Primo Levi

And so our journey is over. We are back in Toronto and I am sitting physically and mentally within all of the accumulated materials and experiences of the past three weeks as well as the regular commitments and paraphernalia of our lives here. I have been thinking this morning of the cities that we visited, the people that we met and spoke with, the powerful visits to historical sites of Nazi atrocities, the documents that I have been able to bring back with me, and the leads that I found for other books related to this period and these issues. Some of the latter have not been translated into English, but of those that have I have been able to order used copies through my favourite on-line site abebooks. A grounding place in the midst of all these connections has become for me the writings of Primo Levi.

I wrote briefly about Levi in an earlier post but will say more about him now. He was born in Turin, Italy in 1919 so was just 20 years old at the outbreak of the war. He had, however, grown up during the Mussolini years and was opposed to fascism. In 1943, by then a young chemist, he helped to form a partisan band, intended to co-ordinate with other resistance groups in Italy. Arrested by Italian forces toward the end of that year, he was in custody when in early 1944 the Germans invaded Italy following it’s capitulation to the Allies. In February Levi and other Jews incarcerated with him were told to prepare themselves for deportation. The next day he and about 650 others were loaded into 12 “goods wagons” and shipped to Auschwitz. Of those 96 men and 29 women were sent to Birkenau or to Auschwitz 3: Monowitz-Buna for forced labour; the others went directly to the gas chamber. Of the 125 who were chosen for labour only three survived; Levi was one of these.

Soon after his return to Italy Levi wrote his account of the voyage to Auschwitz and his time at Monowitz-Buna in If This is a Man, first published in 1947. It had already been rejected by a number of publishers and in this edition only 2500 copies were printed. In 1958 when the early repugnance in Europe to thinking or talking about the war years had begun to wane, it was published again, this time to unflagging interest. In 1963 he published The Truce, an account of his passage from a traumatized survivor to a person who to the extent possible, had found his way to a sense of living in the present. He published several other books, novels and essay collections before his death in 1987.

A distinguishing feature of all of Levi’s writings is his sensitive and intelligent observations of not just the details of camp life, but also of the various peoples that inhabited and interacted with one another in that closed universe that he rightly viewed as “hell.” Levi does not write from a place of theory but rather from his lived experience, giving stories about the people with whom he lived and negotiated his survival – as all who survived had to do – in the sense of working with on a day-to-day basis the ingredients of the camp as it was in such a manner as to make ultimate survival a possibility. Those who failed to do so, who were unable to “organize” as it was put, to find items or services that had value within the economy of the camp, would succumb to the starvation diet and brutal work agenda within a month or so of arrival. They either died at Monowitz of illness brought on by these things or were “selected” in the on-going process of the SS, weeding out those who were unable to produce enough work value to be worth keeping. These people were sent to Auschwitz: Birkenau either for the gas chambers or more likely to be shot.

Levi entered the camp in the latter stages of its existence and in relatively good condition. Though he had been held in custody in Italy, the intention of his jailers had not been to starve or work to death their captives. Many of the Jews sent to Auschwitz in 1942-4 were already in pitiful conditions given the diet, over-crowding, and brutality of the ghetto or camp from which they came. He was 25 years old and had trained as a mountaineer which meant that he was physically fit. He was also a chemist, which after a number of months became his passport from crushing physical labour to the relatively privileged position of an inside worker. These things aided his survival. In answer to frequent questions put to him by readers, however, (quoted in the afterword of the Abacus edition of his first two books combined), he also refers as a major contributor to survival to, “my interest, which has never flagged, in the human spirit and by the will not only to survive (which was common to many) but to survive with the precise purpose of recounting the things we had witnessed and endured. And finally, I was also helped by the determination, which I stubbornly preserved, to recognize always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things, and thus to avoid that total humiliation and demoralization which led so many to spiritual shipwreck.”

My immediate intention is to look in greater detail at the life of the labour camp as described by Levi in his precise but elegant prose.