If This Is a Man, the memoir Primo Levi wrote about the eleven months he spent at Auschwitz III Monowitz between February 1944 and January 1945, is the most precise piece of Holocaust prose ever written. Levi was a chemist by training and the book reads like a chemist’s report. The events are stated in plain Italian. The temperatures are exact. The conditions of the laboratory experiment are described with care. The conclusion is that the experiment, the camp, was the deliberate work of human beings, and that what those human beings had done was, as a matter of demonstrable fact, a worse thing than civilians outside the camp could readily understand.
Levi was twenty four when he was deported. He was a chemistry graduate from the University of Turin who had joined a partisan group in the Aosta Valley in autumn 1943 after the German occupation of northern Italy. He was arrested on 13 December 1943 by the Italian Fascist militia, identified as a Jew, and sent to Fossoli transit camp. From Fossoli he was deported on 22 February 1944 with around six hundred and fifty Italian Jews to Auschwitz. Twenty three of them survived the war. Levi was selected for slave labour at the new IG Farben Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant attached to Auschwitz III Monowitz. His chemistry qualification, identified through interviews in November 1944, eventually got him out of the construction labour and into the laboratory of the Buna plant. The lab assignment came late enough that he was not on the death march of 18 January 1945, having been left behind in the camp infirmary with scarlet fever. The Soviet army arrived on 27 January 1945. The infirmary patients were among the few survivors of the camp’s eleven months of operation.
The book was written between January 1946 and the end of 1946 and was rejected by the major Italian publishers, including Einaudi and Mondadori, on the grounds that the topic was no longer of public interest. It was finally accepted by the small Turin house De Silva, which printed twenty five hundred copies in autumn 1947. Most of the print run sold; some was destroyed in flooding in Florence in November 1966. The book lay in obscurity for a decade. Einaudi, the publisher that had rejected the original manuscript, picked it up in 1958 and published a revised version that has been in print ever since. The English translation by Stuart Woolf, If This Is a Man, came out from Orion Press in London in 1959. The American edition, retitled Survival in Auschwitz, came out from Macmillan in 1961.
The book’s argument is the catalogue of a destruction process. Each chapter takes a single feature of the camp, the journey, the arrival, the selection, the rations, the work, the camp economy, the relationship between the German criminals and the political prisoners, the death of Sigmund Steinlauf, the chemical examination by Doctor Pannwitz, the last days before the Soviet arrival, and presents it in detail. The cumulative effect is the demonstration that the catastrophe was not, in any sense, a natural disaster or a meteorological accident or a moral failure of weak men. It was the deliberate, careful, accountable work of an industrial society. Levi’s German title for one of the chapters, Hier ist kein warum, here there is no why, became the line most often quoted from the book. The line was spoken to him by an SS guard on his first day in the camp when he reached for an icicle to drink from. The guard knocked it out of his hand. Levi asked why. The guard’s answer was the line. Levi heard it as the camp’s whole programme.
The book’s later companion, The Drowned and the Saved, written forty years later in 1986, is the more philosophical work. The Grey Zone chapter, on the prisoner functionaries, is in that book and not in If This Is a Man. The companion to If This Is a Man is The Truce, La tregua, which records Levi’s nine-month return journey from Auschwitz to Turin through the chaos of postwar central and eastern Europe. The two books are usually published together in English-language editions.
If This Is a Man is the book Levi expected to write. The Drowned and the Saved is the book he wrote against his own will after forty years of trying to leave the case alone. He killed himself, by falling down the stairwell of his Turin apartment building, on 11 April 1987, at the age of sixty seven. He had been depressed, and had been on antidepressant medication. The death was ruled a suicide. The argument over whether it was a delayed effect of the camp continues. The books are now read across the world.
See also
Sources
- Primo Levi, Se questo รจ un uomo, De Silva, 1947; revised edition, Einaudi, 1958
- Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, Orion Press, 1959; Survival in Auschwitz, Macmillan, 1961
- Primo Levi, La tregua, Einaudi, 1963; The Truce, Bodley Head, 1965; The Reawakening, Little Brown, 1965
- Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, Einaudi, 1986; The Drowned and the Saved, Summit, 1988
- Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life, Hutchinson, 2002
- Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2002