The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  In these stories, written in different periods and on different occasions, and not, certainly, with any plan, it seems to me that precisely this common feature emerges. Each story centers on a single character, and he is never the object of persecution, the predestined victim, the prostrate man—the one to whom I dedicated my first book, and of whom I wondered obsessively whether “he was still a man.” The protagonists here are “men” beyond any doubt, even if that virtue, the quality that allows them to survive and makes them exceptional, isn’t always one of those which ordinary morality approves of. Bandi, my “disciple,” draws strength from the holy joy of believers, Wolf from music, Grigo from love and superstition, Tischler from a patrimony of legends; but Cesare from a cunning without scruples, Rumkowski from a craving for power, Rappoport from a feral vitality.

  Rereading them, I notice another peculiarity: the settings, which I chose instinctively, are almost never tragic. They are bizarre, marginal: moments of reprieve, in which the identity that has been suppressed regains its features for a moment.

  The reader may be surprised at this recovered lode, thirty or forty years after the events narrated here. Well, it has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two sharply defined groups: those who repress their past wholly, and those in whom the memory of the offense endures, as if carved in stone, dominating all other experiences, before or after. Now, not by choice but by nature, I belong to the second group. Of my two years of life outside the law I have forgotten nothing. With no deliberate effort, memory continues to retrieve facts, faces, words, sensations: as if at that time my mind had been in a state of exalted receptivity, in which no detail was lost. I remember, for example, the way a tape recorder or a parrot might, entire sentences in languages that I didn’t know then, and do not know today. A few years ago I encountered, after thirty-five years, a fellow prisoner with whom I hadn’t had any special friendship, and I recognized him immediately in the midst of a crowd of unknown faces, although his face was much changed. Even now, odors from “down there” make me jump. Today it seems evident that the attention I had then, turned to the world and to the human beings around me, was not only a symptom but also an important factor in my spiritual and physical salvation.

  It’s possible that the distance in time has increased the tendency to fill out the facts, to embellish: this tendency, or temptation, is an integral part of writing, and without it one writes not stories but reports. Nevertheless, the episodes on which I have constructed these stories really happened, and their protagonists existed, even though, for obvious reasons, I have frequently changed their names.

  In Moments of Reprieve (New York: Summit Books, 1986)

  1. The first section of Levi’s collection Lilith and Other Stories was published separately in English under the title Moments of Reprieve.

  Buck of the Wolves

  The prestigious Einaudi series “Writers Translated by Writers” has published its nineteenth book, an unexpected gift: Jack London’s Call of the Wild, in a beautiful and meticulous translation by Gianni Celati. The book is very well-known, and precisely for this reason it reserves many surprises for the reader, or rather the rereader, regardless of age. We read a book we know differently from a new book: we already know “how it ends,” therefore we are more critical of the plot and pay more attention to the details.

  Here we are immediately struck by the book’s genuineness. The très curieux Jack London, a writer long considered marginal, vernacular—in other words, a maverick within the illustrious American literary tradition—drew from his brief adventure as a gold prospector in Alaska an amazing number of experiences to relate, and he is a first-class storyteller. Nothing of what he says seems secondhand, as if written at a desk, relying on other books or the imagination. The wild world into which Jack London was plunged is decanted into his best books with the urgency and directness of real life; this is neither Verne nor Salgari1 but a man who fought to the last in a struggle for life and survival, and found in this struggle the inspiration to write.

  With happy intuition, London transferred his experience to a dog, and I believe that this dog has no rival in world literature, precisely because he isn’t a literary dog. Buck, well off, master of his home on a splendid California ranch, is canine and human at the same time, like all dogs who are treated neither too badly nor too well by destiny or by their owners. He radiates dignity and respectability. More than Judge Miller’s servant, he is his equal, his companion; he has an instinctive understanding of his rights and duties. But at the turn of the century, at the time of the gold rush, all strong dogs are under threat: they have unprecedented commercial value, they can be stolen, traded, and shipped up there, where the law of clubs and fangs prevails over the laws of civilization. They will become sled dogs or they will die.

  Buck, thanks to his physical and moral strength, passes the first test of deportation, an endless journey by rail and then steamboat to reach a new and hostile land: no California sunshine, but snow on the ground and in the air. He is tamed; he learns that a man wielding a club is invincible. His dignity is not defeated but is transformed as he must adjust, he must learn new and terrible things. He learns that he can’t trust anyone, and especially his companions, sled dogs who are already experienced. If he isn’t as fast as they are, his daily ration will be immediately stolen. He learns that at night the fire and the tent aren’t for him; he must learn, and does learn, to dig a hole in the snow, where his animal heat makes it possible to endure the arctic cold.

  Buck must also learn the job, and here London’s tone and observations are masterly. Each of these dogs, of a hundred different breeds, yoked to the sled every day, has an individual, surprisingly credible personality. Ethologist ante litteram, London has penetrated canine psychology to truly modern depths. Rivals with one another and yet gregarious, the sled dogs “elect” a leader, the head of the pack, the first dog in the team. He must be the strongest, but also the most experienced: hauling is a kind of work that must be consented to, and Spitz, the head dog, forces and speeds up consent. He punishes those who hinder the work, he bites the stragglers, he stops fights with his undisputed authority.

  Buck understands and learns, but doesn’t accept Spitz’s authority: inside himself he feels, next to the endless craving for food, the craving for leadership. On the other hand, he accepts the sled: “Though the work was hard, he found he did not particularly despise it. He was surprised at the eagerness which animated the whole team and which was communicated to him.” It is work as the last resort and the alternative to servitude; how can we not recall Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the wall that the prisoners build willingly, fighting against the frost of another Arctic? Dave and Solleks, old sled dogs, are passive and indifferent during the short hours of rest, but when they are harnessed to the sled they become “alert and active, anxious that the work go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded that work. The toil between the sled’s traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.” Work is intoxicating: the dogs’ “heart breaks when they are excluded from it.” Here, in embryo, is the intuition of the human pathology of early retirement.

  Buck is different. He feels growing within himself “the dominant primordial beast,” he subtly provokes the leader of the pack and encourages indiscipline until it comes to an open challenge. This is the most brilliant page of this short book, and its harshest: on a freezing night, surrounded by the ravenous but neutral pack, Spitz and Buck confront each other, and Buck, the more cunning fighter, triumphs. The loser is devoured on the spot by his former underlings. The next morning, Buck forces himself on his human masters: he has killed the pack leader; he is the new head of the pack. He will be an even more efficient leader (a Kapo?) than Spitz, better at maintaining discipline and anticipating the dangers of the track.

  Then the pack changes o
wners and in the spring, when the ice is most treacherous, it ends up in the hands of three inexperienced men. Hunger, exhaustion, and lashes: Buck’s dignity is offended, the dog rebels; he “knows” who should be obeyed and who shouldn’t. Subjected to a deadly beating, he is rescued by Thornton, the good pioneer, toward whom Buck develops that total, exclusive love which only dogs are capable of: and right here, in my view, the book weakens. This devotion is excessive: what happened to the “primordial beast”?

  Nor is one convinced by passages permeated by half-baked echoes of Darwin. Thornton dies, struck down by Indian arrows, and Buck, his last tie with human civilization undone, listens to the call of the wild—that is, the howling of the wolves. He feels within himself, through evolution, the wolf’s blood. In spite of his different life, he approaches the pack until he becomes part of it, and in fact its leader. California, the sled, and Thornton are forgotten, and Buck’s story (this is Celati’s observation, but I believe it’s valid only after this turn of events) dissolves into legend. Buck’s blood prevails over that of the wolves to the point of changing their appearance: a new generation of wolves is born, with a canine coat. Buck has become the Phantom Dog who at night savagely tears to pieces prey and men; yet, every summer, he goes on a pilgrimage to the place where Thornton is buried—the only creature this dog who is now a wolf ever loved. Come on, this is a bit too human.

  La Stampa, January 11, 1987

  1. Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), an author of adventure stories that take place in exotic lands.

  The Black Hole of Auschwitz

  We cannot remain indifferent to the debate under way in Germany between those who tend to trivialize the Nazi slaughter (Nolte, Hillgruber) and those who assert its uniqueness (Habermas and many others).1 The thesis of the first group is not new: there have been massacres in every century, especially at the outset of this one, and in particular against the “class enemies” in the Soviet Union, hence near the German border. We, the Germans, during the Second World War, simply followed a horrible but by now established practice: an “Asian” practice made up of slaughters, mass deportations, merciless exile to hostile regions, torture, family separations. Our only innovation was technological: we invented the gas chambers. Incidentally, it’s precisely this innovation that was denied by the Faurisson school of “revisionists.”2 Thus the two arguments complete each other in a scheme of historical interpretation that cannot but cause alarm.

  Granted, the Soviets cannot be absolved. The slaughter of the kulaks first and, later, the despicable trials and the countless cruel actions against real or alleged enemies of the people are extremely serious offenses. They led to the political isolation of the Soviet Union, which, to varying degrees and with the forced interval of the war, continues to this day. But no justice system absolves a murderer because there are other murderers in the house across the street. Moreover, it’s indisputable that these events were internal to the Soviet Union and that no outsider could have opposed them without resorting to a general war.

  The new German revisionists tend to present Hitler’s slaughters as a preventive defense against an “Asian” invasion. This thesis seems to me extremely fragile. It’s far from certain that the Russians intended to invade Germany. On the contrary, they feared Germany, as demonstrated by the hasty Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; the subsequent, sudden German aggression of 1941 confirmed that those fears were justified. Further, it’s not clear how Stalin’s “political” massacres could find their mirror image in Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish people. It’s well-known that, before Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews were deeply German, intimately integrated into the country, considered enemies only by Hitler and the few fanatics who initially followed him. The identification of Judaism with Bolshevism, Hitler’s obsession, had no objective foundation, especially in Germany, where the vast majority of Jews notoriously belonged to the bourgeoisie.

  It is true that “the Gulag existed before Auschwitz,” but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the purposes of the two hells were not the same. The first was a massacre among equals; it wasn’t based on racial supremacy, it didn’t divide humanity into superhumans and subhumans; the second was based on an ideology imbued with racism. Had it prevailed, we would find ourselves today in a world split in two: “we,” the masters, on one side, and all others their servants or exterminated because they were racially inferior. This contempt for the fundamental equality of rights among all human beings revealed itself in a multitude of symbolic details, from the Auschwitz tattoo to the use, in the gas chambers, of a poison originally produced to disinfest ships’ holds overrun by rats. The ruthless exploitation of the corpses, and of their ashes, is an exclusive feature of Nazism, and, in spite of those who would like to blur the contours of Hitler’s Germany, remains its emblem to this day.

  It is in fact true that mortality in the Gulag was terribly high, but it was a sort of by-product, tolerated with cynical indifference. The primary purpose of the Gulag, however barbaric, had its own logic, consisting in the reinvention of a slave economy aimed at the “construction of Socialism.” Not even in Solzhenitsyn’s writings, trembling with justified rage, does anything similar to Treblinka and Chelmno appear; neither labor camps nor concentration camps, they were black holes for men, women, and children whose only crime was to be Jewish, places where people got off the trains only to enter the gas chambers, and from which no one came back alive. The Soviet invaders of Germany, after the martyrdom of their country (do you remember, among hundreds of episodes, the brutal siege of Leningrad?), were eager for revenge and were responsible for serious excesses, but there weren’t among them Einsatzkommandos, charged with machine-gunning civilians and burying them in huge mass graves that were often dug by the victims themselves. And although they harbored a justifiable craving for retaliation, the Soviets never planned the annihilation of the German people.

  No one has ever claimed that there were “selections” in the Gulag, such as those, repeatedly described, which occurred in the German Lagers, where, after a quick look at a prisoner’s front and back, the SS doctors (doctors!) decided who could still work and who was to go to the gas chamber. And I don’t see how this “innovation” could be considered marginal and mitigated by an “only.” This development was not on the “Asian” model; it was thoroughly European. The gas was produced by renowned German chemical factories, German enterprises received the hair of the massacred women, and the gold in teeth extracted from the corpses went to German banks. All this is specifically German, and no German should forget it; nor should he forget that in Nazi Germany, and there alone, even children and the dying were sent to an atrocious death in the name of an abstract and ferocious radicalism without equal in modern times.

  In the ambiguous debates that are under way, the fact that the Allies bear a heavy share of the blame has no relevance whatsoever. It’s true that no democratic country offered asylum to the Jews who were threatened or expelled. It’s true that the Americans refused to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz while they repeatedly bombarded the adjacent industrial district. And it’s also true that there were probably sordid reasons for the Allies’ failure to come to the rescue: the fear of having to shelter or support millions of refugees or survivors. But one can’t call this real complicity, and the moral and legal difference between those who take action and those who do nothing to oppose it remains immeasurable.

  If today’s Germany cares about the place that it is entitled to among European nations, it cannot and should not whitewash its past.

  La Stampa, January 22, 1987

  1. Ernst Nolte (b. 1932) is a German historian and philosopher; Andreas Hillgruber (1925–1989) was a German historian; Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German philosopher.

  2. Robert Faurisson, a French professor and Holocaust denier, is discussed in several essays in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980.

  Nose to Nose: A Date with Love in the Dark

  JOURNALIST: Wait a minute, my goodness! It
’s two full days, forty-eight hours, since I’ve been here waiting for you to show up, and you already want to go back inside. My director won’t hear of any excuses, you know: if I come back without an interview I risk losing my job, and he wants it right away, before the mating season is over.

  MOLE: Go ahead, then, but hurry up. It’s not that I’m in a rush: it’s just that I don’t like the light. Some other time, if you warn me first, we can arrange to meet in the evening—at night everything is simpler, and calmer. Don’t you hear that buzzing sound? Tractors, motors, even planes in the sky: it’s unbearable. Once upon a time, it wasn’t like this, or so I’m told: in the fields there was peace. But in the meantime, bear with me, you know I can’t see well. Are you male or female?

  JOURNALIST: Male, but I don’t see what difference that makes.

  MOLE: Yes, it does make a difference. You can’t trust females. They interest me for just two weeks a year, then not at all—better off alone. The only thing females look at, even yours, is fur. Not that they’re wrong. Did you know that ours is the only fur that you can also stroke the wrong way? Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to back up in our tunnels.