by Primo Levi
Statement made on the occasion of the presentation of Raymond Queneau’s
La Canzone del Polistirene (The Song of Styrene), translated by Italo
Calvino; Milan, January 29, 1986, sponsored by the Progetto Cultura
of Montedison. The text was published in Montedison Progetto Cultura, no. 5,
April 1987, and later appeared in a longer version, in G. Poli and
G. Calcagno, Echi di una voce perduta (Milan: Mursia, 1992).
Foreword to Offended Life
Not every book can stand up to a question that is often put openly to its author: Why does this book exist? Why, to what end, prompted by what urge did you initiate this effort? I think that this anthology can stand up to the question and also to the opposite question: Why only now? Why so late?
Late, yes: had the collection and transcription of these life stories been undertaken earlier, the memory of those interviewed would have been sharper, and their number greater. Many of our fellow former deportees have died. Late, for reasons of organization, but also because only recently, and not just in Italy, have we fully recognized that mass political deportation, accompanied by the will to slaughter and by the reestablishment of a slave economy, is central to the history of this century, on the same level as the tragic introduction of nuclear weapons. It’s also central in the memory of the survivors. Almost all the interviewees, even those who suffered less, even those whose health and family were not permanently affected, even those few who (for reasons we respect) refused to talk, know it, feel it, and said it, more or less explicitly. Finally, this modern-day return to barbarity is central in the conscience of the guilty and their heirs. If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t have witnessed the obscene efforts of the revisionists, young historians who have in recent years come out into the open, and though they claim to be politically pure, tabulae rasae, impartial, neutral, receptive to all the pros and cons, devote pages and pages of polemical acrobatics to proving that we didn’t see what we saw, didn’t live what we lived. Although the introduction doesn’t say so, this anthology of brutality and of pain deliberately inflicted is dedicated to them.
The level, the tone, and the historical value of the testimony varies. It couldn’t be otherwise: among the deportees were men and women; intellectuals, factory workers, and peasants; partisans, opponents with a strong political commitment, and poor souls rounded up randomly in the street; believers and laymen; Christians and Jews. Nonetheless, the stories largely coincide in certain essential aspects, which distinguish them from the recollections (often just as painful and dramatic) of returning soldiers or of former prisoners of war. There is, everywhere, described with naïveté or with surprising expressive strength, the trauma of separation, of feeling uprooted: the sealed train (an inevitable detail, to the point of becoming the very symbol of deportation) abruptly tears you away from your environment, climate, country, family, profession, language, friendships, and hurls you into an alien environment, strange, incomprehensible, hostile. Sometimes the deportee doesn’t even know what corner of Europe he has landed in. It’s the Lager, the KZ: new words for him, never heard before. In a way, it’s an upside-down world, where honesty and gentleness are punished, while violence, betrayal, and deception are rewarded. Here, as is to be expected, destinies and accounts differ. There are those who give up right away and adjust instinctively to a subhuman existence; those who try hard to understand and to react; those who seek, and find, comfort in their faith; those (in particular the political detainees, and especially the Communists) who recognize around them a life force, an untamed will to continue the struggle, an experience and an international solidarity that alleviate the material and moral sufferings of the newcomers. The events that follow diverge as well. Some found their families, homes, friends, jobs, and for them the liberation was a happy time, without shadows or difficulties. But some found their families annihilated, their homes destroyed, the world around them indifferent and deaf to their anguish, and had to laboriously rebuild a new life on the ruins of the old one. For them, the grief has never ended.
Another feature that unites all these interviews is their spontaneity, and the goodwill with which they were granted. Often one has the impression that the desire to talk, to find an interested and attentive listener, is old, and that the opportunity to give written form to experiences by now remote in time had long been hoped for. Many of the depositions share a characteristic trait: the need to speak, to “speak about it,” goes back to the time of imprisonment. Sometimes, it’s almost a vow, a promise that the believer makes to God and the nonbeliever to himself: If I ever return, I will speak, so that my life will not have been in vain. In other words, the hope of survival coincides with the obsessive hope of being able to tell others, to sit beside the fire, around the table, and talk: like Ulysses at the court of the Phaeacian king, like Silvio Pellico after surviving the squalor of the Spielberg, like Ruzante returning from battle, like Tibullus’ soldier who narrates his exploits and “draws his camp on the table with wine”; and like the unforgettable soldier described by Eduardo de Filippo, who returns “town by town” from Germany to his starving and “millionaire” Naples, right after the war, and seeks, in vain, someone who will listen to him.1 The veteran’s tale is a literary genre.
For the survivor, bearing witness is an important and complex undertaking. It’s perceived simultaneously as a moral and civic duty, as a primary, liberating necessity, and as social prestige. Those who lived in the Lager see themselves as custodians of a fundamental experience, included in world history, witnesses by right and by obligation, frustrated if their testimony is not sought and understood, rewarded if it is. Therefore, the interview that preceded this anthology was, for many of us, a unique and memorable experience, the event that we had waited for since the day of our liberation, and that gave meaning to liberation itself.
There are many of us (but every year our number decreases) who remember the specific way in which we feared death down there. If we die here in silence, as our enemies would like, if we do not return, the world will not know what man was capable of, and still is; the world will not know itself, and will be in greater danger of repeating National Socialist barbarity, or some other, equivalent barbarity, regardless of its real or declared political origin.
In this urge to live to tell the story, this awareness of a clear historical obligation that surfaced in the rare moments of respite, many found the strength to resist, day after day. The idea for this book originated in the rational need to bear witness. To those who conceived, financed, and promoted it, to the young researchers who listened patiently to our reminiscences, often confused and upset by a renewed anguish, and to those who worked to reconstruct them, we offer our gratitude as survivors who are no longer young, who are not always heard, but who have not forgotten.
Foreword to La vita offesa: Storia e memoria dei lager nazisti nei racconti
di duecento sopravvissuti (Offended Life: The History and Memory of
the Nazi Lagers in the Stories of Two Hundred Survivors), edited by Anna
Bravo and Daniele Jalla (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1987)
1. Silvio Pellico (1789–1859) was a patriot and dramatist who was imprisoned for eight years in Spielberg prison in Brunn. Ruzante was the stage name of the playwright Angelo Beolco (1496–1542), whose dialogue Il parlamento de Ruzante tells of his return from the Venetian war front, only to find that he has lost his wife, his land, and his honor. Tibullus (c. 55 bc–19 bc) was a Roman poet. Napoli milionaria!, by the Neapolitan Eduardo De Filippo (1900–1984), premiered in 1945.
“Our Generation . . .”
Our generation has had the unenviable fate to live through events of historical importance. I don’t mean to say that afterward nothing more happened in the world: natural catastrophes and collective man-made tragedies have followed everywhere. Yet, in spite of the omens, nothing has happened in Europe that compares to the Second World War. Therefore, each one of us is a witness, whether he likes it o
r not; and the research carried out by the Piedmont Region regarding the memories of the survivors of deportation is justified and timely, since the deportation, owing to its extent and the number of its victims, is emerging as an event that is unique, at least until now, in human history.
I was asked to participate in my double capacity as a witness and as a writer. I am honored and, at the same time, burdened by a responsibility. A book is read; it may or may not entertain, it may or may not educate, it may or may not be remembered or read again. As someone who wrote about the deportation, this is not enough for me. Since the publication of my first book, If This Is a Man, I have hoped that my writings, even though they are signed by me, would be read as collective works, as a voice representing other voices. More than that: that they would be an opening, a bridge between us and our readers, especially young ones. It is soothing for us former deportees to sit at the same table and tell one another about our by now distant ordeals, but this serves little purpose. As long as we live, it’s our duty to talk, of course, but to talk to others, to those who weren’t born yet, so that they know “how far man can fall.”
Therefore, it’s no accident that a good part of my current work consists of a sort of uninterrupted dialogue with my readers. I receive many letters full of “whys?” and requests for interviews; and above all I am asked, especially by young people, two fundamental questions: How could the horror of the Lagers happen? Will it happen again?
I don’t believe in prophets, in people who can read the future; those who have passed themselves off as such have, so far, failed miserably, often becoming ridiculous. Even less do I see myself as a prophet, or as a legitimate interpreter of recent history. However, these two questions are so pressing that I felt obliged to attempt an answer, or, rather, a cluster of answers, those which were distributed on the occasion of this conference. Some answers are addressed to Italian, American, and British readers; other, I believe more interesting answers are the outcome of an intricate network of correspondence that for many years put me in contact with the German readers of If This Is a Man. These are the voices of the children and grandchildren of those who were responsible for what happened or who allowed it to happen or who didn’t care to learn about it. There are also here the voices of different Germans, who did what they could, whether little or much, to oppose the crime their country was committing. I thought it right to give space to both groups.
We survivors are witnesses, and every witness is obliged (in part by law) to give complete and truthful answers. In our case, however, this is also a moral duty, as our ranks, always small, are thinning. I tried to fulfill this duty with my recent book, The Drowned and the Saved, which some of you may have read and which will soon be translated into English and German. This book, too—which consists of questions about deportation (not only by the Nazis) and of tentative answers—is part of my dialogue with readers, which by now has lasted more than forty years; I see it as very much in tune with this meeting. I hope readers will find that the book accomplishes the same purpose as the meeting: that it makes a modest contribution toward an understanding of the history of our time, whose violence is the child of the violence that we fortuitously survived.
In 1976 Levi added an appendix to If This Is a Man, in which he answered the questions that were most frequently asked by students he met in the schools and by other readers of the book. For an American edition of Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) and The Reawakening (The Truce) (published by Summit Books in 1986), he wrote this text, which was then added as an introduction to the appendix. The Italian version appeared in the anthology Storia vissuta (Living History) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988).
Foreword to Writings in Memory of Daniele Levi
I don’t know who was the author of the consolatory but cruel expression “whom the gods love die young.” The death of a young person, and especially a lively, pious life-loving scholar like Daniele Levi, is not an event that we can be consoled for, much less be cheered by. The devout and just man (and just among the just is his father, Isacco, to whom we Jews of Turin owe so much) is not consoled—that is, his sorrow is not erased—but it abates, with the sorrow of others; he draws from his faith the strength to resign himself to a Will that transcends us, because its designs are unknown to us.
We would like this collection of writings and testimonials concerning a short, difficult life to be read not only as an homage to the dead man but also as a collective act of thanks to the father, who is left to mourn him in solitude, desolate but undefeated.
Foreword to Scritti in memoria di Daniele Levi (Writings
in Memory of Daniele Levi) (Turin: privately printed, 1993);
Levi’s foreword was written in 1986–87
Foreword to Broken Future
by Lidia Beccaria Rolfi and Bruno Maida
The international year of the child, 1979, ended with many words and commitments but few results. The fact that the collective conscience of all countries felt the need for such a celebration is in itself a depressing symptom. Obviously, the year of the child originated in a widespread feeling of guilt, in the awareness that to this day, even in the most advanced countries, there is no feeling of reverence toward children, as prescribed by the Gospels, and that adults are preparing, for today’s children, a future full of shadows. And yet love for children is inscribed in us; the proximity of a child, even an unknown child, makes us responsible, brings us joy, strength, and peace of mind. It’s an axiomatic love, unquestionable, a product of our remote evolutionary roots as nurturers of our newborns, but in the human species this love has been enriched with meanings and symbols. To us, the child is (or should be) the embodiment of innocence, of the boundless potential that can turn into anything, of the blank slate on which anything can be written.
There is and has been no civilization that hasn’t acknowledged and exalted this love, with the exception of the “civilization” established by National Socialism in the heart of Europe. On this point, as on many others, Nazism has become an unavoidable term of comparison, as “what shouldn’t happen,” and yet did happen. Its seeds survive, and Lidia Rolfi recognizes them under many guises in the world we live in. They are always, invariably, negative, precisely what is and shouldn’t be: the negation in deeds of the morality proclaimed in words.
But at the time of the Nazis words and deeds were consistent. The most unbelievable pages of this book come from Nazi sources, and they not only concern the treatment reserved for children of little or no “biological value” (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs) but extend the reach of violence to the children of pure Aryan and German blood. Of course, it’s a different kind of violence: not a drop of German blood must be lost; rather, it must be reclaimed whenever it has been mixed with less noble blood. In Poland, in Bohemia, in Ukraine, children who, according to the Handbook of Germanization, had the requisite genetic features were snatched from their parents and entrusted to German families or to the Lebensborn organization. As I said, this information—order sheets, treatises, even legal regulations—comes from German sources. Some remained in a nebulous draft state, because of their intrinsic absurdity; others were implemented with a maniacal and paranoid diligence that makes one wonder, considering that the fundamental feature required to qualify as a pure German was blond hair, while Hitler and his champion Himmler had brown hair.
In other words, children are subjected to a hierarchy of behaviors, on different levels, but with a single inspiration, which is to extend to the human species the practices of zootechnics. As if man, including National Socialist man, had no mind, no memory, feelings, or passions, and were nothing but living matter, to be accepted or rejected according to its appearance. Children of Germanic blood must become warriors if male, makers of warriors if female. “Germanizable” children must be Germanized. All others, according to their country of origin and their “race,” must be made to work, starting at the age of ten, deprived of any education, used in the Lager as guinea pigs in so-called medical experiments.
Gypsies are to be confined to the Lager and later killed, Jews killed even before entering the Lager.
I don’t think that facilities for mass slaughter like those of the Nazis exist anywhere in the world today, nor do clear plans for genocide, immediate or deferred, like the ones described in this terrible book. However, children continue to suffer and die by the millions from hunger and disease, or are caught in the meshes of incomprehensible and cruel wars. As long as this happens, pages such as these must be read, even if they cannot be read without anguish: they are vital nourishment for those who wish to watch over the conscience and the future of the world.