The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Not even in his last pages, which assume the tone of a spiritual testament, does Höss manage to grasp the horror of his actions and to sound sincere. “Today I understand that the extermination of the Jews was a mistake, a colossal mistake” (note, not “a crime”). “Anti-Semitism failed; Judaism has actually taken advantage of it to move closer to its ultimate goal.” A little later, he claims that, upon “learning of the appalling tortures in Auschwitz and in other camps,” he almost “fainted.” Considering that Höss knew when he was writing this that he would be hanged, we are astonished by his obstinacy in lying with his last breath. The only possible explanation is that, like all his peers (not just the Germans; I’m also thinking of the confessions of terrorists who have repented or distanced themselves), Höss spent his life making the lies that filled the air he was breathing his own, and therefore lying to himself.

  We can ask, and surely someone will ask himself or others, if there is a reason to publish this book again today, some forty years after the end of the war and thirty-eight years after its author’s execution. In my view, there are at least two good reasons to do so.

  The first reason is conditional. An insidious operation was launched a few years ago, arguing that the number of concentration-camp victims was lower by far than what was claimed by “official history,” and that toxic gas was never used to kill human beings in the camps. On both these points, Höss’s testimony is exhaustive and explicit. It’s not clear why he would have formulated it in such a precise and articulate way, and with so many details corresponding to those of the survivors and to the physical evidence, if he was under pressure, as the “revisionists” allege. Höss lies often to justify himself, but never about actual facts; on the contrary, he seems proud of his work as an organizer. To construct such a coherent and credible story out of nothing, Höss and his alleged masters would have had to be extremely cunning. The confessions extorted by the Inquisition, or at the Moscow trials in the thirties, or during the witch trials had a totally different tone.

  The second reason is fundamental and of lasting relevance. Today, many tears are shed over the death of ideologies. I believe that this book shows, in an exemplary way, how far ideology may carry us when accepted with the radicalism of Hitler’s Germans and of extremists generally. Ideologies can be good or bad. It is useful to know them, compare them, and try to evaluate them. It is always a mistake to marry one, even when it is cloaked in respectable words such as Fatherland and Duty. Rudolf Höss’s story shows where Duty, blindly accepted, leads, and that is to the Führerprinzip of Nazi Germany.

  Foreword to Rudolf R. Höss, Comandante ad Auschwitz (Commandant of Auschwitz) (Turin: Einaudi, 1985)

  1. The initial English translation of Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss was published in 1959 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

  2. Theodor Eicke (1892–1943), a Nazi general.

  Foreword to The Jews of Eastern Europe

  from Utopia to Revolt

  This volume contains the records of a conference held in Turin in January 1984 on the journey of Eastern European Jews “from utopia to revolt.” It offers many surprises to the Italian reader, whether Jewish or Christian. We have read a lot about the final stop on this journey—that is, the bloody and desperate rebellions in the ghettos and the Lagers—varying from thorough, historically accurate works to epic transformations and commercial novels. The cinema has also dealt with the subject, again at varying levels of artistic quality and philological accuracy. On the other hand, we knew relatively little, or had only partial and distorted notions, about the background, the complicated historical and social circumstances that led to rebellion, and from which rebellion drew its exemplary strength.

  In the West, and especially in Italy (where the Jewish presence was always numerically small and where, even during the terrible years when Hitler’s barbarity was spreading, Jewish refugees in search of safety were few), people had a vague and poetic image of Eastern Jewry. This image came to us through the channels of literature, where the books of Joseph Roth and the Singer brothers, precisely because of their transfiguring power, played a preeminent and forceful role. From these, the reader basically derives the image of a Jew removed from the world, confined (voluntarily or not) to his shtetl, which is both a prison and a nest; he is alien, unaware, untouched by the political convulsions that changed the face and the borders of European countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a luftmensch, “man of air,” nourished on a naïve faith, on family love, on weird, picturesque legends; gentle, humble, wandering, neurotic. A second, negative image was superimposed on this one, the result of Fascist propaganda or the sediment of old prejudices: Judaism, apparently scattered among the nations (the goyim), in reality is a single unit, an astute and wicked power bent on the economic conquest of the world, held together by secret ties that cross all borders.

  The picture that emerges from these writings, from both the personal accounts and the historical reconstructions, is quite different. It’s not only more articulate but also more concrete and credible, better suited to enabling us to understand the reality of yesterday and today. The picturesque and dreamy civilization of the shtetl survives into the second half of the nineteenth century, but it is secondary: in the Jewish world, as in the rest of Europe, a rapid process of urbanization is under way. The small Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian rural communities are becoming depopulated: the big-city factories attract artisans, tradesmen, the lower middle classes, who feel better protected from the recurrent countryside pogroms. A Jewish, urban proletariat is born, similar to, and yet different from, the majority proletariat. Similar in the merciless exploitation it is subjected to; different, and more restless and divided, because exploitation is often compounded by the hostility that Jews sense around them. The Jewish proletariat listens carefully to socialist and Marxist teachings but does not forget its own identity: it is divided between two allegiances, to its class and to its roots. An astonishing variety of options arise from this tension and are put forward. Toward the end of the century, however, two basic, incompatible trends emerge, both charged with messianic promise.

  The trauma of the Dreyfus affair gives birth (or rebirth) to Zionist prophethood. Here in Europe, or even in America, you are and always will be a stranger; if you ever forget that you are a Jew, “the others” will remind you. You have a homeland, the land of your forefathers: it’s far away and has become a desert, but if you cultivate it, it will bloom, it will flow with milk and honey. If you rescue it, it will rescue you: never again will you be a stranger or a slave. It seems like a dream, but, if you want, it can become reality. Paradoxically, this appeal draws the benevolent attention of tsarist authorities: why not? If they want to leave, why should we hinder them? Zionist leaders go as far as making contact with officials of the tsar’s police; it’s a clever and daring move that shocks supporters of Jewish socialist internationalism.

  A social democratic strain soon emerges from among the different trends that compete with one another in this field. In 1897 it is established as a union-political party, first semi-clandestine and later official: the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, the Bund. How far we are from all stereotypes! Bund members, workers and intellectuals, are neither humble nor resigned. Their double allegiance has turned into double pride: the pride of the proletariat and the pride of the Diaspora. Aliyah, the Zionists’ return to the homeland, is desertion, flight: why immigrate to Palestine and rebuild hated bourgeois society there? This is our country, where we and our flesh-and-blood forefathers were born—not the patriarchs of the Torah. We are here, and here we wish to remain, in Poland and in Russia, proletariat among the proletariat of the whole world, because our struggle is their struggle. Yet we are not like them. We have, and we want to keep, our cultural autonomy, and first of all our language: not Hebrew, the rabbis’ language, the language of a religion that we reject as we do all religions, but Yiddish, the mame-loshn,
the mother tongue that for centuries we have been speaking in our homes. Judaism’s center of gravity is us, it’s here, do in Yiddish; our patriotism is the “doikeyt,” “here-ism.” “The Bundists’ messianism, absorbed since childhood from parents, grandparents, and teachers, even when rejected at the level of consciousness, was feeding in a completely natural way the messianic eschatology of the socialist view of the world” (Frankel).

  Around the turn of the century, the Bund is the largest Jewish workers’ party in the Tsarist empire. It cooperates with smaller parties with which it is in constant, dissonant agreement; like every socialist party, it is shaken by internal conflicts, but, unlike other socialist parties, it has no inclination toward compromise; through strikes, congresses, and demonstrations, it strives to keep its members in a state of stormy and constant anger. In 1905 it reaches the peak of its revolutionary potential: it has available a well-trained paramilitary force and is one of the great revolutionary parties of European Russia. When, in June, the sailors of the battleship Potemkin revolt, it’s a young Bundist, Anna Lipsic, who speaks before tens of thousands of people and the leveled guns of Cossacks and police. However, the Bund emerges weakened from that failed revolution. In Russia, the Bolsheviks crushed it in 1919, along with the other parties of the left. The Bund survived in Poland until the Nazi carnage, but neither in Russia nor in Poland did it die a natural death.

  In retrospect, the utopian effort of the Bund may appear reckless, but no one at the time could have predicted the measure, or, rather, the lack of measure, of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Subsequent history proved the loathed Zionists, “anti-Semites who speak Yiddish,” according to a Bund slogan, right. For the Jews of Eastern Europe, there was no salvation without emigration. Yet the ideological and moral vigor of the Bund found its tragic height precisely in the crucial years of the Nazi terror. Without the insurrectionary experience of the Bundists, the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto and the other heroic uprisings in ghettos and extermination Lagers would not have happened, or would have been just local tremors, desperate and improvised, with no idealistic context. The brothers-enemies—Bundists, Zionists, and Communists—could find agreement and unity of action only in the ghettos besieged by hunger, daily slaughters, and epidemics, only in the European resistance movement that fought to the very end without the light of hope.

  It seems to me that, thanks to the pages collected here, the fighters of the ghetto show the Italian (or, generally, Western) reader a new face, historically believable and, above all, modern: a face far from that of the simplified heroes, the blameless knights so dear to folklore of all times, and closer to us, to our still controversial choices, to our unending Jewish quest for identity. Their precursors, the indomitable activists of the Bund, of early Zionism, and of all the other innumerable currents and trends (remotely mirrored in the plethora of parties that, to this day, complicate Israeli politics), were, like us, blind before the future, but they had precociously understood, and their story enables us to understand, that inaction and servility don’t pay.

  Gli ebrei dell’Europa orientale dall’utopia alla rivolta (The Jews of

  Eastern Europe from Utopia to Revolt), edited by M. Brunazzi

  and A. M. Fubini (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1985)

  What Burned in Space

  What to say? It’s not the moment for rhetorical praise of heroism. The news of the failure of the space shuttle mission,1 broadcast in real time, or almost, throughout the entire world, is not comparable to a tragic accident on the job. Not only were seven young lives lost but, along with them, an enormous capital of intelligence that had been invested in experience. Each of the astronauts, except the unfortunate schoolteacher, had accumulated an invaluable store of knowledge, which vanished in an instant, in an apocalyptic fire.

  A useful sacrifice or not? It would be cynical to make calculations, but one statement can be made with confidence. The shuttle was not as safe as had been declared. The aim of the reusable spaceship will certainly not be abandoned, but it will be achieved by an indeterminate number of improvements aimed at safety, as happened decades ago in the case of atmospheric flight.

  In addition to the technological “benefits,” which, starting with the first space flights, have been productive in the most surprising fields, we now expect a benefit specifically oriented to the protection of life. Perhaps it was a mistake to move so quickly to human travel: probably the time wasn’t ripe and the risks were greater than expected.

  We don’t know precisely what the goals of the shuttle project were. Maybe it was aimed essentially at prestige—if we can do this, we can do other things that we don’t want to and can’t tell you. This failure will likely, it is to be hoped, serve as a warning: the moment to think of the shuttle as the airplane of tomorrow has not yet arrived nor is it about to.

  Along with grief at a collective and instantaneous death, along with the frustration that accompanies every failed undertaking, may we be allowed to express a hope that this tragedy may help prevent other, greater tragedies that the future might hold in reserve. The almost simultaneous, and marvelous, circumnavigation of Uranus by Voyager has shown us in a tangible way that the universe we live in can be explored today without risking the lives of human beings.

  La Stampa, January 30, 1986

  1. The space shuttle Challenger exploded and broke apart shortly after liftoff, on January 28, 1986.

  Letter to the Editor of Commentary

  I am responding to Fernanda Eberstadt’s article, “Reading Primo Levi” [October 1985]. I neither wish to nor am I able to discuss Miss Eberstadt’s opinions on the literary merits of my books; to our common good fortune, in your country as in mine, freedom of criticism exists. I would like, however, to comment on several passages in the article.

  1. “It was only with the first sign of a decisive Allied victory and with the collapse of the Fascist regime on July 25, 1943, that Levi found within himself the will to resist” (p. 43). This assertion amounts to an accusation of opportunism, and it strikes me as insulting. I was not the only one to take up arms so late. I am not speaking here of the minuscule Italian Jewish community, but the entire resistance movement against the Nazis, in all of Europe, did not begin until after the German invasion; before that it would not have made sense. A soldier, even if animated by the best will in the world, does not mobilize alone, spontaneously, against an enemy who is not there. The decision to fight militarily was taken when it was possible to take it, but my anti-Fascist commitment and that of my family and the group of friends I belong to, goes back many years earlier (see, for example, the chapters “Zinc” and “Iron” in The Periodic Table), in fact, to the years of my adolescence.

  A little further on: at the moment of my arrest by the Fascists, “Levi . . . thought it safer . . . to declare himself a Jew.” That was the least important part of the motives that led me to declare myself a Jew. I expressed them clearly in The Periodic Table: “in part out of weariness, in part also out of an irrational point of pride.”

  2. On p. 45 and elsewhere I am accused of omission: that is of not having tried to demonstrate that the slaughter of the Jews was provoked by the Nazi terror and by Hitler’s racist ideology. Such a drastic statement can spring only from an extremely superficial reading of my books, especially If This Is a Man (now reissued in English under the title Survival in Auschwitz). Even if one simply relies on the narrated facts, the revulsion against and condemnation of Nazism leap from every page.

  Moreover, the explanation which Miss Eberstadt seems to put

  forward—that Jews are persecuted where and when they tend to

  assimilate—seems to me false, or at least not generally true. They weren’t assimilated in Spain in 1500, and yet they were burned or expelled. They were assimilated in Italy, where they would have remained undisturbed or almost so if it had not been for the German invasion in the course of the Second World War. They were and are assimilated in Bulgaria, whose (pro-Fascist) government opposed
their deportation. They rejected assimilation in Poland and Russia in the last century and were paid back with pogroms. In short, I see no correlation between assimilation (desired or attained) and anti-Semitism. The anti-Semite hates the Jew no matter what: if he assimilates, because he “tries to hide himself”; if he remains faithful to tradition and religion, “because he is different.”

  3. I am accused of irreligion. I am not religious; furthermore, the experience of Auschwitz led many religious people, Jewish and not, to doubt. All the same, I profoundly respect, and sometimes envy, those who have the support of a faith. The pious Lithuanian Jew on whom Miss Eberstadt dwells (p. 45) is plainly a positive character, and the episode described in the story in which hse appears really happened. The line of reasoning has been misunderstood: it is known to everyone (even to me) that “cooking” on Yom Kippur is prohibited, but the discussion described hinges on whether it is permitted to “keep the soup warm,” that is, not to let it get cold. Whether this is allowed or not I personally do not know; my character, Ezra, maintains that it is not.

  As for the suspension of the fast by rabbinical authorities, Miss Eberstadt must take my word for it; there was no communication between the camps and the outside world, and Ezra could not have been aware of this concession. However, in my opinion, he observed the fast because of his personal heroic zeal, and I remember quite well that he was not the only one.