by Primo Levi
Its historical interest is small, because it was never spoken by more than a few thousand people, but its human interest is great, like that of all fluid border languages. It has a marvelous comic force, arising from the contrast between the fabric of the speech, which is the rough, sober, and laconic Piedmontese dialect, never written except on a bet, and the Hebrew framework, plucked from the remote language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geologic, smoothed by the millennia like a riverbed by the glaciers. But this contrast mirrors another, that essential conflict of the Jews of the Diaspora, scattered among “the peoples” (the gôjím, that is), and stretched between divine vocation and the daily misery of exile; and still another, more general, and innate in the human condition, for man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, of divine breath and dust. The Hebrew people, after the dispersal, lived this conflict long and painfully, and drew from it not only its wisdom but its laughter, which is missing from the Bible and the Prophets. Yiddish is pervaded by it, and, within modest limits, so was the strange speech of our fathers in this land, which I want to recall here before it disappears: a skeptical, good-natured speech that might upon superficial examination appear blasphemous, but in fact has a richly affectionate and decorous intimacy with God.
The chemical analogy, still subtly ironic, changes focus in the chapter “Zinc.” It is 1938, the racial laws have not yet been promulgated in Italy, but they can be felt in the air. Newspapers and magazines, orchestrated by the totalitarian regime, write insistently about the Jews as different, as potential (or current) enemies of fascism, as damaging “impurities” in the pure body of the Italian nation; they cite as an example to be followed the Nuremberg Laws and repeat the arguments of Dr. Goebbels’s fanatical propaganda. The Jew, represented in cartoons with stereotypical Semitic features, is at the same time the capitalist who starves the “Aryan” peoples and the bloodthirsty Bolshevik, destroyer of Western civilization. It should be recalled that zinc reacts with acids only if it contains certain impurities: if it is extremely pure, it does not react. The young self whom I describe here is in a confused way proud to be “an impurity”:
For the wheel to turn, for life to live, impurities are needed. . . . We need dissent, difference, the grain of salt, the mustard seed. Fascism doesn’t want them, forbids them, and so you’re not a Fascist; it wants everyone to be the same, and you are not the same.
And a little further on:
I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt, the mustard seed. Impurity, certainly: since La Difesa della Razza1 had just begun publication in those months, and there was a lot of talk about purity, and I was starting to be proud of being impure. The truth is that until then being Jewish hadn’t much mattered to me: privately, and with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as a nearly negligible but curious fact, a small, cheerful anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles; a Jew is someone who doesn’t have a Christmas tree, who shouldn’t eat salami but eats it anyway, who learned a little Hebrew at the age of thirteen and then forgot it. According to the periodical cited above, a Jew is miserly and clever: but I was not especially miserly or clever, nor was my father.
It seems to me that this last passage closely reflects the state of mind and the circumstances of the majority of Italian Jews on the eve of the racial laws.
In the chapter “Gold,” things have come to a head. The Second World War is raging, in 1943 the Allies landed in Italy, fascism fell, and the German Army invaded northern Italy. Although unprepared, both politically and militarily, I considered that the only proper choice was to join the anti-German resistance. This was what many of my friends, both Jewish and Christian, had done. Indeed, Jewish participation in the Italian resistance was relatively substantial in terms of both numbers and leadership. But my partisan activity was destined to be short-lived. Owing to an informer, on December 13, 1943, I was captured by the Fascists in the mountains of Valle d’Aosta. Under questioning, I admitted to being Jewish. This was due in part to exhaustion but in part also to a resurgence of that pride I mentioned earlier, which is a product of persecution, and whose intensity is proportionate to the harshness of the persecution itself.
In February 1944, the Fascists handed me over to the Germans, who deported me to Auschwitz. The convoy that transported us to the Lager contained 650 people; 525 of them were killed right away; 29 women were interned in Birkenau; 96 men, including me, were sent to Auschwitz-Monowitz, a “Nebenlager” owned by I.G. Farbenindustrie. Of these, only about 20 men and women returned home. I survived imprisonment because of a combination of lucky circumstances: I never fell ill, I was helped by an Italian bricklayer, I was able to work for two months as a chemist in an I.G. Farbenindustrie laboratory. I was liberated, thanks to the rapid advance of the Red Army, in January 1945.
Already during captivity, in spite of the hunger, the cold, the beatings, the exhaustion, in spite of the gradual death of my comrades and the crowded living together at all times, I had felt the urgency to relate my experience. I knew that my chances of survival were very small, but I also knew that, if I survived, I would have to tell the story, I could not avoid it. Further, I knew that telling the story, bearing witness, was a purpose worth surviving for. Not surviving and telling the story but surviving in order to tell the story. In Auschwitz, I was already aware that I was living the fundamental experience of my life.
Indeed, as soon as I returned to Italy (in October 1945), I began writing, with no plan, with no concern about style, giving precedence to events that were fresher in my memory, or that seemed important in themselves, or charged with symbolic meaning. I was not aware, nor did I have the intention, of writing a book. Rather, I felt I was fulfilling a duty, paying a debt to dead comrades, and at the same time answering a need of my own. I must add that neither in this book nor in the subsequent ones did I ever face language problems. My education was exclusively Italian, Italian is the only language I know well, and I could not imagine using any other.
I was alerted to the fact that I was writing a book by friends who were reading my pages. They suggested that I organize these pages and finish them. This is how If This Is a Man, published in 1947, originated. Later, the book showed its vitality: it has been translated into nine languages and adapted for radio and the theater in various countries. Excerpts appear in many anthologies; the book is reprinted frequently; and to this day young people read it, as confirmed by the many letters I receive.
It is not a book purely of testimony. Reading it after many years, I recognize many intertwined themes: the effort to understand “how could it have happened,” the almost scientific study of human behavior (of myself and others) under those extreme circumstances, the painful and daily comparison with life as a free man, the reappearance (sometimes intentional, sometimes unconscious and spontaneous) of literary reminiscences from Dante’s Inferno. But among these themes there is one in particular that I would like to highlight here: the evocation of the Bible.
For the first time in my life, starting in the Italian transit camp of Fòssoli, I found myself segregated from the “normal” world and forcibly plunged into an exclusively Jewish environment. It was a brutal confirmation of my condition as a Jew: a sentence, a relapse, a revival of the Biblical tales of exile and migration. A tragic return, in which, however, alongside the despair stood the surprise and pride of a recovered identity. The following passage refers to the evening of our departure for Auschwitz from Fòssoli:
In Barrack 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and numerous children and grandchildren and his sons-in-law and hardworking daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters; they had come from Tripoli after many long journeys, and had always carried with them the tools of their trade, their kitchen utensils, and their accordions and violins, so they could play and dance after the day’s work. They were happy and pious folk. Their women, working silently and quickly, were the first to finish the preparations for the journey, in order to have time for mourning. When
all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied up, they loosened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the funeral candles on the ground, and, lighting them according to the customs of their fathers, sat on the bare soil in a circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping through the night. We gathered in a group before their door, and experienced within ourselves a grief that was new to us, the ancient grief of a people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus, renewed in every century.
This theme and the Biblical tone reappear often as the months of captivity go by. At times, what emerges is the perception of a fate decided far above man by an incomprehensible God:
On the march to work, limping in our clumsy wooden clogs on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived in Paris for twenty years but still speaks an implausible French. He is thirty, but, like all of us, could be taken for anywhere from seventeen to fifty. He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel, and moving story; because such are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, shocking necessity. We tell them to one another in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine—simple and incomprehensible, like the stories in the Bible. But are not they, too, stories in a new Bible?
The confusion of languages as a punishment for man’s hubris is a theme that recurs frequently. Here, however, the legend is transformed; the hubris is that of Hitler’s Germany forcing its slaves with a hundred languages to build its bold towers. For this, it will be punished:
The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak, and they were cemented by hate, hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel; and that is what we call it, Babelturm, Bobelturm; and we hate it as our masters’ insane dream of grandeur, their contempt for God and men, for us men.
And finally, at the moment of liberation, the memory of Biblical rescues returns but with utter ambivalence:
The Germans were not there. The towers were empty.
Today I think that if only because an Auschwitz existed no one in our age should speak of Providence. But in that hour the memory of Biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity undoubtedly passed like a wind through the mind of each one of us.
After writing If This Is a Man and seeing it published, I felt at peace with myself, like someone who has fulfilled his duty. I had borne witness, whoever wanted could read it. As a matter of fact, not many people did, because the book had been brought out by a small publisher, in a printing of only 2500 copies. Reviews were positive, and every now and then I would receive a letter expressing solidarity and praise, or would meet someone who had read the book; but there was no mention of reprints or translations and two years later the book was forgotten. I had committed myself wholeheartedly to my work as a chemist, I had married, I had been classified among “single book” authors, and I was hardly thinking of this one little book, although sometimes I dared to believe that the descent into hell had given me, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a “strange power of speech.”
Almost ten years later, I began thinking about the book again, on the occasion of an exhibit on the deportation that was held in Turin and elicited extraordinary interest, particularly among the young. I had contributed to the commentary on the exhibit, and young people (I was also relatively young) were crowding around me, asking questions, showing that they knew my book almost by heart, asking whether I didn’t have other stories to tell. I offered the book to the publisher Einaudi, which published it again, in 1958. Since then, the reprints have never ceased.
Yes, I had other stories to tell. My liberation was not followed by a speedy return home. Instead of being repatriated by the shortest route, along with tens of thousands of other former prisoners of the Germans, military and civilians, Christians and Jews, French, English, Americans, Greeks, etc., I was sent to the interior of the Soviet Union, where I spent the entire summer of 1945. We were not treated badly, but we were suspicious. The excuses of the Soviet authorities (that there were no trains, that the war with Japan was not over yet) were not convincing. We were terrorized by the thought of a new imprisonment, knew nothing of the fate of our loved ones, and were tormented by homesickness.
Encouraged by the success of the new edition of my first book, in 1961 I began writing a memoir of my return: in the evenings, on Sundays, during the breaks in my job as a paint technician. The moment was favorable for two reasons: in Italy, a wave of optimism and relative prosperity prevailed after the hardship of the postwar period; internationally, the cold war had been followed by détente between the United States and the USSR. This made it easier to talk objectively about the latter country without being accused of either anti-communism or subservience to the Italian Communist Party. In this second book, The Truce, I tried to depict the Soviets as I had seen them, “from below,” and living among them, especially among the soldiers of the Red Army, tired of war, intoxicated by victory, totally unaware of the Western world.
That journey home was not pleasant, but it proved to be a remarkable observatory for realities normally inaccessible to an Italian. Among them, I must mention here the direct contact with Ashkenazi Judaism. The image of it that I had acquired in the Lager was distorted (everything in the Lager was distorted) and, above all, schematic. There were millions of Jews in Russia and Poland, and the Nazis had sent them to the Lager to be exterminated. The endless journey imposed on us by the Russians added details and nuance to this image. I was passing through countries very different from Italy, barren and wild, primitive and violent. Hostility toward the Jews long preceded the German invasion; it was endemic and constant. For centuries, Jews had been living in a state of segregation, linguistically as well. Wandering through Ukraine, then in White Russia, we encountered Jewish soldiers of the Red Army; young people who had fought with the partisans; families that had escaped the Einsatzkommandos by hiding in faraway places and who were now returning home by whatever means possible; villages deep in the forests whose once flourishing yeshivas were now destroyed—shreds of an exploded, mortally wounded Jewish world that was now seeking a new equlibrium. A few years later I drew inspiration from it to write this short poem:
Our fathers on this earth,
Merchants of many gifts,
Shrewd wise men whose fertile progeny
God sowed across the world
As mad Ulysses sowed salt in the furrows:
I have found you everywhere,
As many as the sands of the sea,
You stiff-necked people,
Poor tenacious human seed.
I will not devote much space here to the two books of short stories, Natural Histories and Flaw of Form, as they are little known abroad and are less committed, and the Jewish theme appears only intermittently. The stories vary in content, some bordering on science fiction, and they were written at different times and with different motivations. Yet some of them relate (maybe unconsciously) to the midrashic tradition of the moral tale. For instance, “Angelic Butterfly” imagines that a Nazi scientist discovers that man is merely the larva of a different animal, just as the caterpillar is of the butterfly. However, man never undergoes mutation because he dies too early. Would mutation transform man into an angel, or maybe a superman? The scientist gives a group of prisoners in a Lager medicines intended to speed up mutation. Rather than angels, however, they become huge, monstrous, flightless birds that are devoured by the starving inhabitants in the days of the battle of Berlin. “The Servant,” an ironic reinterpretation of the Golem legend, imagines that Rabbi Loew of Prague knew the secrets of genetics and informatics, and so the Golem, his creature, is nothing other than a robot. Elsewhere I assume that, on the sixth day of Creation, a technical commission discusses in strictly business terms “Project Man.” It decides to create a man-bird, but God the Father i
ntervenes, with his full authority, and instantly creates a mammalian man, vaguely apelike, making the woman from his rib.
I’ve already mentioned passages of The Periodic Table that touch upon Jewish themes. The following book, The Wrench, is my only work that does not have Jewish references. The central message of this novel is the dignity of work, especially the artisan’s work, as today’s substitute for adventure and original research. This is a topic that I consider relevant in any time, place, or social structure. However, as I was writing the book, I was not unaware of the many references to the nobility of work, and its necessity, which are scattered throughout the Talmud.
The volume Lilith and Other Stories includes thirty-six short stories, most of them first published in newspapers or magazines. The first twelve, which have earned more attention from the critics, contain (in my own words, taken from one of the stories) “what was left out of my first two books.” After approximately thirty years, I felt that the patrimony of memories from the Lager had not yet been entirely expended and that it was worth going back to it. Obviously, the perspective had changed. I no longer felt the urge to bear witness and liberate my inner self; I thought I had said everything about the sociology of the Lager, its essential horror, its nature as a distorted reflection of today’s world, its laws. In a fairly serene mood, I wished instead to study again from close up certain individuals from that time, victims, survivors, and oppressors, who stood out in my memory against the gray, collective, and impersonal background of the “drowned.” In If This Is a Man, I described the latter as follows: