Survival in Auscbwitz

by Primo Levi

THE LITERARY WORK

A Holocaust memoir set in Auschwitz between late 1943 and early 1945; published in Italian (as Se questo ë un uomo) m 1947, in English in 1959 (as If This Is a Man) and in 1961 (as Survival in Auschwitz).

SYNOPSIS

Arrested as a partisan and a Jew in wartime Italy, Primo Levi is deported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where he spends the next 11 months, His memoir of the period reflects on the meaning of humanity and presents vivid portraits of the various camp dwellers.

Events in History at the Time of the Memoir

The Memoir in Focus

For More Information

Primo Levi (1919-87), one of the foremost Holocaust writers of his time, was born, lived most his life, and died in Turin, Italy. Fascinated by chemistry at an early age, he worked as a chemist for much of his adult life. He meanwhile married, had two children, and began a writing career that led him to international prominence in later years. Even when he wrote about the Holocaust, three biographical factors intersected to influence Levi’s perspective as an author: his belonging to the small Italian-Jewish community, his training in science and lengthy career as an industrial chemist, and his upbringing in twentieth-century Italy with its underlying classical culture. Explorations of the intersection of science and literature appear in many of his works, including his Holocaust writing. Although he came to prominence with autobiographical works about the Holocaust, he also achieved renown in Italy and abroad for his novels, short stories, science fiction, poetry, and essays. Prominent among them are The Reawakening (1963), The Periodic Table (1975), and The Drowned and the Saved (1986). Altogether they reveal a writer of unusual equanimity, clarity, and gracefulness, one who reflects forthrightly and sometimes with irony on the themes of good and evil, human justice, and the makeup of hu-mankind. These themes coalesce in the original title of Survival in Auschwitz, Se questo e un uomo, (“If This Is a Man”). In this first memoir, and in subsequent works Levi explores what it means, on the psychological and ethical levels, to be a human being (un uomo) and how humans behave under difficult circumstances. He bases these explorations not only on skills of close observation related to his training as a scientist but also on grim firsthand experience as a victim of man’s inhumanity to man.

Events in History at the Time of the Memoir

The Holocaust arrives to Italy

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were allies in World War II from May 22, 1939 (the signing of the Pact of Steel), until July 25, 1943 (Mussolini’s ouster from power). A short two months later, on September 8, 1943, Italy unconditionally surrendered to the Anglo-American troops, who had invaded it from the south; at this point Italy effectively switched sides from the Axis Pact (Nazi Germany and Japan) to the Allied forces (Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States). Nazi troops, which had been massed in central and northern Italy, overnight went from confederates to belligerents, with brutal implications for the country’s Jews. At the same time, the partisan guerrilla war—mounted by Italian civilians against Nazi troops and Fascist diehards—swung into high gear. Italy was plunged into chaos, with the war now being fought on many fronts. Italian Jews immediately found themselves in danger as they never had been before; indeed, the roundup and murder of Jews on Italian soil began on September 16, 1943, and culminated in the deportation of more than 8,800 Jews from the Italian main-land and territories. Among them was Primo Levi.

The rise of Fascism and Italy’s Jews

From 1922 until mid-1943, Italy was governed by Benito Mussolini and his Fascist regime. Seizing power in the 1922 “March on Rome,” the charismatic Mussolini established a totalitarian state that would later be imitated by Germany (1933-45) and Spain (1939-75). Italian Fascism was based on the concepts of militarism and empire-building, economic corporatism, and the consolidation of power in the Fascist political party. Its leaders quashed political dissent, often through the use of violence and terror. Cultural norms were imposed by the state—including jingoistic conceptions of language, art, and music—and family life was carefully regimented. The family, for example, was legally defined as a “social and political institution,” allowing the state to intervene in matters such as family size and female education. To gain public support, the government sponsored public-works projects and propaganda campaigns. The appearance of order and alliances with the monarchy (from the ruling House of Savoy) and the papacy likewise fostered support.

Life for Italy’s 35,000 Jews (0.9 percent of a total 1931 Italian population of 41 million) resembled that of other Italian citizens. Indeed, Italian Jews were highly visible and assimilated, present throughout the professions, and associated with both ends of the political spectrum: on the left, as dissenters and members of the anti-Fascist Resistance Movement, and on the right, as supporters of the Fascist Party, and even members of Mussolini’s cabinet.

The tide began to turn for Italian Jewry in 1936, when Italy invaded Ethiopia and started to adopt racial categories that would enable the Italian government to classify its citizens by race. This same year Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany established the Rome-Berlin Axis, in which the two governments committed themselves to fighting Bolshevism in Europe and supporting Francisco Franco’s rebellion against the democratic government of Spain. Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had already promulgated racially based laws targeting the Jews, and Mussolini, as a consequence of his new alliance with Hitler, soon espoused the German leader’s view that Jews—unlike “Aryan” Germans or Italians—belong to an inferior, non-Aryan “race” and therefore warrant discrimination. A series of Italian “Racial Laws” (based on Germany’s Nuremburg Laws) were passed in 1938. They banned Jews from practicing most professions, from owning large businesses, and from attending public schools. In general, the laws restricted the movements of Italy’s Jews, especially in relation to their contacts with non-Jewish Italians.

While the Italian populace was generally perplexed by the regulations afflicting their Jewish neighbors, few protests were registered. Most Italians of the day were preoccupied with the war effort—the new theaters of conflict in Albania and Greece, the establishment in 1939 of the Nazi-Fascist “Pact of Steel,” and Italy’s 1940 entry into World War II on the side of the Axis Powers and against the Allies. (The key provision in the “Pact of Steel” was for either signatory to come to the military aid of the other signatory in the event of war.)

The Italian Jews’ 2,000-year history

In order to better understand the position of the Italian Jews (including Primo Levi) during the war years, in the Resistance, and in the Holocaust, it is important to briefly explore the history of the Jews in Italy. Much of this history comes to play in Levi’s personal biography as well as in Survival in Auschwitz.

The Italian Jewish community is the oldest in Europe, dating back more than 2,100 years. It was initially a large, flourishing community, living mainly in southern Italy between Sicily and Rome. Its population had climbed as high as 120,000, becoming traders, shopkeepers, and small farmers. By the Middle Ages, its numbers had dwindled some and, through many vicissitudes, it had become well-established in southern society. This southern Italian Jewish community fell subject in 1492 to an order of expulsion from King Ferdinand of Spain that covered all the Italian territories then in his possession (roughly from Sicily to Naples). Jews were forced to move northward to Rome and its environs. For the first time, they began settling in large numbers in areas of northern Italy; meanwhile, Ferdinand’s edict virtually eradicated all Jews from southern Italy (where their presence is sparse even today).

In 1555 the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, issued by Pope Paul IV, required that all Jews move to self-contained (often walled-off) areas within the cities where they lived. All sizeable cities under papal influence eventually established Jewish quarters, or ghettos, a term that probably derives from geto, the Renaissance Venetian word for “iron foundry” (such a foundry stood by Venice’s Jewish quarter). The papal bull ushered in the ghetto era in Italy, which persisted for more than 300 years, until the last Jewish ghetto (in Rome) was emancipated in 1870.

Although significant variation existed with respect to living conditions within the ghettos, they were generally deplorable. The inhabitants became subject to frequent outbreaks of disease and, especially in Rome and the Papal States, were generally reduced to pauperdom. The conditions decimated the Jewish population, to a low of 20,000 by the mid-1600s (Delia Pergola, p. 56).

Abolition of the Jewish ghettos coincided in most cases with the Risorgimento (“revival” or “renewal”), a process lasting from 1848 to 1870 and culminating in the establishment of a unified Italy, the first federation since the fall of the Roman Empire in 476. The new Italian state, officially consolidated in 1870, was quick to ex-tend full citizenship to all Italians, including Jews—a policy that promptly won over the Italian Jews and fostered an enduring sense of allegiance to the state. This allegiance partly accounts, in later years, for Jewish support from some quarters for the Fascist government. Jews like Primo Levi’s grandparents, capitalized on their newfound freedom and equal rights to enter various domains: the universities, professions previously closed to them (like law and medicine), the military, and politics. Or they established their own businesses (Levi’s paternal grandfather was a civil engineer, while his maternal grandfather was a cloth merchant). Many Italian Jews served with distinction in World War I, including Levi’s father, Cesare.

Primo Levi: family life, education, and Resistance activities

Cesare Levi (1878–1941) was an electrical engineer and his wife, Ester (1895–1991)—Primo Levi’s mother—was a housewife. They lived in a stylish apartment in the center of Turin, the capital of Piedmont in northern Italy. The family (Primo had a younger sister, Anna Maria) was highly assimilated and steeped in Italian classical culture. Levi himself attended a classical high school, where he studied works by Dante Alighieri, Ludovico Ariosto, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, and other canonical authors, as well as Greek and Latin literature. Many of these authors would be referenced in Survival in Auschwitz and in Levi’s subsequent writings. Even more passionate about science than he was about literature, Levi pursued a chemistry degree at the University of Turin, completing it in 1941. At that time, the Racial Laws had been in effect for three years, complicating his search for a thesis advisor and requiring the annotation “of the Jewish race” after his name on his diploma.

Levi took up employment as an industrial chemist in the Lombardy region, first in Lanza and then in Milan. In 1942, with Italy at war on the side of Nazi Germany and the Allies about to land in Sicily, Levi, together with a group of Turinese friends, made contact with the Resistance and joined the clandestine Partito d’Azione (Action Party). They became partisans, bent on defeating the Italian Fascist-Nazi war effort. In July 1943 Mussolini was ousted from power as leader of Italy by his own party but, with Nazi connivance, managed to flee north where he set up a rump government, the Italian Social Republic.

Meanwhile, Field Marshall Pietro Badoglio governed the country as a whole; Badoglio dissolved the Fascist Party and, on October 13, 1943, declared war on Nazi Germany, Italy’s erstwhile ally. Levi and his friends at this point joined a partisan cell centered in the mountains, in the northern Val d’Aosta Alps. Completely unprepared and ill-equipped, they were arrested on December 13, 1943. The authorities had Levi deported to a holding camp in Carpi-Fossoli (near Modena) run by Republican (Fascist) guards and, from there, in February 1944—once the camp was turned over to Nazi guards—to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz begins on the eve of Levi’s deportation and covers the next 11 months of his life, from February 22, 1944, until Auschwitz was liberated, on January 27, 1945.

Auschwitz: anatomy of a concentration camp

Auschwitz, a complex of three main camps plus smaller satellite camps, was located near Cracow, Poland. It was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, and the most infamous of the six camps devoted to extermination. Nearly all of the roughly 8,800 Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories were sent directly from Italy to Auschwitz; afterwards, some, like Primo Levi, were assigned to smaller camps within the Auschwitz complex or to independent concentration camps (like Flossenberg, Gross-Rosen, etc.).

Auschwitz I was established in 1940 as a penal camp, though even then it featured a gas chamber and crematorium (used to kill prisoners and then incinerate their bodies to dispose of them). Auschwitz I became infamous for the torturous pseudo-medical experiments conducted on inmates (often children) by Dr. Josef Mengele. Auschwitz II, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau or just Birkenau, was the largest subdivision and included sections for women, men, Roma (Gypsies), and families deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Most of the mass murder by gassing (with Zyklon B gas) was carried out in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s four large gas chambers.

Trains arrived nearly daily at Auschwitz I and II, carrying Jews and other prisoners from those European countries that had fallen to the Nazi invasion (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, and others). Prisoners were either sent to the camp to be used as slave labor or sent directly to the gas chambers to be killed. When the camp was overcrowded, whole transports of Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers. Of the roughly 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz, “[a]t least 1.1 million Jews were killed [there]. Other victims included between 70,000 and 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, and about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war” (“Auschwitz”). Of the roughly 8,800 Jews deported from Italy and its territories to Nazi lagers [camps], [only] about 1,000 (or 12 percent) survived; the survival rate for Italian Jews in Auschwitz was half that, 6 percent (Picciotto Fargion, pp. 25–26; Gutman, p. 1801). The number in Primo Levi’s company who survived was about half again as large; of the 650 Italian Jews deported along with Levi in his transport, just 23 (or 3.5 percent) survived.

Primo Levi was tattooed, initiated, and given a chemistry exam, which he passed. Afterward, he was assigned to Auschwitz III, or Buna (also called Monowitz), an outlying camp where German manufacturer I. G. Farben managed a synthetic rubber plant. Levi credited his survival to a series of lucky circumstances: first among them was his knowledge of his captors’ language, German (part of the standard Italian university chemistry curriculum of the day) and his chemistry expertise (which eventually got him removed from manual labor and assigned to lab work). He also credited his survival to the material assistance provided by Lorenzo Perrone, a non-Jewish Italian “civilian laborer,” who provided an extra daily ration of soup; to his friendship with Alberto Dalla Volta; and to the fact that he neither became seriously ill nor suffered a serious beating during his imprisonment. Of Lorenzo in particular he writes, “Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man” (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 122).

Levi was still alive to greet the liberating Russian Army troops in January 1945 and was evacuated by them back to a Soviet DP (deported persons) camp. After several months of enforced idleness, Levi became impatient to return to Turin and began a five-month labyrinthine and picaresque journey through White Russia, the Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Austria. He traveled either alone or with occasional companions, on foot, by truck, and by train, arriving home in Italy on October 19, 1945 (the trip was the subject of his second book, The Reawakening). In Turin, amid a difficult readjustment to peacetime Italy and life after Auschwitz, Levi took up residence in his family’s apartment, found work as an industrial chemist in a Turin paint factory, became engaged to his future wife, Lucia Morpurgo, and began transforming his memories and the few notes he took with him from Auschwitz into his first book, Survival in Auschwitz.

The Memoir in Focus

Content summary

Survival in Auschwitz comprises an author’s preface, a poetic epigraph by Levi, and 17 short chapters, ranging in length from 4 to 22 pages. The author’s preface is notable for three points: it opens with an homage to the “good fortune” that allowed Levi to be deported to Auschwitz late in the war, thus increasing his chances of survival (rarely do similar Holocaust memoirs include such preeminent paeans to luck). The preface goes on to state Levi’s objective in writing: not to “formulate new accusations” but “rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 9). In conclusion Levi avows that “none of the facts are invented” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 10). (That Levi felt compelled to add this assurance testifies to the skepticism with which many Holocaust survivors’ stories were greeted in the immediate aftermath of World War II.)

The oft-studied poetic epigraph to Survival in Auschwitz (called “Shema” when published in Levi’s Collected Poems, 1988, but here untitled) is one of Levi’s very first writings upon returning to Turin. Composed on January 10, 1946, it evokes in its title (“Hear!” in Hebrew), its structure, and its lexicon the central prayer of Judaism (also called the Shema, found in Deuteronomy 6:4–9), an affirmation of the centrality of God. Levi alters the prayer to admonish his readers to “[m]editate that this [the Holocaust] came about” and warns them to repeat his message about the destruction of man in the Holocaust, lest harm befall them and their children abandon them (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 11). The original title of Survival in Auschwitz comes from the poem’s fifth verse (Considerate se questo e un uomo; “Consider if this is a man”).

The first chapter, “The Journey,” opens with the details of Levi’s capture by Fascist militiamen on December 13, 1943. The author immediately asserts the “justice” of his subsequent fate, Auschwitz included, in that it is in line with the lager doctrine he is about to learn: “he who errs, pays.” Once captured, Levi prefers to offer up that he is a Jew rather than admit to being a partisan: the latter would lead to torture or death, while the former earns him a trip to the Carpi-Fossoli holding camp. Soon, Nazi SS officers (Nazi Germany’s special police force) take over the running of the camp from the Italian Fascists and the inmates are told to prepare for deportation. In watching a group of devout Libyan Jews at prayer, Levi for the first time feels a direct connection to his ancient Jewish roots. On the other hand, when an SS officer refers to the Jewish prisoners as “pieces,” he realizes the horrible metamorphosis that awaits him. Levi describes the transit to Auschwitz, the deaths along the way, and the incomprehensible, frantic scene as prisoners are separated into the able-bodied (who enter the camp) and the invalids (who are sent to the gas chambers). He almost expects to hear Charon—the ferryman to Hell in Dante’s Inferno—shout, “Woe unto you, wicked spirits!” (Dante, Inferno 3.84).

Though a sign on the Auschwitz gates reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work gives freedom), Levi instead feels that he has reached bottom (thus, the title of the next chapter, “On the Bottom”). “This is hell,” he writes (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 22). Levi and his campmates are shaved and tattooed (Levi would keep his tattoo, 174517, his whole life, as a reminder of Auschwitz). A veteran prisoner explains that they are in Monowitz in High Silesia, Poland, and that they will be expected to work. The showers suddenly burst on, followed by four SS officers shouting orders and throwing them ragged clothing and broken clogs. Levi feels transformed into one of the “phantoms” that he had glimpsed just the day before inside the camp. He meditates that “for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. … We had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 26).

A cacophony of new words accosts him: hdftling (prisoner), kapo (inmate overseer), kommando (work detail), and so forth. Their special meanings will become clear over time—to Levi and to the reader. One striking characteristic of this memoir is its linguistic heterogeneity: Levi uses a wealth of lager-specific terms (sometimes called Lagerjargon) as well as snippets of phrases in the languages heard at Auschwitz (German, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, French, and others). By doing so, he conveys not just the physical but also the cultural impact of the lager.

That the memoir manages to deliver a narrative punch in a foreign idiom becomes clear at the beginning of his internment. Thirsty, Levi reaches for an icicle, only to have a guard snatch it from him. “Warum?”—Why?—he asks. “Hierist hein warum (there is no why here)” comes the reply (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 29). The incomprehensibility and injustice of the concentration-camp system resound in the reply, gnawing at Levi, the rational scientist. To stave off the demolition of the soul he recognizes in some in-mates, he sets out to document and, perhaps, determine the “why” of the Holocaust. Primarily he aims to investigate human nature in the crucible of Auschwitz: what makes a man a man; how can he retain his humanity; how and under what circumstances does he lose it? Levi starts by describing the absurd Nazi rituals and the inmates’ work assignments. He reveals, sadly, that the few Italian prisoners—scattered among Auschwitz’s many barracks—soon cease their Sunday evening get-togethers because “it was so tiring to walk those few steps and then, meeting each other, to remember and to think. It was better not to think” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 37).

Levi’s “initiation” into camp life includes awareness of the perpetual linguistic Babel of the camp, where “bread,” for example, is alternately referred to as “pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechemkeny’er” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 39). Fights, he learns, are the norm, and ironically in the shadows of crematoria prisoners are exhorted to wash their hands before eating. Levi meets a certain Steinlauf, who eloquently confides that he insists on maintaining personal hygiene, not for reasons of cleanliness per se but to resist becoming animal-like. Levi rejects such deliberately conceived practice and belief, asking, “would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 41). His portrait of Steinlauf is just the first in what will be a series of vivid portraits along the lines of medieval exampla (sketches used to point to a moral). An-other intense portrait profiles Null Achtzehn, a man with no name other than his number “Zero Eighteen”: “as if everyone was aware that only man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn was no longer a man” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 42). Levi often finds himself working alongside this shell of a man.

One day, while carrying dangerously heavy loads from the train to a storehouse, Levi injures his foot, precipitating a trip to the ka-be (krankenbau, or infirmary). His destination is fraught with peril, since both disease and “selections” (for the gas chamber) are rife in the infirmary; making matters worse, foot injuries (which imply an inability to work) are often the first step in the chain of events that leads to the crematorium. Indeed, a ka-be inmate pitilessly tells Levi, “Du Jude, kaputt. Du schnell Krematorium fertig (You Jew, finished. You soon ready for crematorium)” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 49). Miraculously, Levi emerges healed from the ka-be, but not before experiencing the particular “limbo” it represents or, in conversations with longer-term prisoners, revealing that he still naively disbelieves (even after weeks in the camp) in the existence of selections, gassings, and crematoriums. Perhaps, suggests Levi, the “missing” inmates have been transferred to other camps? “He does not want to understand,” the older prisoners irritably conclude (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 53).

During the winter of 1944, Levi befriends Alberto Dalla Volta, which turns out to be a real boon, since, contrary to lager ethos of each man for himself, the two decide to divide any material gains (extra soup or items to barter). Both come out the stronger for the arrangement. As the fall days become shorter, the prisoners get more time to sleep. Levi is tormented by a recurring dream, simple in its structure, but devastating (and prescient) in its content: his sister (Anna Paola), his friends, and many others listen to him telling his story of Auschwitz—the hunger, the lice-control, the beatings, and the rest. Levi feels intense pleasure in being home among friends and having so much to recount, then notices that his listeners are completely indifferent. His own sister gets up and walks away without a word. At this point Levi feels intense grief and awakens. (The dream foreshadows the real-life indifference that greeted Italian Holocaust survivors on their return to Italy. A meager group—less than 800—they were totally overshadowed by the hundreds of thousands of returning solders and partisans, and their stories remained untold for many years.)

Regulating the rhythm of sleeping and dreams is the harsh reality of work. One day Levi finds himself carrying 175-pound sleepers—structural parts—back and forth through a field of soft mud; another time his work squad must transport cast-iron supports; yet another time, push wagons and break stones. Although Levi was later to write about work as ennobling man (in The Monkey’s Wrench [1978]), here work portends maiming, injuries, beatings, and exhaustion. Indeed the rations given to Auschwitz inmates are not calculated for long-term survival and the inmates are literally worked to death. Levi writes, “The Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 74). A “good day” (in the chapter of the same name) means a day when his kommando “organizes” an extra 11 gallons of soup. “What more could one want?” Levi asks sardonically but also sincerely. He describes sitting down to eat with the German verb, fressen, “the way of eating of animals,” not essen, “the human way of eating” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 76).

If the concentration camps were a “Germanic social organism,” as Levi contends, then they also included a range of types, with two at their extremes, the “drowned” and the “saved,” the title of a chapter (Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 83, 87). The drowned are represented by the muselmdnä ner, “the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection,” like Null Achtzen. The saved are represented by the kleine Nummer (“low numbers,” or camp veterans—referring to their low tattoo numbers), the organisators, kombinators, and lageräkesteren (prisoner-directors)—all the various kinds of prominenten (prominent persons) in the camp. Levi’s memoir reaches a conclusion about the prominenten, or, more generally, about human nature:

If one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated.

(Survival in Auschwitz, p. 91)

In the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved,” the memoir offers a rogue’s gallery of such hateful individuals, beginning with Schepschel, a petty kombinator who didn’t hesitate to condemn one of his partners in crime to a flogging in order to gain favor with the blockdltester (block director). There is also Alfred L., an erstwhile industrialist who, in the camp, coldly uses his former prestige to advance in the camp hierarchy. Two portraits stand out in particular. Elias Lindzin is a dwarf of prodigious strength, cast-iron stomach, exceptional capacity for work, and a hair-trigger temper. He is both admired and feared. With regard to Levi’s inquiry into who is a “man,” he writes, “We can now ask who is this man Elias. If he is a madman, incomprehensible and para-human…. Or if he is perhaps a product of the camp itself, what we will all become if we do not die in the camp, and if the camp itself does not end first…. In the Lager, Elias prospers and is triumphant” (Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 97–98). Another who triumphs in the camp is Henri. Unlike Elias’s brute strength, Henri has as his weapon his civilized fagade and capacities for “organization, pity and theft” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 98). He can be warm when he calculates that warmth is needed and evinces compassion from the kapos whenever he can. Levi reserves his harshest judgment for Henri, writing, “I know that Henri is living today. I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 100).

Thus, the first nine chapters of the memoir are dedicated to narrating the literal and epistemological demands of the lager, and to Levi’s process of acculturation. The chapters concern themselves especially with his acculturation as an Italian Sephardic Jew in a primarily Eastern European and Ashkenazi populace (Ashkenazi and Sephardi being the two main ethnic branches of world Jewry), relaying the process of acculturation as a voyage downwards towards “the bottom.” Subsequently Levi’s fortunes change when he is removed from outdoor manual labor to indoor lab work in support of Buna’s synthetic rubber production (Levi comments on the bitter irony that despite hundreds of thousands of deaths in the name of this elusive goal, no synthetic rubber was ever produced there).

The pages devoted to Levi’s chemical examination (in chapter 10) are some of the most densely packed in the book. The author conveys, with restraint and an eye for detail, the absurdity of interrogating half-starving, demoralized Auschwitz inmates in German on the finer points of chemical reactions. Levi struggles to recall his university learning and is momentarily euphoric when he realizes that his exam may have gone well. His status as prisoner is brutally recalled, however, when a guard named Alex escorts Levi back to his barracks. His hand dirty with some grease, Alex wipes it on Levi’s shoulder as if he were nothing but a rag. “[H]e would be amazed, the poor brute Alex,” Levi writes, “if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him … and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 108).

As the summer and fall of 1944 approach, so do rumors that the Allies are nearing Auschwitz and the war will soon be over. However, October comes and so does the now-infamous, massive Auschwitz “selection” of that same month, decreed to relieve overcrowding. Levi is spared, as is a prisoner named Kuhn. Praying aloud, Kuhn thanks God “because he has not been chosen,” heedless of poor Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, a 20-year-old lad who knows he will be gassed the next day (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 129). Levi is irate at Kuhn’s arrogance and in-sensitivity. He calls his prayer an “abomination” and says, “If I [were] God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 130).

Levi spends the winter of ‘44–45 sheltered in the chemistry lab. After what he has been through, it hardly seems like working. He also participates in the camp black market, stealing and selling soap and gasoline. Working side by side with non-Jewish Polish and Ukrainian women, a strange thing happens: he becomes aware as if for the first time of how distant he is from them, how close he has come to the “bottom,” and another side of him—the non-camp side—painfully begins to come out of hibernation. When in January 1945 Levi hears the advancing Russian troops in the distance, he has ever so slightly emerged from a cocoon of brutalizing survival instincts.

Just before liberation, the SS abandon Auschwitz, leaving the sickest prisoners behind (including Levi, who had come down with a providential case of scarlet fever). They take along about 66,000 prisoners (including Levi’s friend Alberto) on what is to become a death march (more than 15,000 will perish on the way) (Laquer, p. 44). In the days before January 27, when the Soviets arrive at Auschwitz, Levi and two other abandoned men (meaning, in Levi’s connotation, humane individuals)—Charles and Arthur—forge bonds of friendship, care for the sick in their hospital ward, and reawaken long-dormant feelings of altruism and concern. Bitterness mixes with joy in the end:

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pygmy or the most vicious sadist. Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune from it, and we owe each other mutual gratitude.

(Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 171–72)

Survival in Auschwitz ends with the words “Arthur has reached his family happily and Charles has taken up his teacher’s profession again; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 173).

From Dante’s Divine Comedy to the Holocaust

An extraordinary chapter of Survival in Auschwitz has drawn attention from scholars and readers alike because of its rich layers of meaning, luminously spare writing (just over six pages long), and illuminating reference to a classic of world literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy (1310–14; also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). As Levi does elsewhere, he lets Dante speak in his stead; Dante’s description of Hell stands in for a description of the incomprehensible world of Auschwitz.

“The Canto of Ulysses” chapter begins with Levi’s work detail cleaning the inside of an underground oil tank. Working alongside Levi is Jean (Jean Samuel), the pikolo (messenger-clerk) of the detail, a well-liked 17-year-old from Alsace who is fluent in French and German but not Italian. Though Jean is a prominent, he and Levi have become friends. That day Jean uses his power to have Levi accompany him on essenholen (ration retrieval) duty—carrying the daily vats of soup. This is a prize assignment indeed since it means “a pleasant walk there without a load, and the ever-welcome chance of going near the kitchens” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 111). Along the way Jean mentions his desire to learn Italian and Levi agrees to teach him, surprising even himself with his choice of text, Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno from the Divine Comedy: “The Canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind. … If Jean is intelligent, he will understand. He will understand—today I feel capable of so much” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 112).

In the Divine Comedy Dante considered Ulysses a noble sinner—an ancient hero to be revered poetically but, as a pre-Christian, to be condemned theologically. He is placed in the eighth bolgia (circle) of Hell, along with the “evil counsellors” “who have used their high mental gifts for guile” (Sinclair in Dante, p. 329). As a Jewish author, Levi is less interested in Dante’s reasons for condemning Ulysses than in the Greek warrior’s high mental gifts. He is particularly drawn to Ulysses’ brashness, daring, and thirst for knowledge. Levi too seeks to know his world—in his case, a brutal concentration-camp world. Ulysses’ reckless attempt to burst beyond the Strait of Gibraltar—the ancient Greek boundary of the end of the known world—has its parallel in Levi’s own incessant philosophical questioning. And if, in the end, the Greek’s ship is smashed to bits and Levi is answered “there is no why here,” each remains persuaded that the quest for knowledge is central to human experience.

It is under the aegis of enlightenment that Levi begins his Italian lesson with Jean. Translating bits of the Ulysses canto helps Levi to comprehend and convey his own situation in the Nazi lager. The autobiographical often intersects with the allegorical, as the Polish Carpathian Mountains outside Auschwitz recall the Italian Alps outside Turin, and in turn Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory—“a mountain, grey / With distance” (Dante in Survival in Auschwitz, p. 114).

At the same time, harking back to a central text of Italian literature, the Divine Comedy (and through it to Homer’s Odyssey, one of the oldest texts of the Western world), Levi reaffirms the value of civilization in a cosmos from which it is notably absent. Through Dante, Levi defines man as a creature of culture and knowledge, as well as order and justice. Ulysses exhorts his crew to “Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence” (Dante in Survival in Auschwitz, p. 113). For Levi, the exhortation validates the mind’s potential to soar beyond its confines—even the confines of Auschwitz. The fact that Levi’s Dante adventure takes place within the context of his friendship with Jean gives the adventure added significance; it is the rare instance of human solidarity (with Alberto, Lorenzo, Charles, Arthur, and Jean) that sustains him in camp and that constitutes a form of resistance against the Nazi plan to destroy man.

Canto 26 ends with a whirlwind rising up and striking Ulysses’ ship. “And three times round she went in roaring smother/ With all the waters; at the fourth the poop / Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another” (Dante in Survival in Auschwitz, p. 114). In the Inferno Ulysses and his men are sunk, as ordained from on high (by God, or “Another”). Levi’s chapter ends on a similar note. He quotes these lines from Dante, just after telling Jean he regrets that he cannot recall the preceding rhyme. Significantly, they include the verse “We rejoiced, but soon our joy was turned to grief (Dante, Inferno 26.134). Levi too rejoices at remembering most of the canto, sharing it with Jean, and enjoying the momentary mental escape it affords him from Auschwitz, but his joy becomes grief shortly thereafter. In the soup line, Jean informs him of the day’s soup: “Choux et navels. Kaposzta és repak” (cabbages and turnips). Levi replies by invoking the line from Dante’s Inferno,”’ And over our heads the hollow seas closed up’” (Survival in Auschwitz, p. 115). His words reverberate with the disillusionment of a man fully back in Auschwitz but who, by his very act of quotation, still clings to the life raft of literature.

Sources and literary context

Upon his return from Auschwitz in October 1945, Levi found an Italy in ruins after a disastrous ground and aerial war fought within its borders by the Allied and Axis powers, and an equally wrenching civil war fought between the remains of the Fascist militia and the partisan irregulars. It was in this climate that Primo Levi found work outside Turin in the Duco-Montecatini paint factory and began his memoir. The seed for the memoir came from stories he told to whomever would listen upon his return to Italy, most immediately the people at the factory, where he also lived and drafted his manuscript: “I wrote Survival in Auschwitz without giving [style] a second thought: at night, in the lab, on the train, wherever I happened to find myself (Sodi, “An Interview with Primo Levi,” p. 366). At night and on weekends, he wrote feverishly, finishing the first draft in several months.

From Mouth To Hand: Genesis Of A Memoir

“Well, when I had just come back from the camp… I had an impelling need to tell this story to whomever at all! I had just gotten a job as a chemist in a little paint factory near Turin, and the workers there considered me something of a harmless kook because …. I told my story to anyone and everyone, at the drop of a hat, from the plant manager to the yardman, even if they had other things to do. … And then l would type into the night (because l also lived in the factory) l typed every night, and this was considered even crazier!”

(Levi in Sodi, “An Interview with Primo Levi,” p. 356)

Levi acknowledged a mix of literary models for Survival in Auschwitz, ranging from the Divine Comedy to his weekly lab reports. He admitted in a 1985 interview, “lve constructed a sort of legend around that book, that I wrote it without a plan, that I wrote it on impulse, that l wrote it without reflecting at all.” In actual fact, he went on to observe, “writing is never spontaneous” (Levi in Belpoliti, p. 4). His memoir, he realized, is actually full of literature: “When the time came … to write this book, and I did have a pathological need to write it, I found inside myself a whole ‘programme.’ And it was that literature I’d studied more or less unwillingly, the Dante I’d had to do in high school, the Italian classics and so forth” (Levi in Belpoliti, p. 4).

Beyond helping initiate a flow of Holocaust memoirs, Survival in Auschwitz follows in the tradition of such nonfiction works of Italian literature as Italian patriot Silvio Pellico’s memoirs of his prison years, Le mie prigioni (1832; My Prisons); novelist and man of letters Alessandro Manzoni’s Storia della colonna infame (1840–42; History of the Column of Infamy), a reconstruction of the Milan plague of 1629 with particular emphasis on its moral ramifications; and author and partisan Emilio Lussu’s Un anno sull’altipiano (1938; A Year on the High Plains), an evocation of his experiences as a soldier in World War I. After Levi’s memoir came other Italian first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, such as Liana Millu’s Il fumo di Birkenau (1947; Smoke over Birkenau), Giuliana Tedeschi’s C’e’ un punto sulla terra (1988; There Is a Place on Earth [first published in 1947 as Questo povero corpo, or This Poor Body]), and Bruno Piazza’s Perche’ gli altri dimenticano (1956; Because the Others Forget).

Publication and reception

Levi first brought his manuscript to the Turin publishing house of Einaudi in 1947. Its editor-in-chief, Giulio Einaudi, rejected the manuscript on the recommendation of Levi’s friend and fellow Turinese Jew, Natalia Ginzburg (herself an author of distinction) in the belief that the time was not yet ripe for a Holocaust memoir. Indeed the publishing market was then flooded with memoirs of the great suffering endured by Italian troops. With over 200,000 Italians returning from World War II, there was a ready-made audience for such works, eclipsing the interest that a memoir by an Italian Jewish concentration-camp survivor might have. On a global level, the word “Holocaust” had not yet entered into the world’s vocabulary and another decade would pass before systematic studies of the Holocaust were undertaken.

Levi persisted, nevertheless, finding a company that published his manuscript in 1948—De Silva publishing house, owned by former-partisan-turned-editor Franco Antonicelli. The work received favorable reviews in five Italian newspapers, including a review on May 6 in L’Unita (Unity) by Italo Calvino, who would go on to become Italy’s most influential postwar author (see The Path to the Spiders’ Nests , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Nonetheless, few of Levi’s initial readers came from outside Turin. De Silva printed 2,500 copies of the memoir and sold 1,400. The remainder, stocked in a Florence warehouse, was destroyed in a 1966 flood.

After De Silva declined to publish a second edition, Levi returned to Einaudi, in the wake of a popular 1955 Turin exhibit on deportation. This time Einaudi said “yes” and brought out a new, slightly longer edition in 1958. The first Einaudi press run of 2,000 copies sold out and a second was called for; Survival in Auschwitz has never been out of print since. In 1959 English translations appeared in Great Britain and the United States; two years later a German edition—which Levi personally oversaw—appeared. Other translations followed. In 1976 Survival in Auschwitzwas adopted into the national middle-school curriculum in Italy and a special version annotated by Levi was published. By 1995 nearly 1.5 million copies had been published in Italy, and sales abroad continue to be strong.

Levi was not alive to witness the extent of his work’s success. On April 11, 1987, he died in his apartment building in Turin. The death was ruled a suicide, but some friends and scholars continue to argue that it was instead accidental.

Over the past 50 years, Survival in Auschwitz has emerged as one of the preeminent works of Holocaust narrative published in any language, and Primo Levi as one of the world’s most compelling thinkers on the Holocaust. In the words of the American critic Irving Howe, Levi’s is “the voice of a man struggling to retrieve the sense of what it means in the twentieth century to be, or become, a mensh [Yiddish for “man,” used to signify a decent person]”; “How,” the critic wonders, “would you say that in Italian?” (Howe in Levi, p. 16).

—Risa Sodi

For More Information

Belpoliti, Marco, and Robert Gordon, eds. The Voice of Memory: Interviews,1961–87. Trans. Robert Gordon. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.

Dante Alighieri. Inferno. In The Divine Comedy. Trans. John D. Sinclair. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Della Pergola, Sergio. Anatomia dell’ebraismo italiano: Caratteristiche demografiche, economiche, sociali, religiose e politiche di una minoranza. Assisi/Rome: Benimino Carucci Editore, 1976.

Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Laquer, Walter, ed. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Levi, Primo. If Not Now, When? Trans. William Weaver. New York: Summit, 1982.

——. Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Summit, 1985.

Picciotto Fargion, Liliana. II libro della memoria: Gli ebrei deportati dall’ltalia 1943–1945. Milan: Mursia editore, 1991.

Sodi, Risa. A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and >Auschwitz. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

——. “An Interview with Primo Levi.” Partisan Review, Summer 1987, 355–66.

Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi. London: Hutchinson, 2002.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Learning Center. “Auschwitz.” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php.