If This Is a Man Read online

  Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and trained as a chemist. Arrested as a member of the anti-fascist resistance during the war, he was deported to Auschwitz. His experiences there are described in his two classic autobiographical works, If This is a Man and The Truce. He also wrote a number of universally highly acclaimed novels and essay collections, including If Not Now, When?, Moments of Reprieve and The Wrench. The Drowned and the Saved, Levi’s impassioned attempt to understand the ‘rationale’ behind the concentration camps, was completed shortly before his tragic death in Turin in 1987.

  ALSO BY PRIMO LEVI IN ABACUS

  The Wrench

  The Drowned and the Saved

  The Mirror Maker

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Abacus

  978-1-4055-2819-1

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Se questo è un uomo first published in Italy 1958

  Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A. 1958

  This translation first published by The Orion Press 1969

  Copyright © The Orion Press 1960

  La Tregun first published in Italy 1963

  Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A. 1963

  This translation first published by The Bodley Head 1965

  Copyright © The Bodley Head 1965

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Afterword copyright © New Statesman 1971

  Introduction copyright © Howard Jacobson 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  www.hachette.co.uk

  If This Is A Man/The Truce

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  ALSO BY PRIMO LEVI IN ABACUS

  COPYRIGHT

  Introduction

  IF THIS IS A MAN

  Author’s Preface

  If This is a Man

  1: The Journey

  2: On the Bottom

  3: Initiation

  4: Ka-Be

  5: Our Nights

  6: The Work

  7: A Good Day

  8: This Side of Good and Evil

  9: The Drowned and the Saved

  10: Chemical Examination

  11: The Canto of Ulysses

  12: The Events of the Summer

  13: October 1944

  14: Kraus

  15: Die drei Leute vom Labor

  16: The Last One

  17: The Story of Ten Days

  THE TRUCE

  Map

  1: The Thaw

  2: The Main Camp

  3: The Greek

  4: Katowice

  5: Cesare

  6: Victory Day

  7: The Dreamers

  8: Southwards

  9: Northwards

  10: The Little Hen

  11: Old Roads

  12: The Wood and the Path

  13: Holidays

  14: The Theatre

  15: From Starye Dorogi to Iasi

  16: From Iasi to the Line

  17: The Awakening

  Postscript: The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions

  Afterword: Saving the Scaffolding

  Introduction

  The danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue and ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and by stages finally deny – actively or by default – the horror of the extermination camps and the witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who experienced them. The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually. We don’t like being reminded of our obligations, we don’t want to go on taking the medicine, especially when we don’t accept that we are sick. So it is important that a writer such as Primo Levi is not sold to future generations as being ‘good’ for them. Again and again Primo Levi’s work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstates the case: but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others, and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn’t.

  The friendlier language to which enthusiastic publishers and reviewers sometimes have recourse is hardly more appropriate to the case. It means nothing to say of any writer that he is ‘readable’ or ‘a page turner’ and Primo Levi is certainly not one you read in a single sitting without pausing for breath. There is much that makes one pause in If This is a Man, the record of Primo Levi’s eleven-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air. But while it would be foolish to describe him as an entertainer, he nevertheless engages the reader’s interest in a story and an illumination, in character, in description, et cetera as any other imaginative writer does. His subject is humanity in extremis but it is still humanity. He does not stand outside the compendious narrative of human life to which every writer is committed. Nor is he the end of the line. Things happen in If This is a Man that are beyond ordinary daily experience but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Primo Levi seeks is no different in kind to that sought by Shakespeare in King Lear, or Conrad in The Heart of Darkness.

  So if we approach If This is a Man expecting a historical investigation of the rise of Nazism and the potency of its appeal to the German people, or an enquiry into the origins and nature of evil, we ask both too much and too little of it. Primo Levi is neither historian nor metaphysician. As a matter of honour, no less than as a matter of writerly decency – perhaps as a mark of respect to mankind – he refuses grandiose philosophising or theology. ‘We do not believe,’ he writes, ‘in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilised institution is taken away… We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.’

  The quietness of that ‘conclusion’, so determinedly rational and even matter-of-fact, so calm in its rejection of the consolations of rage or blame or despair, is characteristically heart-breaking. ‘Reduced to silence’ is a humane but terrible description of man’s fate in the camps; it is inevitable, final, an attrition of spirit of which the beatings and the humiliations are just the foretaste, and which can only be atoned for, all round, by the opposite to silence. This is what the book is for. It must speak of what happened, of what it knows, for the very reason that silence – the removal of the will and wherewithal to speak, and the fear of never being listened to or believed – was the ultimate aim of that system of dehumanisation Nazism embraced, and the proof it had succeeded.

  The subject of If This is a Man is not how could men do such things, but what was it that they did, how did it fall to some prisoners (‘the saved’) to endure it and others (‘the drowned’) not to, what is left when everything but the barest capacity to endure, the power only ‘to refuse our consent’, is driven out, and by what means are some still able to impress on others the suggestion of a world ‘not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror… a remote possibility
of good’.

  From the first pages of the book the essential project of the camps is laid bare: it is, in Levi’s words, ‘the demolition of a man’. Through small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist’s gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is ‘not even any room to be afraid’ – with a stranger who doesn’t speak your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an end, ‘you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others’.

  With grievous amazement, never self-pitying but sometimes bordering on a sort of numbed wonderment, Levi records the day to day personal and social history of the camp, noting not only the fine gradations of his own descent, but the capacity of some prisoners to cut a deal and strike a bargain, while others, destined by their age or character for the gas ovens, follow ‘the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea’.

  There are pages where, unexpectedly, amid the horror, a reader feels he has stumbled on a near inconsequential diary entry. ‘It is lucky that it is not windy today,’ one such passage begins. The incongruity of anything being lucky in such a place strikes the diarist: ‘Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live.’ In this way, too, we come to understand how living is possible, how, if it is the small things that demean, it can also be the small things that sustain. Here, perhaps, is the advantage of Levi having written If This is a Man so close to his time in Auschwitz. Recollection has not been worn away by years and controversy nor subsumed under the necessity to take a long view of historical events. In much of this book, immediacy does the work of theorising and education.

  The anger, also, is too close to the event to feel either tempered or cranked up. Seeing old Kuhn, a religious man, praying aloud and thanking God he has been spared selection for the gas chamber, Levi is furious that Kuhn does not realise it will be his turn next, that ‘what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory power, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again… If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.’

  It is a bitterly ironic thought, God spitting at a devotee’s prayers, as though in such a place, where such crimes have been committed, it is a blasphemy to be religious. A blasphemy, too, even to think of pardon or expiation.

  Primo Levi gave his life to considering the full extent of those crimes, for they did not stop at the gates of the camps. They would go on, if the guilty had their way, into the dreams of men like him, mocking them with the promise that they would never be listened to, and even where they did secure a hearing, would never be believed.

  In a terrible dream which he discovers he shares with fellow inmates, Levi is back home telling people of his experiences, but they are ‘completely indifferent… speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there’. Here is the dread to end dreads – ‘the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story’.

  And so, of course, in many quarters it has turned out to be. Despite a testament as harrowing as his, and for all its meticulous refusal of melodrama, the Holocaust has become subject to sneering scepticism – now outright denial, now the slower drip of devaluation and diminishment. In later books, as he saw the thing he dreaded becoming a reality, Primo Levi wrote of the ‘negators of truth’, people who defame not only those who lived to tell the tale, but those for whom they speak as though ‘by proxy’, the true witnesses of the abomination – that is to say those who did not survive it and so cannot speak for themselves. Thus, in any of its forms, Holocaust denial kills the victims a second time.

  Strong though the words of If This is a Man are, they are still weak before the will to deny or forget.

  Howard Jacobson

  April 2013

  IF THIS IS A MAN

  Author’s Preface

  It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average lifespan of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals.

  As an account of atrocities, therefore, this book of mine adds nothing to what is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing question of the death camps. It has not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind. Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.

  I recognize, and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book. Its origins go back, not indeed in practice, but as an idea, an intention, to the days in the Lager. The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. The book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation. Hence its fragmentary character: the chapters have been written not in logical succession, but in order of urgency. The work of tightening up is more studied, and more recent.

  It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.

  PRIMO LEVI

  If This is a Man

  You who live safe

  In your warm houses,

  You who find, returning in the evening,

  Hot food and friendly faces:

  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.

  Consider if this is a woman,

  Without hair and without name

  With no more strength to remember,

  Her eyes empty and her womb cold

  Like a frog in winter.

  Meditate that this came about:

  I commend these words to you.

  Carve them in your hearts

  At home, in the street,

  Going to bed, rising;

  Repeat them to your children,

  Or may your house fall apart,

  May illness impede you,

  May your children turn their faces from you.

  1

  The Journey

  I was captured by the Fascist Militia on 13 December 1943. I was twenty-four, with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency – encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years by the racial laws – to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships. I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.

  It had been by no means easy to flee into the mountains and
to help set up what, both in my opinion and in that of friends little more experienced than myself, should have become a partisan band affiliated with the Resistance movement Justice and Liberty. Contacts, arms, money and the experience needed to acquire them were all missing. We lacked capable men, and instead we were swamped by a deluge of outcasts, in good or bad faith, who came from the plain in search of a non-existent military or political organization, of arms, or merely of protection, a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes.