant, blurry, “historical.” The young are assailed by current-day problems that are different and more pressing: the nuclear threat, unemployment, the depletion of natural resources, the population explosion, and frenetically renewed technologies to which they have to adapt. The configuration of the world has changed profoundly, and Europe is no longer the center of the planet. The colonial empires have ceded to the pressures of the peoples of Asia and Africa, who are thirsting for independence, and they have broken up, not without tragedies and conflicts among the new nations. Germany, split in two for an indefinite future, has become “respectable,” and in fact it holds the destinies of Europe. The United States–Soviet Union dyarchy, born of the Second World War, persists. But the ideologies that uphold the governments of the only two victors of the last conflict have lost much of their credibility and luster. A skeptical generation is approaching adulthood, short not on ideals but on certainties, and in fact distrustful of the great revealed truths, and ready instead to accept the small truths, changing from month to month on the feverish wave of cultural fads, masterminded or random.
For us it is becoming harder and harder to speak with young people. We see it as both a duty and a risk: the risk of appearing outdated, of not being listened to. We have to be listened to: apart from our individual experiences, we were collective witnesses to a fundamental and unexpected event, fundamental precisely because it was unexpected, unforeseen by anyone. It happened contrary to every prediction. It took place in Europe. Incredibly, an entire civilian population that had just emerged from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar followed a two-bit actor whom people find laughable today. But Adolf Hitler was obeyed and acclaimed until the catastrophe struck. It happened once and it can happen again. This is the heart of what we have to say.
It can happen, anywhere. I do not mean nor can I say that it will happen. As I’ve just noted, it’s unlikely that all the factors that triggered the Nazi madness could occur again, and simultaneously. But some precursory signs are appearing. Violence, “useful” or “useless,” is before our eyes. It is spreading, through sporadic private incidents and government lawlessness, in the two areas customarily known as the first and the second worlds, that is to say, in parliamentary democracies and Communist-bloc countries. In the Third World it is endemic or epidemic. All that is needed is a new two-bit actor (there is no shortage of candidates) to mobilize the violence, legalize it, declare that it is necessary and just, and infect the world with it. Few countries can be guaranteed immunity from a future wave of violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic claims, religious or political fanaticism, or racial friction. We thus need to sharpen our senses and distrust the prophets, the charismatics, the persons who speak and write “fancy words” without the backing of sound reasons.
An obscene thought has been voiced that we need conflict, that the human race cannot live without it. It has also been said that local conflicts, violence in the streets, in the factories, and in the stadiums, are comparable to an all-out war, and that, like petit mal, the epileptic equivalent, they protect us from a grand-mal seizure. It has been noted that Europe has never gone forty years without a war: such a long European peace would be an historical anomaly.
These are deceptive and questionable arguments. Satan is not necessary: there is no need, ever, for wars and violence. There are no problems that cannot be settled around a table, so long as there is goodwill and mutual trust: or even mutual fear, as the current interminable stalemate seems to prove, in which the great powers confront each other with a cordial or a grim face, but have no qualms about unleashing bloody wars between their proxies (or allowing them to be unleashed), sending sophisticated weapons, spies, mercenaries, and military advisors rather than peace negotiators.
Nor is the theory of preventive violence acceptable: violence only begets violence, in a vicious cycle that accelerates over time rather than slowing down. In effect, many signs suggest a genealogy of contemporary violence that stems from the violence that reigned in Hitler’s Germany. Obviously it existed before, in the distant and the recent past: nevertheless, even in the midst of the senseless bloodshed of the First World War, features of mutual respect survived among the contenders, along with a trace of humanity toward prisoners and defenseless civilians, and a tendency to respect agreements: a believer would say, “a certain fear of God.” The adversary was neither a demon nor a worm. All that changed after the Nazis’ “Gott mit uns.” The Allies responded to Göring’s terroristic air raids with carpet bombings. The destruction of a people and of a civilization proved to be possible and desirable both in itself and as an instrument of domination. Hitler had learned the mass exploitation of slave labor in the school of Stalin, but it returned to the Soviet Union in amplified form after the war. The exodus of brains from Germany and Italy, together with the fear of being surpassed by Nazi scientists, gave birth to the nuclear bomb. The desperate Jewish survivors, fleeing Europe after the great shipwreck, created in the heart of the Arab world an island of Western civilization, a miraculous palingenesis of Judaism, and a pretext for renewed hatred. After the defeat, the silent Nazi diaspora taught the arts of persecution and torture to soldiers and politicians in a dozen countries bordering the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. Many new tyrants keep a copy of Mein Kampf in their drawer; it could still come in handy, maybe with some adjustments or the substitution of some names.
Hitler’s example showed just how devastating a war fought in the industrial age can be, even without recourse to nuclear weapons. This has been confirmed in the past twenty years by the ill-fated Vietnam venture, the Falkland Islands conflict, the war between Iran and Iraq, and the events in Cambodia and Afghanistan. Yet it has also demonstrated (not, unfortunately, in the rigorous sense of mathematicians) that, at least sometimes, and at least in part, historical wrongs are punished. The mighty leaders of the Third Reich ended up on the gallows or as suici
des. Germany suffered a Biblical “massacre of first-born sons” that decimated a generation, and a partition that put an end to the venerable German pride. It is not absurd to assume that, if Nazism had not proved to be so ruthless from the beginning, the alliance among its adversaries would never have been established or would have fallen apart before the end of the conflict. The world war that the Nazis and the Japanese wanted was a suicidal war: all wars should be feared as such.
I would like to add one final stereotype to the ones listed in chapter 7. Young people ask us, more frequently and more insistently as that time grows more remote, what cloth our “torturers” were made of. By “torturers” they mean our former guardians, the SS, and in my opinion the term is inappropriate: it implies deformed individuals, born bad, sadistic, flawed at birth. Instead, they were made from the same cloth as us, average human beings, of average intelligence and average malice: with some exceptions, they were not monsters, they had the same faces as us, but had been brought up badly. For the most part, they were crude and diligent lackeys and functionaries; some were fanatic believers in the Nazi gospel, many were indifferent, or afraid of punishment, or eager to advance their careers, or overly obedient. All of them had received the appalling miseducation provided and imposed by school according to the dictates of Hitler and his collaborators, and with the SS drills as the finishing touch. Many men joined the SS because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence, or even simply to escape family woes. Some—very few, in truth—had second thoughts, and requested transfer to the front, provided cautious assistance to the prisoners, or chose suicide. Let there be no mistake that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, was responsible but also that this responsibility encompasses the overwhelming majority of the German people. From the beginning—out of mental laziness, nearsighted calculation, stupidity, or national pride—they accepted the “fancy words” of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as he was blessed by fate and a lack of scruples, were devastated by his downfall, ravaged by grief, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later by unprincipled political gamesmanship.