The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Thus ends Marek’s first exploit. A naïve soldier of fortune, like many distant travelers from the north, he had discovered Italy with a virgin eye and fought for the freedom of all in a country that was not his. Although he is a fundamentally gentle soul, Marek joined other battles, which he describes elsewhere—the battles that gave birth to the State of Israel, today his homeland. He now lives in the Lohamei Hagetaot kibbutz, which he helped establish. Every now and then, though, he comes back to Italy, to the Canavese, where everybody remembers him, and welcomes him like a brother. A polyglot, Marek no longer has a language that is truly his own. He wrote this memoir in Hebrew, the ancient language of the fathers, which was new to him, and which he didn’t start learning until 1946, when his Italian adventure had ended.

  Foreword to Marek Herman, Da Leopoli a Torino: Diario di

  un ragazzo ebreo nella seconda guerra mondiale (From L’viv to Turin: Diary of a Jewish Boy During the Second World War) (Cuneo: L’Arciere, 1984)

  Foreword to People in Auschwitz

  by Hermann Langbein1

  Literature about the National Socialist concentration camps can be broadly divided into three categories: diaries or memoirs of deportees, their literary interpretations, and sociological and historical works. This book belongs to the latter group, but it differs markedly from all other works published so far on the subject because of its extreme effort to be objective. It benefited from being written late (only in 1972), so that it could achieve a detachment and a serenity of judgment that would not have been possible immediately following the war, when, understandably, surprise, indignation, and horror prevailed.

  The original title, Menschen in Auschwitz, is full of meaning. It sums up the subject and the specific nature of the work, as Mensch means, in German, “human being.” A detail noted by the author in his introduction is revealing. The decisive incentive to write this long-planned book came to him from the comparison between Klehr the Auschwitz nurse and self-styled doctor—the “all-powerful terror of the hospital,” whose horrible crimes are described in the text—and Klehr the aged detainee, crude and helpless, whom Hermann Langbein met on the occasion of the big Auschwitz trial that concluded in 1965. It is then that the vague plan acquired precise contours. Langbein, a former political fighter in Vienna and in Spain, a prisoner in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Neuengamme (but also active in the Lager in the Auschwitz Combat Group, a secret self-defense organization), a militant Communist who left the Party after the events of 1956 in Hungary, decides to tackle a terrifying problem. He won’t just describe Auschwitz; rather, he will try to clarify for himself, his contemporaries, and future generations the sources of Hitler’s barbarity, and how the Germans were able to support it and follow it to its extreme consequences. Since Auschwitz is the work of man and not of the devil, he will move the Acheron: he will plumb the depths of human behavior in Auschwitz, that of the victims, that of the oppressors, and that of their accomplices, at the time of the Lager and afterward.

  Thus the subject of the book is Auschwitz, anus mundi, the exemplary and total Lager, product of the expertise accumulated in almost ten years of Hitlerian terror. Indeed, the book contains everything one might wish to know about the Lager, drawn from the author’s own memories and from numerous other sources: its history and geography, the number of inhabitants, its complex social relations, the death factories, the infirmaries, the rules, the exceptions to the rules, the few ways to survive and the many ways to die, the names of the commanders. Langbein’s special “observatory” makes this a unique work in many respects and adds to its significance and universality.

  It was a triple observatory. Langbein, a courageous and clever man, was at the same time a member of the clandestine resistance movement within Auschwitz and secretary to Dr. Wirths, one of the most powerful SS officers in the camp. Later, after the liberation, he had access to the proceedings of the most important trials of officials both high and low, many of whom he had known earlier, during the performance of their duties. Through these three channels he was able to obtain a vast amount of data, and he devoted the rest of his life to the study of man confined to extreme conditions. Such are the prisoners inside the barbed wire, but such, too, are the members of the constellation of jailers. They have also reached, willingly or not, the extreme limits of what a man can do or feel. Langbein bends over them with stern inquisitiveness not only to condemn or absolve but also in a desperate attempt to understand how man can go that far. Among contemporary historians, he may be the only one to devote so much attention to this subject. His conclusion is disturbing. Those who bear the greatest responsibility are Menschen, too; they are made of the same raw material we are, and it did not require a great effort or real coercion to make them into cold-blooded assassins of millions of other Menschen. A few years of perverse indoctrination and Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda were sufficient. With some exceptions, they were not sadistic monsters; they were people like us, trapped by the regime because of their pettiness, ignorance, or ambition. Nor were there many fanatical Nazis, since Langbein’s time in Auschwitz coincided with the most “eventful” period, between 1942 and 1944, when, in the face of military defeats, Hitler’s star was in decline.

  Langbein studies the life of these ministers of death, before, during, and after their “service.” The resulting image is quite different from that conveyed by the propaganda of the regime or by popular postwar historiography and sadistic-Nazi movies. The Lager SS were not supermen faithful to their loyalty oath, nor were they wild beasts in uniform. Rather, they were wretched, unfeeling, and corrupt individuals who much preferred guarding the Lagers to the “glory” of battle, who tried to become rich by stealing from warehouses, and who carried out their abominable work with obtuse indifference more than with conviction or satisfaction. National Socialism had a deep impact, stifling from a young age their natural moral impulses and giving them in exchange a power over life and death for which they were not prepared and which intoxicated them. Consciously or not, they had taken a dangerous road, the road of obedience and consent that has no return. Totalitarianism, all totalitarianism, is a broad path leading downward; German totalitarianism, Langbein tells us, was “a path on which every step made it harder to turn back and which eventually led to Auschwitz.” And a little further on: “This is the lesson of Auschwitz: the very first step, the acceptance of a social system that aims at total control of human beings, is the most dangerous one. Once such a regime has conceived a plan to eradicate ‘subhumans’ (they need not be Jews or Gypsies) and a person wears its uniform (which can be adorned with symbols other than the runes of the SS and the death’s-head), he has become a tool.”

  Another lesson, we might add, is that to judge is necessary but difficult. The enormity of the events described in this book drives us urgently to take sides against the great Nazi criminals and their collaborators, down to the gray zone of the Kapos and the prisoners who were given a rank and authority. Now, it is a characteristic of despotic regimes to coerce the individual’s freedom of choice, making his behavior ambiguous and paralyzing our ability to judge. Who is guilty of the evil that is done (or allowed to be done)? Is it the individual who let himself be convinced or the regime that convinced him? Surely both are responsible: but the measure of guilt must be judged with extreme caution and on a case-by-case basis. This is necessary precisely because we are not totalitarian, and generalizations, which are so loved by totalitarian regimes, are repugnant to us. This book is a rich anthology of complex human cases; it contains frequent reminders (one is rightly addressed to me) to reject easy stereotypes. At Auschwitz, not all “criminals” marked with the green triangle behaved like criminals; not all “political detainees” behaved like political prisoners; and not all Germans hoped for a German victory. It is no accident that the book opens with this quotation: “What Auschwitz was is known only to its inmates and to no one else.” But Langbein, a careful and comprehensive investigator of many cases of conscience, is a rigorous and relentless p
rosecutor of confirmed crimes and a severe critic of the excuses and lies that the guilty put forward to justify themselves.

  Foreword to Hermann Langbein, Uomini ad Auschwitz (People in Auschwitz) (Milan: Mursia, 1984)

  1. Published in English by the University of North Carolina Press, in 2004.

  Homage to an Unknown Reporter

  To seal the year 1984, which, out of mental laziness and a hunger for portents, we have been quick to call the Orwell year, I would like to place before this Almanac praise for the reporter, its collective and almost always unknown author. The reporter is the foot soldier of the paper, even if today he is rarely forced to walk. He is in the front line, oppressed by urgency, by the fear of missing a date with the deed or the misdeed.

  He is denied the charitable (and egoistic) screen of ignorance: he has to stick his nose into the most cruel and sordid reality, which we ordinary folk repress. Furthermore, he has to track down, describe, and transcribe, within a few minutes, events that challenge the experience of the specialist, sociologist, criminologist, doctor, engineer, technician. The reader not only expects the pure “photograph” of the event but also wants the background, the setting, the why. How can it surprise us if he sometimes fails?

  Let’s watch him in his daily activity, which is often a battle. He has to pick up signals on the fly, sniff them in the air, distinguish true trails from false. Hurry to the spot, vying with his colleagues from other papers; usually they are his friends, but at that moment they are competitors and rivals.

  Cut through the crowd, bluntly interrogate witnesses or even victims of an accident, who have other things to think about, who in his eyes read only a voracious, cold curiosity, in him see the vulture and the hyena. Also: reconstruct as well as he can, on the basis of bits of information extorted from grim reticence, the multiple pileup in the fog, the factory disaster, the collapse, the tanker truck that crashes and spills its contents (with a chemical name never heard before, unpronounceable) whose properties, use, destination he doesn’t know. If he feels the temptation to judgment or comment, he has to repress it; that’s not for him, it’s for the one who comes afterward and has the right to the signature. He has to be objective! A lens, like that of his colleague and consort the photographer.

  What more do we expect of him, we hurried, distracted readers, besieged by our own problems? We expect it all: we would like the reporter to be a 360-degree periscope, who sifts through the entire mass of news that develops in the world in twenty-four hours, throws out the chaff, and gives us the wheat: solid, nutritious, pure. In short, we ask too much, we are greedy.

  And yet here I would like, if I may, in my personal capacity, to make some recommendations. He should never forget the power he holds: unlike what happened in Fascist times (when the regime forbade news of suicides and abortions), the reporter today has some discretionary faculties; since he can’t recount everything, let him choose the essential, the news that is not fleeting, not useless. Don’t tempt the reader’s morbid curiosity; treat him as a responsible adult, even if he is not always that. Avoid the vagaries of the moment, which are dubious and immediately forgotten. Don’t pretend to have understood what you haven’t; it’s pointless to put in quotes terms whose meaning you don’t know—the reader will simply get an impression of confusion and obscurity. If space allows, don’t leave out “the conclusions of the preceding chapters,” especially when it comes to political news; not all readers read the daily daily, and not all have a good memory. And, most of all, remember that for most citizens “appearing in the paper” is unpleasant, harmful, or tragic: writing can be detrimental to legitimate interests, violate privacy, and wound sensibilities; but it can also right wrongs, and focus our attention on the most current matters. If, starting some ten years ago, public opinion has evolved, and if the citizen today perceives the problems of drugs, of urban decay, of organized crime as his own, in all their complexity and articulation, we owe it, in large part, to the “unknown reporter.” A civilized and responsible reporter is at once a mirror and the basis of a civilized and responsible society.

  Almanacco di Cronaca 1984, Gruppo Cronisti Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta

  Foreword to Jews in Turin

  On the occasion of the centennial of the inauguration of our synagogue, which took place on February 16, 1884, we, the Jews of Turin, have decided to forgo, for once, our traditional twofold reserve. There is the well-known Piedmontese reserve, which, rooted in geography and history, has led some to see us as the least Italian of Italians, and then there is, superimposed on this, the ancient reserve of the Diaspora Jew, who has been accustomed forever to live in silence and suspicion, to listen a lot and say little, not to draw attention to himself, because “you never know.”

  We were never many: scarcely more than four thousand in the thirties, the highest number we ever reached, and scarcely more than a thousand today. But I don’t think it’s too much to say that we counted for something, and continue to count, in the life of this city. Paradoxically, our humble and quiet community is linked to the history of the most important monument in Turin, which is certainly not humble, nor does it reflect our character. As Alberto Racheli tells us in detail in the following essay, we ran the serious risk of sharing with Alessandro Antonelli the responsibility for the presence, right in the city’s center, of the Mole, that huge exclamation mark.1 Of course, we, too, like all Turinese, have a certain affection for the Mole, but our affection is ironic and polemical, and we are not blinded by it. We love it as we love the walls of our houses, but we know it is ugly, pretentious, and of little use, that it involved a very bad use of public funds, and that, after the 1953 cyclone and the restoration of 1961, it still stands, thanks to a metal prosthesis. For some time, the Mole hasn’t even had the right to be mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records: it is no longer, as we were taught in school, “the tallest brick building in Europe.” And so we feel posthumous gratitude for the municipal councillor Malvano, our coreligionist, who in 1875 had the good judgment to resell the building—a voracious money eater that had been commissioned but not completed—to the municipality. Had the transaction failed, we would witness a sorry sight today. The few hundred Jews who attend temple on formal holy days and the few dozen who go there for daily rites would be almost invisible within the enormous space of Antonelli’s dome.

  However, as I said, if we had not been here, the city would be different, and this exhibition intends to demonstrate that. When our fathers (for the most part not Turinese, but coming from small Piedmontese communities) moved to the city, toward the end of the nineteenth century, they brought with them the great, maybe the only, special talent that history bequeathed to the Jews: literacy, a secular and religious culture seen as a duty, a necessity, and a pleasure of life, at a time when most Italians were illiterate. Therefore, emancipation did not catch the Jews unprepared; as the stories of many of the families outlined in the displays indicate, within one or two generations Jews coming out of the ghetto moved easily from handicrafts and small trade to the nascent industries, administration, public offices, the military, and the universities. In fact, it is in the academic world that Turinese Jews have left an important mark, altogether disproportionate to their small number. Their university presence is still outstanding in both quantity and quality. This ascent, parallel to that of much of the Christian lower middle class, was also facilitated by a tolerant population. It has been said that each country has the Jews it deserves; post-Risorgimento Italy, a country of ancient civilization, ethnically homogeneous and immune to heavy xenophobic tensions, made its Jews into good, law-abiding citizens, loyal to the State and averse to corruption and violence.

  From this perspective, the integration of Italian Judaism is unusual in the world. Even more unusual may be the balance achieved by Turinese-Piedmontese Judaism, which was easily integrated yet without giving up its identity. With the exception of rare and marginal cases, such as the centers in Yemen and the Caucasus, all the Jewish communities i
n the world carried (and carry) the scars of the tormented history of the people of Israel, interwoven with slaughters, expulsions, humiliating separations, exorbitant and arbitrary taxation, forced conversion, migration. Jews expelled from one country (from England in 1290, from France throughout the fourteenth century, from the Rhineland at the time of the Crusades, from Spain in 1492, up to the recent migration to the Americas) sought shelter elsewhere, joining existing communities or founding new ones. Thus they were doubly foreigners, because of their religion and because of their origins. This is why most communities are stratified and heterogeneous, with occasional tensions and divisions. Israel Zangwill gave a lively account of this in his renowned short novel The King of Schnorrers, where he describes the encounter-collision, in early-nineteenth-century London, between an arrogant beggar and a “German” Jew, assimilated, rich, and naïve. In Amsterdam the Jews, of German origin, welcomed the Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula, but there was little blending between the two groups. In Venice there are still some five synagogues, originally intended for Jews of different backgrounds and rites. The current situation in Paris is similar, as Jews of old French stock live side by side with Algerian, Egyptian, Polish, Russian, German, etc., Jews. The most complex case, and of greater historical weight, is, of course, that of Israel, where the presence of Jews belonging to all branches of the Diaspora constitutes to this day an intricate problem of internal politics. The most recent development is in the Jewish community of Milan, where the great influx of refugees from the Arab states and Iran is causing upheaval and friction, along with an unexpected increase in numbers.