This is the centenary year of Italian writer Primo Levi — he would have been 100 years old on July 31. A survivor of Auschwitz, Levi fell to his death in 1987, from the landing of his third-storey apartment in Turin. He wrote several books on the Holocaust, keeping the devastating memory alive.
Levi, who trained as a chemist, was sent to Auschwitz on February 21, 1944, “a name without significance for us at that time…” He spent 20 months there, and was one of the three, out of the 125 Jews sent from Fossoli, to make the journey home when the camp was liberated.
After some years lapsed, Levi sat down to write about the experience in If This Is a Man, first published in Italian in 1947. “You who live safe/ In your warm houses… Consider if this is a man/ Who works in the mud/ Who does not know peace/ Who fights for a scrap of bread/ Who dies because of a yes or a no.”
Demolition of man
The inmates were first taken to a work camp, where they were “shaved and sheared” and forced into shower rooms to be disinfected before being taken to Auschwitz. “Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand.”
Soon the name was taken away for a number. Levi was assigned Häftling (prisoner) 174517, a tattoo on the left arm to be carried till he dies. The clinical detail he provides is to “furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind,” and how one is capable of behaving with another. For Levi, “precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts.”
He endured the pain to “tell the story, to bear witness,” remaining alive so that he wouldn’t “begin to die.” Asked once why there is no expression of hate for the Germans and if he had forgiven them — the Afterword of the English edition has a host of questions, answered by Levi — he said: “My personal temperament is not inclined to hatred.”
If his first memoir was about the “descent into hell,” years later he wrote another book, The Truce , which describes the journey to a celebration of life around him. But that’s another story.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
