Introduction:
Saving the Scaffolding
PAUL BAILEY
IN 1943 Primo Levi, a young chemist from Turin, helped to form a partisan band which he and his comrades hoped would eventually be affiliated with the Resistance movement 'Justice and Liberty'. At the end of the year he was captured by the Fascist militia and sent to a detention camp at Fossoli. He stayed there a few weeks. On 21 February 1944 it was announced that all the Jews in the camp would be leaving the following day for an unknown destination. They were told to prepare themselves for a fortnight of travel. On the train the next morning - 650 'pieces' crammed into twelve goods wagons - they found out where they were going: Auschwitz. 'A name without significance for us at that time, but it at least implied some place on this earth.'
On arrival the children, the old men and most of the women were 'swallowed up by the night'. Ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau: the rest went to the gas chamber. Of the 125 people sent to the camps only three made the return journey to Italy after the liberation. One of them was Primo Levi. Some years later, when he had adjusted himself to normal life once more, he sat down and wrote about the twenty months he spent in hell. Two short books, If This is a Man and The Truce, contain the recollections that came to him in that uneasy tranquillity.
Two books, but they should be read as one. Although a crude over-simplification, it is nevertheless essentially true that If This is a Man is about the descent into, and The Truce about the flight away from, hell. The statement is crude because the first book, despite its appalling subject, is not dispiriting. Levi does not flinch from setting down the unbelievable details of that cruelty born of the 'mystique of barrenness', but then neither does he paint them in lurid colours to press his point home. The facts are surely enough. Paradoxically, what finally emerges from the book is a sense of Man's worth, of dignity fought for and maintained against all the odds:
Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.
Haftling (Prisoner) 174517 - 'We have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die' - found the strength in himself to retain something of Primo Levi. But, at the beginning of his internment especially, it wasn't easy; he was shocked into finding it by the example of others:
... after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness completely disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth ... We will all die, we are all about to die ... Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson ... This was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization ... We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.
Levi does not say how Steinlauf died - presumably he disappeared in one of the many 'selections'. Nor did he take all of the older man's advice literally: many months of freedom passed before he lost the habit of walking with his eyes fixed to the ground, as if searching for bread or something to sell or exchange for it.
If This is a Man and its sequel are books about a man among men: there are no saints and no heroes in the accepted sense. Indeed, what Levi says of his friend Leonardo in The Truce could with equal justice apply to himself:
Besides good fortune, he also possessed another virtue essential for those places: an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a virile patience, which sustained him miraculously to the very edge of collapse.
And Levi did have good fortune, though the phrase is an obscenity when one thinks of the horrors that he and Leonardo and the other survivors were forced to combat. But he was not 'selected' and by some miracle he was ill with scarlet fever when the Germans fled from Auschwitz in January 1945, taking all the healthy prisoners with them. The healthy, who numbered almost 20,000, vanished on the march. A few of the sick survived, surrounded by corpses and tormented by the groans of dying men. 'The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.' The work by this time was the work of healing, of finding and sharing food with the helpless, not the humiliating drudgery imposed upon them by the SS (a sign at the entrance to the camp read Arbeit Macht Frei, work gives freedom). It is on this note of hope that If This is a Man ends: with the Haftlinge, tired and hungry, creeping out of the shadows and slowly becoming men again.
Still, the book is not all blackness, though the tone of the narrative is elegiac and those millions of accusing ghosts haunt its every sentence. Levi does not omit from his story the faint glimmers of light that came on rare occasions to shine briefly out of the evil murk. There is the story of Lorenzo, for instance:
In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward ... His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.
But The Truce is almost all light. It tells of Levi's journey home to his native Turin, and the quiet, hesitant note of hope and renewal that ends the first book is transformed into something like a trumpet blast in its pages. The reader's eyes open with Levi's as he becomes aware of the abundant life about him. Like the great novels he devoured as a youth ('printed paper is a vice of mine'), it is a celebration of other men's uniqueness. In Auschwitz he bad learned a new morality, one that had made him more tolerant of the failings of others, and he draws a clear line in The Truce between the good thieves and the bad, the genuinely strong man and the vicious bully. There are unforgettable portraits of the people he met or who shared his journey with him: Cesare, from the Roman slums, making fish fatter with the aid of a syringe and selling them to gullible Russian peasants; the resourceful Greek, Mordo Nahum; Mr Unverdorben, the composer of a fantasy opera, The Queen of Navarre, praised by a fantasy Toscanini and never performed because of four consecutive bars which were identical with four in I Pagliacci; the ministering angel, Dr Gottlieb; the stately Moor of Verona, warding off friendship with obscenities. But the self-styled Colonel Ravi is perhaps the most incredible character of them all - an official interpreter at Katowice camp who cannot speak a word of German or Russian, dressed in a uniform composed of Soviet boots, a Polish railwayman's cap and a jacket and a pair of trousers from an unknown source.
What is chastening about Levi's writing is its freedom from self-indulgence. There isn't even a hint of hysterical recrimination. How easy, and how understandable, it would have been for him to have adopted such a tone. He chose to build instead: out of the mud, the blows dealt without anger, out of that unique humiliation he has constructed two incomparable works of art, written in a careful, weighted and serenely beautiful prose (the quality of which Stuart Woolf has captured in his exemplary translations). In Italy they are rightly regarded as classics, but not - as yet - of the safe kind. I hope they will one day be so regarded in Britain and America. They should be required reading for the decriers of the merely human, the dazed pursuers of the Maharishis, and the armchair Jeremiahs who make a profitable business out of the dissemination of gloom. But, most of all, I hope they find their way into the hands of the practitioners of the new sentimentality - those who try to persuade us, with increasing shrillness, that Man is vile: the artists who use the terrible fact of the camps for emotional and aesthetic effect, and the critics who compare their grimmer brand of kitsch to King Lear and the paintings of Goya's last years. Levi, who has confronted the unendurable, could not be persuaded that our short time on earth is just a matter of waste disposal. He has heard songs other than those of the crow. His books remind us that the scaffolding is worth saving. We who weren't interned should endeavour to build things that are worthy of its support.