by Primo Levi
The French revisionists, on the other hand, deny the facts. Their arrogance and impudence are astounding, but their arguments, which are extremely verbose, boil down to little: all the testimony of the survivors—Jews, Russians, Poles, and Communists—must be rejected, because it is “obviously” biased; all material proofs are forgeries; all the confessions of the guilty were extorted through torture, blackmail, or drugs. It is frightening to think about what could happen in twenty years, when all the eyewitnesses will be gone. Then the forgers will have a free hand; they will be able to assert or deny anything. If convenient, they will demonstrate that the Second World War never took place: the Siegfried and Maginot lines never existed; their still visible ruins were built a few years ago by specialized firms, based on the drawings of obliging set designers, and the same applies to war cemeteries. All pictures from the time are photomontages. All statistics about casualties are falsified, the product of self-serving propaganda. Nobody died in the war because there was no war. All diaries and memoirs are lies, or the work of lunatics, or the result of corruption and violence. War widows and orphans are salaried extras.
Until now, the sacrilegious audacity of the revisionists has not turned, for example, to the Nazis’ exploits on the war’s fronts or their acts of retaliation on the home fronts; even for revisionists it would be difficult to whitewash Marzabotto or the Ardeatine Caves or Lodz or the slaughters committed by the Einsatzkommandos behind the vast Russian front. Whole countries would have risen up to restore the truth. It has been easier, and more advantageous, to stick to the camps: more advantageous because the camps were the gravest crime of the Third Reich; and easier because there were only a few survivors, a few witnesses, and because the Jews, who were the main victims of the camps, were not a single nation but came from dozens of different countries, from North Africa to Norway and from Belgium to Ukraine. However, there is no doubt that if the vigilance of historians, of the public, and of democratic institutions were to slacken, the whole monstrous Nazi machinery would be exonerated, and the revulsion that all Europe continues to feel toward totalitarian regimes would tend to disappear. For this reason it is an important task for us—Jews, survivors, democratic and anti-Fascist Europeans—to prevent this outrage. If the world could be convinced that Auschwitz did not exist, it would be easier to build a second Auschwitz, and there is no guarantee that it would devour only Jews.
Lecture written in June 1982 for a 1983 meeting of the Italian Jewish
Communities that was later canceled; part of the text was merged in
the Preface to The Drowned and the Saved. In Guido Lopez, ed.,
Se non lui, chi (If Not Him, Who) (Rome: Center for Jewish Culture
of the Israelite Community of Rome, 1987)
A Rebirth
Old photographs are cruel: they stir up sediments, cause pointless regrets. Yet I keep them, for reasons that I do not understand well—maybe sheer narcissism, maybe a vague expectation that they may interest someone or could bear witness to an epoch. I looked again at the pictures taken at the Campiello Prize ceremony in 1963 with mixed feelings, sad and happy, but with the definite impression that they portray what in my former profession is called a color change.
I had written and published my first book, If This Is a Man, in 1947, and nothing further for fourteen years. I did not feel the urge to write, and it seemed to me that nobody needed my writings. I was a chemist in a factory; my daily work was hard but almost never boring. It was concrete and gave me security. It also brought me worries, but it was my job, the trade that I had chosen and for which I had studied, I had grown up inside it, I had been educated in it, it had shaped my way of living and of looking at the world—maybe even my language. It gave me my bread, and the notion of leaving it and devoting myself to writing was far from my mind. I thought about it occasionally, on the bad days that occur in any job, but not seriously, just as we dream of islands. It was not a plan but a daydream; the Turinese do not leave certainty for uncertainty, the old ways for the new ones. After all, work is the human condition, and to work, by definition, means to get up early in the morning, to negotiate the city traffic.
The desire to write returned toward the end of 1961, unexpectedly, the way a love is born; maybe it was because the Italian economic miracle that had blossomed a little earlier had relaxed factory life somewhat. I realized that I still had a lot to say: in just one year of work (yes, this, too, was work, but light, festive, autonomous, my own) I wrote The Truce, the story of my return from prison. Unlike its older brother, this second book immediately appeared to be lively, born under a benign star, so much so that it took If This Is a Man by the hand and put it back into circulation. Nevertheless, I continued to refuse the designation of writer. I was a chemist, an expert in insulating varnishes who happened to have written two books by working overtime evenings and Sundays. I had no more doubts; with The Truce I had exhausted my reservoir of memories—I had completed the tale of my basic experience, the experience of Auschwitz and of the return from Auschwitz.
My publisher’s proposal to compete for a literary prize fell like a meteorite on my settled and orderly existence. The competition in question was the first year of the Campiello, a literary prize that was serious and important but newly launched; and it was like sloughing my skin. I felt acknowledged and flattered. At the same time I felt, within my new skin, the tickle of self-irony—you, in Venice, among career men of letters and descendants of the Doges, maybe in evening dress, still with the smell of paint on you! I remember that the crucial announcement that I was on the short list and had a good chance to win reached me at the test desk.
I was wrong to be so afraid, but I was right to guess that the Campiello was a decisive step. It was a second graduation at an age when many lower their sails; it was the entrance into a new world, full of provocations and risks—and I had not yet lost, at the age of forty-four, my taste for risk. I did not relinquish right away the security of factory work, but I accepted the label of writer and drew up for myself a different future. At a yet unspecified time I would abandon my job as a shaper of matter and undertake a new one. It was like preparing to be born a second time.
Il Gazzettino, July 25, 1982 (written on the occasion of the
twentieth presentation of the Campiello Prize, which in 1982
was awarded to If Not Now, When?)
The Daring People of the Ghetto
To the hurried visitor, today’s Warsaw does not reveal the deep malaise that is eating away at the country. It is a clean, tidy, modern city, brightened by green spaces, with modest and functional housing, with beautiful avenues crisscrossed by efficient means of public transportation and a few cars (as a matter of fact, many citizens envy the chaotic traffic of our cities).
It is, however, an artificial city. The Warsaw of the thirties was almost completely destroyed: by the barbaric aerial bombardments with which the Germans, in 1939, launched, without warning, their invasion of the country and, later, to a terrible extent, during the nationalist insurrection of August 1944. The shredded urban fabric was rebuilt after the peace with financial help from the Soviets, who, stopping on the other side of the Vistula, had left to the Germans the dirty work of liquidating the Polish national armed forces, whom the Soviets themselves disliked.
In this new city there is a singular place. In the Muranów neighborhood, in a humble open space, and against the anonymous background of public housing, stands the monument to the heroes of the ghetto: a truncated pyramid with rather naïve and rhetorical high-relief decorations. But rhetoric is an integral part of monuments; there is no monument that does not seem rhetorical after one or two generations.
Yet the visitor’s mood changes suddenly when he ponders the facts evoked by that monument. In a city that was repeatedly destroyed, Muranów was more than destroyed; it was literally razed to the ground, turned into a wasteland of crushed stones, rubble, and brick.
The German talent for destruction was unleashed against this ne
ighborhood because the ghetto was there, and because there, exactly forty years ago, something happened that should have amazed the world—had the world known about it. In April 1943, on the first day of Passover, a band of Jews walled up in the ghetto declared war on Great Germany, took up arms, incredibly won the first battle, and then were exterminated.
In the mosaic of European resistance movements, the struggle of the Warsaw Ghetto has a unique place. Those insurgents had no territory behind them, did not expect help either by land or by air, had no allies; for years they had been living in miserable conditions. All Christian Poles had been forced out of the small area of the ghetto, which was surrounded by a high wall. The 140,000 Warsaw Jews were moved there in their stead, to be gradually followed by other Jews, from other cities. In January 1941, the boundaries of the ghetto were further reduced, while the number of its inhabitants exceeded half a million.
The overcrowding was terrifying: from seven to ten people in a room, later as many as fifteen. The streets themselves were permanently filled with a crowd that was desperate, restless, and above all hungry. Food rations were less than half of the vital minimum, even lower than the rations in the camps. Those who climbed over the wall were shot, yet many, especially children, risked their lives every day to smuggle into the ghetto food bought on the black market in the Christian part of the city.
Nevertheless, in this citadel, polluted by the stench of the corpses that every morning lay by the hundreds in the streets, infested by rats and epidemics, terrorized by SS raids, schools, libraries, synagogues, infirmaries, mutual aid societies functioned. Factories that produced goods for the German Army were also functioning. Laborers, men and women, were compelled to work exhausting hours for paltry pay, yet the work was sought after, as it was the only (temporary!) protection from deportation “to the east.”
Signs posted at street corners spoke of farmwork in the fields, but people soon learned that that meant the total extermination camps, Treblinka and Belzec. There also existed, in spite of German inspections, reprisals, and spies, an embryonic military structure made up almost entirely of young Zionists.
Their combat experience was almost nonexistent and their weaponry laughable: a few pistols, rifles, and machine guns, in part obtained from the Polish underground, in part bought at exorbitant prices on the black market, in part taken from the Germans in daring attacks, in part, again, built piece by piece with insane patience, in the workshop-barracks that labored for the Germans.
And they lacked above all what gave strength to other resistance movements: a solid hope of overcoming the enemy and surviving—if not all of them, at least a few—to build a better world. But the defenders of the ghetto had no chance of saving themselves, and they knew it. Their only choice was between two ways of dying.
On April 18, 1943, it was learned that the Germans were preparing a mass deportation. The next day, about a thousand SS soldiers who had entered the ghetto were met by gunshots and incendiary bombs, and they retreated in disarray. The German commander was replaced immediately, and from the reports of his successor, General Jürgen Stroop, one can measure the moral gap between the adversaries. Every line drips with an a priori contempt for the desperate heroism of the Jews.
That Jews know how to fight, and in those conditions, goes beyond Stroop’s mental capacity; for him, his adversaries are nothing more than “assassins and bandits.” Stroop describes, without a hint of shame, in his bureaucratic prose, Jews who hurl themselves from balconies rather than surrender, women who “wielded guns with both hands.” He could not understand that, while his men fought in blind obedience to orders, each of his enemies had made a superhuman individual choice.
The unequal fight went on for more than a month, to the growing surprise of the Germans and the boundless fury of Hitler and Goebbels. On May 16, Stroop declared that the “great operation” had ended. In reality, however, hidden among the ruins, concealed in the sewer network, in the cellars, in the attics, about a hundred Jews continued to fight, on and off, until December. A very few among the defenders of the ghetto survived by joining partisan groups.
Forty years later, and in an ever more restless world, we do not want the sacrifice of the insurgents of the Warsaw Ghetto to be forgotten. They showed us that, even where all is lost, man can save, together with his own dignity, the dignity of future generations.
La Stampa, April 17, 1983
Barbarians of the Swastika
By 1943 many, if not all, Italians knew that Hitler’s Germany was fighting the war by the most unorthodox means. The magazine Signal, with the entire Fascist press in tow, depicted the National Socialist fighter in an idealized and heroic manner: handsome, athletic, splendidly armed, proud, noble, gallant. But those who had seen the Germans in action (first and foremost, the Italian soldiers returning from the Russian and Baltic fronts) knew how harsh they could be. Still, the way the German military in Italy reacted to Badoglio’s September 8 armistice was astonishing, and caught everyone unprepared.1
People had expected bloody acts of reprisal in response to the Italian “betrayal,” and, as we know, reprisals did indeed take place. But they had not expected the swift determination with which the Nazis resorted to the mass deportation of all those who were considered hostile or potentially dangerous. Within days, or even hours, the Italian armed forces, whether within the country or in the occupied territories, were disarmed and loaded on trains heading north. It was immediately evident—and the long months of German occupation of northern Italy confirmed this—that the train, this nineteenth-century symbol of progress and civilization, in Nazi hands had become a sophisticated instrument of persecution, humiliation, and death.
Partisans, real or suspected political opponents, Jews, striking workers, men and women, ordinary people surprised in their homes or in the street by a roundup: for all of them, the sinister trains of boxcars sealed from the outside, the windows (when there were windows) screened by barbed wire, were the first chapter of a new ordeal—deportation. It is no accident that for the deportees the journey toward an unknown destination, during which they were packed like cheap merchandise into a few square meters of wooden floor, without air, often without food or water, is engraved in indelible characters in their memory.
For all of them, the journey was a tragic revelation: a passage from home and country toward nothingness; from civilization toward barbarism. The very way in which the journey was organized and carried out demonstrated openly, even to the most optimistic, that in the Nazi universe there was no place for humanity.
In Notizie della Regione Piemonte, April 1983 (special issue on the resistance and deportation)
1. On September 8, 1943, an armistice was announced between the government led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio and Allied forces in Italy.
A Mysterious Sensibility
Few writers have shared Kafka’s fate. As the decades passed after his untimely death, he did not go out of fashion, nor was he forgotten or judged to be merely a reflection of his era. Rather, he gradually emerged as a harbinger, as if he had possessed that mysterious sensibility which enables some creatures to predict earthquakes. Undoubtedly, even in his time, there were warning signs, but they were mixed up with different or opposite ones. The West had emerged from the bloodbath of the First World War wounded, but not without hope for the future, restless, yet confident in its strength. Now, in that background noise, Kafka was able to distinguish significant “harmonics.” This is why his books are best read in this time of “vanishing” confidence: they anticipate many of the ailments that afflict us today.
Which ailments? The crisis of the idea of progress and the prevalence of the opposite perception—of a regression imposed by an obscure force, by an absurd and anonymous network of power. The cruelty of man ennobled by reasons of state (how can we forget the calligraphic machine of In the Penal Colony?). The hermetic universe, impervious to our reason, a labyrinth without Ariadne’s thread. The individual innocent-impotent, convicted without
judgment by a foul yet unknowable court for a crime that is never revealed to him.
For me, a survivor of Auschwitz, reading Kafka again was a profound experience: a denial of my Enlightenment optimism and a singular way of reliving that distant time of my life.
Il Tempo, July 3, 1983
The Pharaoh with the Swastika
In 1943 I had a degree in chemistry and was working in Milan. I lived in a sort of commune (back then they were not yet called that) of young Jews who were financially self-sufficient. We shared lively intellectual interests and an ironic rather than violent dislike for fascism.
Four years earlier, the Fascist racial laws had expelled us from society and had branded us as biologically inferior; not a day went by without newspapers and magazines calling us alien to the country’s traditions, different, harmful, vile, enemies.
Jews had been driven out of all state employment, teaching, public administration, the armed forces; Jewish doctors and lawyers could not have “Aryan” clients; no Jew could own a radio, employ a Christian maid, manage an industry, own land, publish books.
The trickle of slanders and prohibitions, some cruel, others absurd—all painful and damaging—intensified from month to month. How to defend ourselves? Sticking together, cultivating the friendship of the many Aryans who were anti-Fascist or not Fascist, making an effort to laugh and ignore the future.
We all came from bourgeois families; none of us had inherited the seed of active resistance and rebellion; none of us knew how to use a weapon. In retrospect, we were irresponsible, inept, and poorly informed; on the other hand, so were the vast majority of Italians.