The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they have no fear, because they are too tired to understand.

  They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could encompass all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image, which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, head bowed and shoulders bent, on whose face and in whose eyes no trace of thought can be seen.

  Among these “revisited” characters there is an honest and gentle fellow prisoner whom I tried to convince of the necessity of stealing from the Germans in order to survive; another comrade, a practicing Jew, who on the eve of Yom Kippur refused to eat his soup; a third who told me the troubling legend of Lilith, the first wife of Adam and God’s concubine. One of these stories—in my view, the most important—summarizes in a few pages the tale of Chaim Rumkowski, the president of the Jewish council in the Lodz Ghetto. It’s well-known that this man accepted all kinds of compromises in order to preserve the pitiable authority vested in him by the Germans. He adopted without hesitation, and without feeling ridiculous, all the exterior, “royal” symbols of power, bravely defending it against the Germans themselves. According to a rumor circulating at the time in Poland, when the ghetto was liquidated and he was to be deported to a Lager like everyone else, Rumkowski requested and was allowed to make his last journey in a special railway car. In this grotesque and tragic tale, with its Shakespearean flavor, I recognized a metaphor of our civilization: especially of the imbalance we experience, and are used to, between the enormous amount of time and energy invested in the pursuit of power and prestige and the basic futility of these goals. We tend to “forget that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that outside the fence are the lords of death, and a little way off the train is waiting.”

  I still have to talk about my latest book, If Not Now, When?, which was published last April. It is a novel, and its origins go far back in time. The seeds of its development are basically two. The more remote is the almost photographic memory of an episode of our adventurous return from deportation. In October 1945, at the Italian border, we realized that the very long freight train that was taking us home no longer had sixty cars but sixty-one. In The Truce, I described the event thus:

  At the tail end of the train, traveling with us toward Italy, was a new car, crowded with young Jews, boys and girls from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them looked more than twenty, but they were extremely determined and confident; they were young Zionists, they were going to Israel, taking any route they could and by any means they could. A ship awaited them in Bari. They had bought the train car and to hook it up to our train had been the simplest thing in the world, they hadn’t asked permission from anyone—they had simply hooked it up. I was amazed, but they laughed at my amazement. “Is Hitler not dead?” their leader asked me, with the intense gaze of a hawk. They felt immensely free and strong, masters of the world and of their destiny.

  The more recent seed of the book is a story I was told by a friend in 1971. In the summer of 1945 my friend, a former refugee in Switzerland, had volunteered to assist foreign Jews who were flocking in disarray to Italy from Central Europe. They were miserable, traumatized people, who had lost relatives, home, homeland, money, health—everything but the hope of building a future for themselves somewhere else. Arriving in Milan along with them, however, were a few small groups of refugees of a different kind. These men and women refused the designation of “displaced persons.” They called themselves partisans and spoke about their years of guerrilla operations and sabotage against the German troops.

  These two seeds remained dormant for a long time. They were revived by the intergenerational controversy that arose a few years ago (in Israel and elsewhere) over the behavior of the Jews in response to the Nazi massacre. Had they truly let themselves be led to the slaughter without any resistance? If so, why? If not, how many had resisted and when, where, how? In my opinion, this debate flies in the face of history and is tainted by prejudice. As a former partisan and former deportee, I know well that there are political and psychological circumstances when resistance is possible, and others when it is not. It was not my intention to join the discussion, but I believed I had enough narrative energy to extract from those seeds a story worth reading. Obviously, it would be a historical novel; maybe also, in a more nuanced way, a novel with a message. Most of all, however, it would be a wide-ranging action novel. Further, I wanted to pay homage to those Jews, whether a few or many, who in despair had found the strength to oppose the Nazis and in that unequal struggle had recovered dignity and freedom.

  The topic suited me well. My ordeal in the concentration camp, my reading of Yiddish authors, business trips to the Soviet Union had left me with a lively interest in the culture of Eastern Jews, a fabulously rich and vibrant culture, yet destined to be transplanted or to die out. But it wasn’t my culture: my experiences and knowledge were not enough, and a period of study was indispensable. Before I began to write, I devoted almost a year to collecting and reading documents and books. While I wanted to write a novel, I did not want in any way to be at odds with historical events or to diverge from reality. I consulted documentation from Allied, Soviet, and Italian sources, and even a chronicle of the Jewish partisan war (Di milchamà fun di Jiddische Partisaner in Mizrach-Europe; The War of the Jewish Partisans of Eastern Europe) written by Moshe Kaganovich, a partisan commander, and published in Yiddish in Buenos Aires in 1956. Since it’s difficult to depict a social environment and to have characters speak if you do not know their language, I studied some Yiddish grammar and vocabulary. And since Yiddish culture, like all preindustrial and patriarchal cultures, is imbued with popular wisdom and proverbs, I also studied collections of sayings and proverbs and the “Yiddishe Witze” compilations. It is no accident that the very title of the book is taken from a well-known verse of the Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot).

  This may be the only occasion when I had to confront a real (but unusual) linguistic challenge. I had to give the reader the impression that the dialogues between my characters, obviously in standard Italian, were translated from Yiddish, a language that I do not know well and that the average Italian reader does not know at all. I can’t tell whether the challenge was met; the verdict is left to those future readers who actually know Yiddish.

  I did not set out to write a true story. Rather, I wanted to reconstruct the hypothetical but plausible itinerary of one of the groups described in the texts that I had read and which indicated that, within the vast network of European resistance, the Jewish presence was more important than is commonly believed.

  The characters of If Not Now, When? are about thirty Russian and Polish Jews, men and women. Soldiers separated from the Red Army, survivors of the ghettos and of the massacres of the Einsatzkommandos, they do not initially have a definite political or ideological education. Only one of them—a woman—professes herself to be at once Communist, Zionist, and feminist. The others are driven mostly by the necessity of defending themselves and by a vague longing for revenge, rehabilitation, and freedom. They meet and join together “like drops of mercury,” individually or in groups, in the forests of White Russia and in the swamps of the Pripet Marshes, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected, by the Soviet partisan units:

  Each one, man or woman, carried a different history, as heavy and scalding as molten lead; each would have been grieving over a hundred dead if the war and three terrible winters had left the time and the leisure to do so. They were weary, penniless, and filthy, but not beaten; the children of merchants, tailors, rabbis, and cantors, they had armed themselves with weapons taken from the Germans, they had won the right to wear those tattered uniforms wi
thout insignia or rank, and they had tasted more than once the bitter food of killing. . . . In each day’s new adventure in the partizanka, on the frozen steppe, in the snow and in the mud, they had found a new freedom, unknown to their fathers and their grandfathers, a contact with other men, both friends and enemies, with nature and with action that intoxicated them like the wine at Purim, when it is customary to abandon the usual sobriety and drink until you can no longer tell the difference between a blessing and a curse. They were cheerful and ferocious, like animals released from a cage, like slaves rising up to take vengeance. . . . Many of [them] had never tasted freedom, and [they had] learned to appreciate it here, in the forests, in the marshes, and amid much danger, along with adventure and brotherhood.

  Following orders from Moscow, they move westward in order to stay close behind the retreating Germans but also because they no longer have a homeland, a home, a family, and they hope to start a new life in the land of Israel, of which they have a millenary and mythical image. The harshness of the life forced upon them—endless marches, battles, round-up operations, escapes, hardships—makes them uncivilized and wild. Yet they haven’t lost certain traits that make them different from the other partisans they meet: the creative imagination, the old Jewish self-irony that immunizes them against any rhetoric, the passion for dialectic discussion, the conflict between traditional gentleness and the necessity of killing. Accepted for a time by a unit of Soviet partisans, they participate in the diversion of German airdrops, seize and destroy a train, help Polish peasants with the harvest, kill the guards of a small German Lager and free the surviving prisoners. Overtaken by the war front, they are interned by the Russians but escape in a stolen truck. The war ends, in Germany a sniper kills one of the women, and the group avenges her in a bloody reprisal. At last they cross the Italian border, in a railway car bought on the black market, and reach the Refugee Assistance Center in Milan, where one of the women delivers a baby. It is August 7, 1945, the day of Hiroshima. The story ends with this twofold, deliberately ambiguous message.

  In Italy, the book has had an excellent reception from both critics and the general public. It was widely read during the summer season and was awarded two of the three most sought-after Italian literary prizes, the Viareggio and the Campiello. A French translation is under way. The fortuitous coincidence of the publication of the book with the war in Lebanon has helped its editorial success, and, at the same time, has distorted its meaning for some critics and readers, who have taken it for an “instant book.” In fact, today there is no longer any need to prove that, under certain circumstances, the Jews, too, know how to fight.

  In La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 50 (May–August 1984). (Originally presented at a conference on Jewish writing

  since the Second World War sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation,

  held in Bellagio from November 29 to December 3, 1982.)

  1. La Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race) was a violently anti-Semitic biweekly that began publication in 1938.

  The Summer for a Book

  It seems to me that it is indispensable for every Jew, in fact for every civilized person, to read The Terrible Secret, by Walter Laqueur.

  Let me be clear: it’s not summer reading, and constitutes a duty rather than a pleasure. It does not at all mitigate the immeasurable sin of Nazism, but demonstrates how almost every country in Europe bears a quotient of responsibility for the slaughter of the Jews, ranging from open complicity, as in the case of Fascist Italy, to encouragement and to help denied.

  The book completes and summarizes the various other books already published that contain partial treatments of this theme.

  As an alternative I would propose People in Auschwitz, by Hermann Langbein, which is perhaps the most detailed book so far on the most well-known and notorious of the extermination camps.

  The work is remarkable because it pays attention not only to the condition of the prisoners but also to “those on the other side”: men, too, like us, but corrupted and overwhelmed by the fiendish power of the Nazi state.

  Shalom, no. 6, June 1984

  Asymmetry and Life

  When I was a student, around 1940, chemists had a clear understanding of the nature of molecules—maybe even too clear. The molecule, “the smallest portion of matter that preserves the properties of the substance it belongs to,” was tangible and concrete, a small model. Physicists already knew a lot about the functions of the wave, the vibrations of atoms, the rotations and degrees of independence of the whole molecule and its component parts, the nature of the valence. Organic chemists, however, were reluctant to follow them into this terrain. They remained fascinated by stereochemistry, a relatively recent conquest. Stereochemistry is the branch of chemistry that studies precisely the properties of the molecule as an object, having thickness, bulges and recesses, bulk—in short, an object with a form.

  It hadn’t been a short journey. The concept of molecular weight had been precisely defined since the middle of the nineteenth century: the weight of the molecule corresponded to the sum of the weights of its atoms and could be determined by simple techniques available to all laboratories. Elemental analysis also had a solid foundation, and so it was possible to know which and how many atoms made up the molecule. But we would not venture to represent the molecule’s structure: it was conceived as a bundle, a shapeless cluster. We already knew pairs of compounds, such as acetone and propionaldehyde, or diethyl ether and butanol, which had the same composition but entirely different chemical and physical properties. This phenomenon was given a beautiful Greek name (“isomerism”) long before the analytical methods of the time could explain it. We guessed that it must be a permutation, but our understanding of the spatial arrangement of the atoms within a molecule was still too vague.

  Then even more unusual pairs, or sets of three, were observed. Their members were identical not only in their composition but also in all their properties, except two. One member rotated the plane of polarized light to the right, the other to the left, and the third (sometimes) did not rotate it at all. For instance, in nature or in fermented products a right-handed lactic acid and a left-handed one were observed, while the acid obtained in the laboratory was always inactive. Moreover, the crystals of the right-left pairs often showed a strange asymmetry: one set could not be superimposed on the other, but was its mirror image, just as the right hand is the mirror image of the left.

  The phenomenon whetted the robust scientific appetite of the young Pasteur. As a matter of fact, this man of genius, who was to revolutionize pathology, was not a medical doctor but a chemist. It was understandable that products made by synthetic processes were inactive in polarized light: optical activity depended on asymmetry, while in a laboratory, from symmetrical reagents, one could obtain only symmetrical products. However, how do we explain the asymmetry of natural products? No doubt it must come from a preceding asymmetry, but where was the original asymmetry?

  Pasteur and all his interlocutors understood that this challenging problem was far from purely academic. Not all asymmetrical substances as described here belong to the living world (for instance, quartz crystals are asymmetrical); but all the main actors of the living world (proteins, cellulose, sugars, DNA) are asymmetrical. Right-left asymmetry is intrinsic to life; it coincides with life; it is unfailingly present in all organisms, from viruses to lichens and oak trees, from fish to man. This fact is neither obvious nor unimportant; it challenged the curiosity of three generations of chemists and biologists and it gave rise to two big questions.

  To cite Aristotle, the first question is that of the final cause—that is, in modern terms, the question of the adaptive utility of asymmetry. Let’s confine ourselves to proteins, the life structures where the phenomenon is expressed in its clearest and most extensive form. As we know, the long protein molecule is linear; it’s a filament, a rosary of hundreds or thousands of beads. Not all the beads are the same; they consist of about twenty relatively simple compounds, bas
ically the same for all living beings, called amino acids. They can be compared to letters of an alphabet that are used to compose very long words of a hundred or a thousand letters. Each protein is one such word; the sequence of amino acids is unique for each protein, determining its properties, and also the way in which the filament can fold. Now, although all amino acids (with one exception) have an asymmetrical molecule, they can all be represented by just one of the two diagrams reproduced here and differ from each other only by the nature of the R group. They are all “left-handed,” as if they had all come out of the same mold, or as if something had discarded or destroyed their mirror images—that is to say, their right-handed twins. But each protein must possess a precise identity in every one of its beads; if just one of them were to change configuration, the protein would change form. Thus we can perceive an advantage in the fact that only one of the two mirror-image forms of each amino acid is available in the biosphere. If just one of the thousands of beads in a protein chain were to be replaced by its mirror image, many of the subtlest properties of the protein would change fundamentally—in particular, its immunogenic behavior.

  But that asymmetry, so carefully transmitted by the living cell, is difficult to obtain and easy to lose. Whenever the chemist tries to synthesize an asymmetric compound, he obtains a mix of the two mirror images in exactly equal quantities, thus inactive in polarized light. It is possible to separate the mirror images, but only and always with instruments or devices that are asymmetrical. Conceptually, the simplest method goes back to Pasteur. The crystals of certain right-handed compounds can be distinguished by sight from their left-handed analogs in the same way that a moderately trained eye distinguishes a right-handed screw from a left-handed one, and they can be separated manually—but the human eye, and all that lies behind it, is asymmetrical. A second method, pertaining to chemists, consists in combining the mixture of mirror images with another asymmetrical compound, for instance the mixture of the two lactic acids R and L with a natural alkaloid R (the alkaloids with asymmetrical molecules also are usually found in nature in just one of two forms). It is clear that the R-lactate of R-cinchonine is the mirror image of the L-lactate of L-cinchonine, and not of the L-lactate of R-cinchonine. In short, an RR compound is a mirror image of the LL compound; therefore, the two will have identical physical characteristics. However, the LR compound will have different properties and it will be easy to separate it from RR, for instance by fractional crystallization. Besides, it often happens that an R-acid agrees to combine with an R-base but not an L-base, in the same way that a right-handed screw does not fit into a left-handed nut.