Primo Levi: the harsh life and mysterious end of the man who told the hell of the Holocaust unlike any other

He was 24 years old. He thought that it was time to act. He went with his comrades on the hills. Be part of the resistance. At that time, it was not enough to think about what was wrong, about ideological opposition. You had to fight actively. It was the only way to act. Being partisan Fascism had upset Italian society. He has also been segregated. You had to act. But inexperience played them a trick. A few days later, they were captured by regime forces.

The attempt was noble but naive. Without economic support, without weapons or training. Three hundred fascist soldiers found them at night. By chance. They did not look for them, but a bigger cell. After the arrest, they knew what would happen. The beatings, the torture, the long prison. He must have thought that what had happened was inevitable. At least for him. I did not have to badyze too much. The fragile body, the glbades, the diploma in chemistry, his pbadion for literature. He was not a man of action. I only counted for enthusiasm and conviction.

The interrogations began. I was planning the worst. He gave his name and declared himself an Italian citizen of the Jewish race. The interrogators did not ask for more. This solved a problem. Let the others take care of him. This skinny chemist could not be a subversive. They sent him to Fossoli, in a Jewish concentration camp. Upon his arrival, there were about 150 Italian Jews in Fossoli. A few weeks later, they reached six hundred. German soldiers took care of them. They got on a train. No return ticket. Of the sixty Italians who were transported in the same car as him, only four survived the experiment. A wagon, compared to others, with a high survival rate.

Primo Levi was born in 1919. Chemist and writer. Until his retirement, he was running one of the largest painting factories in Italy. He was the author of literary novels, stories and anthologies. However, his most important works are those related to the experience of the victim Lager, the German concentration camps. Besides various stories, he is the author of an exceptional trilogy about his experience under the rule of the Nazis: If it's a man, The truce and The cast and the saved.

If it's a man tells his days at Auschwitz. It's a hard, honest and moving book. But that does not move from the adjective or the low blow. He detailed life and feelings of a Häftling, held without privileges in a Lager. He recounts his most intimate sufferings and thoughts (when he has had them, he comes to describe a man as "emaciated … in whose face and in whose eyes there is no sign of thought"). The style of the book is dry and simple. There is no emphasis, underlining or adjective. This is not necessary. Horror does not require this to be narrated. Everything is true: the artifices are not necessary. There is no hatred in the one who writes. There is a huge desire to tell what happened. Pbad it on. Without judging but without stopping to clearly establish the roles: who is the victim and who is the author of the acts.

If it's a man is the work of a chemist who badyzes the composition of this sinister organism that was the Lager. In Levi, the man, the chemist, the survivor and the writer are inseparable. There, in Auschwitz, despite himself, Primo Levi learns innumerable things. Good and bad. His ability to observe, certain abilities (his scientific knowledge), his moral strength and his luck allowed him to survive.

The experience is atrocious, unimaginable. However, it was absolutely real. He transmits it in a lively way. But without shouting or proclamations. He does it calmly without leaving room for rancor or revenge. Carefully choose each word to convey the ineffable. To do justice to those who, according to him, are the true witnesses: Muselmann (or the "Muslims", as they were called in concentration camps for those who could no longer, for the exhausted), cast them. Those who could not come back, the dead.

"The demolition is over, the work is done, no one has said it because no one has come back to announce his death," Levi writes in The cast and the saved– The cast, even if they had paper and pencil, had not written their testimony, because their real death had already begun before the corporal's death. We speak by delegation. "The sunken. These are the ones that make up the rule, the survivors are the exception, an anomaly.

The trilogy of Auschwitz is the work that made it immortal. An involuntary trilogy that has been written over time. Under the sign of necessity. From the need to count, to be heard, to be understood.

If it's a man It starts with the capture of Levi. One page to another tells the experience of Auschwitz since the train transfer until the release of Russian soldiers at the end of the Second World War.. Count the income, the tattoo on the arm of the prisoner's number – the indelible mark, the unambiguous message: from here he does not go out– the inhuman conditions, the relations between them, the prevarications, the illusions, the enslaving works and the death, which impregnated all the rest. In one Lager nothing more everyday than death.

The book begins with a short poem.

(…) Consider it's a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who is fighting for half a loaf
Who dies for a yes or no?
Consider if it's a woman
Who does not have hair or name
Neither force to remember it
Empty the look and cool the knees
As a winter branch
Think it happened (…)

It was published in 1947 in Italy. At first, it went unnoticed. He has hardly found any readers. But that had an impact ten years later when it was reissued. From that moment, it became an indispensable text to understand an incomprehensible time, a fierce and not logical time. A masterpiece of literature and ethics.

The truce, the second part of this trilogy, begins where the previous book ended, with the liberation of the camp, the flight of the Nazis and the arrival of the Russians. The change occurs in the first ten pages. The need remains extreme, the physical conditions are regrettable, but without oppression, even in the anarchy and the confusion of the first days, the men recover the humanity.

Primo and his partner, very sick (that's why they stayed in the Lager and they have not been moved with others) they help others who are worse off than they are. They bury the corpses. They share the food that they manage to achieve. A dead man was no longer what made a pair of new shoes, a shirt less frayed than his own or a ration of bread and more for that day. The contract with death, as usual as it is, has become aware of the restoration of humanity. The other prisoners were embarked on the March of Death. For them, paradoxically, they were saved by their poor health. Another stroke of luck.

The time spent in the concentration camp, wandering in search of subsistence in the face of the Nazis' flight, is a kind of Robinson Crusoe funerals, sinister. Then the transfer arrives. And a new wave of deaths; even the food was dangerous for those people who had survived the underground world of Auschwitz. Return home after one year. Ride again on a train, being one of the few to come back. What would have taken a few days under normal conditions, it took them several months. It's an adventure book. Sad adventures, initiatic and survival.

"The freedom, the improbable and impossible freedom, so far away from Auschwitz that we had only dared to wait, had arrived and she had not taken us to the Promised Land." It was all around us, but in the form of a ruthless deserted plain. more tests, more fatigue, more hunger, more ice, more fear, "he writes. The survivors came to the surface, surfacing on a path to avoid, not free of pain and cruelty.

In these trains that lead nowhere, as in a macabre game of Goose, each trip, they are several hundred kilometers from their final destination, he has nightmares. In these dreams, he does not recreate the cold nights, the days without eating, the death presiding every moment, the cruelty of his catch. His nightmare is that he tells what has happened and that no one believes it or listens to it. The truce ends with the return to his mother and home.

In 1987, Primo Levi finished the trilogy with The cast and the saved. There, he thoroughly badyzes the experience of Lager. It takes the themes of previous books, but in this case the in-depth badysis. For Levi, there is no revenge or forgetfulness. That justice. He admits that he can forgive those who sincerely acknowledge and repent of their mistakes and their crimes. Who recognizes their faults is no longer their enemy, he says. But of course, only those committed against him. No one can forgive what he has suffered for another. Universal forgiveness is impossible. That's why he says the homicide is unforgivable.

The cast and the saved represents one of the most accurate and courageous badyzes of the lager's experience. The boring, agitated book. Always with the semitone, humility and reasoning as premise, dissects the most controversial elements of the captive experience.

"Let's leave the confusions, the little Freudisms, the morbidity, the indulgence – Levi writes in the first chapter. The oppressor remains as well as the victim: they are not interchangeable; the former must be punished and executed (but, if possible, it must also be understood) ".

The problems discussed are complex, they admit neither simplifications nor mannerisms. Levi investigates them with his humanism and honesty, as always. Remembrance of outrages, field communication and experience, Auschwitz intellectuals and unnecessary violence are some of the problems he has lucidly resolved.

The last chapter is devoted to the transcription and commentary of the correspondence he had with German readers after the translation of his book. Still the human condition naked. However, the central chapter of the book contains research on what he calls "the gray zone". He begins by wondering about one of his obsessions, about what led him to write for the first time on the subject forty years ago.

Primo Levi wonders if the survivors could understand and explain their experience. And against that, he maintains, aware that, in general, he is badociated with understanding to simplify. But there are situations in which simplification leads to serious errors of judgment. That's why, so uncomfortable they are, Levi sinks into it. As always, the difference is not equal. And strives to understand. Because of its relentless prism, the Sonderkommando, Jewish councils, Kapos and also those of his state, the Häftlings. The extremes, the reduction, prevent comprehension. That's his lesson.

Many great writers have left testimonies about the concentration camps. Jean Amery, Imre Kértez, Elie Wiesel, Jorge Semprún and Víctor Klemperer among others. But it is Primo Levi who is the witness. Remember to prevent forgetfulness. This gives the floor to those who can no longer count.

Jorge Semprún wrote one day: "To count well, it means: for that to be heard, we will not be able to achieve it without some artificial". Throughout his work, Levi seems to be arguing with him. In an interview, he said: "I wrote in the most natural way, deliberately choosing a language that was not too strong, it was not necessary to insist on the horror, the l & rsquo; Horror was there. ".

Primo Levi is beaten against this ghost, against this tendency to forget, not to know. His obsession, his deepest vocation was to convey the experience, to recover it. So that nobody will forget. So that it does not happen again.

Primo Levi died on April 11, 1987. He fell into the stairwell of the Turin house in which he lived all his life, with the exception of the past year in Auschwitz. His family and friends talked about an accident. They alleged that he had perhaps suffered a discoloration and that, as a result, he had fallen into the void for several floors. They cling to the fact that the one who left the testimony of everything, left no note addressed to the members of his family nor explained his decision. Another argument: his chemical state, his scientific thought, contradict the fact that he chose a method as unreliable to kill himself.

However, everything seems to indicate that it was a suicide. He was 67 years old and had declared that his writer's time was over, that he was dry, that he was running out of things to tell. Depression was a constant presence in his life.

Some physical problems related to an operation of the prostate, the deteriorated health of the mother for almost a hundred years (with her lived all her life), the ghosts of Auschwitz (Elie Wiesel wrote: "Primo Levi died in Auschwitz forty years later") .

The deep motivations for any suicide are unfathomable. What is certain in the case of Levi is that, as argued by the linguist and literary critic Tzevetan Todorov, suicide is not, in a way, the logical climax of Levi's reflection. Primo struggled all his life against the idea that what he was living at Auschwitz was a death sentence for life, impossible to conquer, that there was no way to conquer. He discussed it publicly with Jean Amery and even criticized him after committing suicide in the late seventies. The Italian had written that the goals of life "are the best defense against death, not just in the Lager". Maybe this morning in April, 32 years ago, he thought he did not have any more.

He was buried in the cemetery of his hometown. The tombstone is simple. He only has his data. The years of birth and death: 1919-1987. Your name: Primo Levi. And a number: 174517. The number tattooed on his left forearm. Your identity as Häftling. The number who called during the year at Auschwitz. The number that Primo Levi never wanted to erase. The one who has not been praised or ashamed, who has not shown or concealed.

From the one who wrote in The cast and the saved: "Often, they ask me why I do not erase it, and it's something that makes me nervous: Why should I erase it? There are not many of us in the world who are bearers of this testimony. "