SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ (Se questo é un uomo)

Memoir by Primo Levi, 1947

Survival in Auschwitz (1986), generally understood to be a supreme achievement intellectually, morally, and stylistically, is Primo Levi's first work of witness. It was originally published in Italian in 1947 as Se questo é un uomo, and the first English translation appeared in 1959 under the title If This Is a Man. Levi committed himself while still in the Lager to communicating the nature of the experience, should he survive. To that end, and at peril of immediate death if found out, he made notes that he intended as an aid in the project. Aside from those notes he could rely on his virtually flawless and detailed memory. He composed the book in the year after the liberation of the camp, but it was refused repeatedly for publication with the excuse that people were tired of the war and would not wish to read it. Published in a small edition in 1947, of which about 600 copies were sold, it gained almost no recognition until it was published by Einaudi in 1958.

The book is composed of a prologue plus 17 chapters . Levi does not aim at a continuous narrative flow covering his period in the Lager. Rather, in each chapter he focuses on an issue or a series of particular events that he supposes bear pondering, if we are at all to understand the nature of the camps and their significance. Scrupulous in restricting his reportage to what he had himself experienced, he focuses with high intensity on particular people and details of experience in a way perhaps best described as synecdochic: a part stands for and suggests the greater whole. He remarks in his prologue that he does not intend an account of atrocities, and in fact he does not dwell on the details of the horrors he nonetheless gives us to know exist. His writing is lucid, precise, and astonishingly free of rhetorical heightening. His intense focus on significant detail related with taut restraint and the alert moral rigor of his analysis and judgment leave the reader with little room for evasion or indifference. The book exerts an enormous and wholly salutary human pressure on mind and sensibility.

As an epigraph to the book, Levi wrote a version of the Shemá ("Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one …") for the world after Auschwitz. Levi believed that his people had undergone in the twentieth century a new slavery and exodus experience, and he commands all humans, not Israel alone, to listen (shemá ) and consider that experience. Beginning with his own capture in 1943, the book comes to a close with the Russian liberation of the camp in January 1945. A sustained focus throughout the book is the way in which the camps broke the moral structure of those brought there—broke, that is, their humanity. The dehumanizing nature of life in the Lager is caught in an episode Levi tells of his being desperate with thirst on arrival in camp and of his plucking an icicle to suck to relieve the drive for water. A guard snatches it out of his hand. "Warum?" ("Why?") Levi asks. To which the guard replies, "Hier ist kein Warum" ("Here there is no why"). Levi remarks that for him the most accurate single image of all the evil of his time would be that of the human broken in the Lager: "an emaciated man, with head drooped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen."

Levi weaves through the book signals of that brokenness as the essence of the slaves' experience of camp. Of this, the pervasive response of the prisoners to their captors—"Jawohl!" ("Yes!")—is a verbal example. He notes at the beginning of the book that the prisoners were taught to respond with that word. It recurs as the universal response of the prisoners to a harangue in German at the hanging of a man who had participated in an attempt to blow up the crematoria. "Do you understand?" they are asked. To which they all reply, "Jawohl." "[I]t was as if our cursed resignation took body by itself, as is it turned into a collective voice." And at the end of the book Levi describes the death agony of a Hungarian chemist, Somogyi, in the Infection Ward. His emaciated and disease-racked body taut in a fetal position, he repeats thousands of times without pause, "Jawohl, Jawohl, Jawohl … "

The book should not be called a novel. Levi remarks in the prologue to the book that "none of the facts is invented." But the matter goes deeper. Novels characteristically have heroes, and Levi resists utterly casting himself in that role. When he gives testimony (in the episode of the hanging, above) that he was one of those saying "Jawohl," he presents himself as broken too. That there was no achievement or excellence that gave one an increased chance of survival in that world of death he similarly indicates out of his own experience. He survived by the chance fact that as a chemist, he was needed for the Buna and was given just enough extra rations that he lived until the Russians liberated the camp. But being a chemist gave no general advantage in the struggle for survival. Witness Somogyi of the story above.

Levi almost never, in all his writings, addresses the "great why of it all," limiting himself to a description and analysis of the events he experienced and their implications for understanding our possibilities as humans. Nor does he engage in overt and sustained polemic about the implications of Christian anti-Judaism as a precondition for Shoah. In a highly allusive chapter titled "The Canto of Ulysses," in which he reads the experience of Auschwitz through his knowledge of Dante's Inferno, he does, however, broach these matters with enormous tact. The point Levi probably wishes to be taken is that through the long history of Christianity there has flowed a stream of understanding that the Christian God would destroy others who did not come to him through the way of Jesus. Levi apparently had an insight that in fact the Germans simply set themselves within this understanding in the position of God and were destroying the "others," the Jews, simply because they were, in German terms, irreducibly "other."

—Ralph G. Williams