Primo Levi was a chemist from Turin. He was twenty four when he joined the partisans of Giustizia e Libertà in the autumn of 1943. He was arrested in December 1943 in the Aosta valley, taken to the Italian transit camp at Fossoli, and from there sent to Auschwitz on the railway transport of 22 February 1944. He was selected, as a chemist, for the IG Farben slave-labour plant at Monowitz, Auschwitz III. He survived because of his profession, because of luck, because the camp was evacuated in January 1945 while he was in the infirmary with scarlet fever and so missed the death march, and because the Soviet army arrived eleven days later. He was twenty five.
His first book, Se questo è un uomo, written in the months immediately after his return to Turin, was rejected by the leading Italian publishers and brought out in 1947 by a small Turin house in an edition of two and a half thousand copies, most of which did not sell. The English translation, If This Is a Man, did not appear until 1959 in Britain and 1961 in the United States, where it was given the trivialising title Survival in Auschwitz. The book is the foundational text of Holocaust testimony in any language. It works because Levi was a chemist by temperament as well as profession. He wrote without melodrama, with attention to detail, with the ear of a writer who had read Dante and would not waste a word.
The second book, La tregua, in English The Truce, traces his nine-month journey home through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and into Italy. It is a freer book than the first because it could afford to be. He wrote a number of further books, including The Periodic Table, in which the elements organise a memoir of his life and his survival; If Not Now, When?, a novel about Jewish partisans in eastern Europe; and The Drowned and the Saved, his last book, published in 1986, which examines the question of why the survivors carried such guilt and what the moral category of the grey zone, the prisoners caught between victim and accomplice, actually meant.
Levi died on 11 April 1987 in Turin, falling from the staircase of the apartment block where he had lived all his life. The verdict was suicide; some friends and biographers have argued for accident. The Drowned and the Saved is the work of a man whose belief in the rationality of his own survival had been wearing thin. He was sixty seven.
Levi has been criticised for the calm of his prose, by readers who wanted more anger. The calm was the discipline. He believed that the catastrophe had to be set down in the language of a chemist’s report or it would not be believed. Forty years after his death, he is still the writer to whom new readers are sent first. The reason is simple. He works.
See also
- Jewish Partisans Across Occupied Europe
- Hungary
- Romania
- Italy
- If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
- IG Farben
- Viktor Frankl
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards