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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
In 1945, soon after the liberation of Auschwitz, Soviet authorities in control of the Kattowitz (Katowice) camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions they witnessed in Auschwitz. The result was an extraordinary testimony and one of the first accounts of the extermination camps ever written. Their report, published in a medical journal in 1946, marked the beginnings of Levi's life-long work as writer, analyst and witness. In the subsequent four decades, Levi never ceased to recount his experiences in Auschwitz in a wide variety of texts, many of which are assembled together here for the first time, alongside other testimony from De Benedetti. From early research into the fate of their companions to the deposition written for Eichmann's trial, Auschwitz Testimonies is a rich mosaic of documents, memories and critical reflections of great historic and human value. Underpinned by his characteristically clear language, rigorous method and deep psychological insight, this collection of testimonies, reports and analyses reaffirms Primo Levi's position as one of the most important chroniclers of the Holocaust.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Figures
Translator's Note
Introduction: Bare Witness
Notes
1: Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews (Auschwitz – Upper Silesia)
Note
2: Record by Dr Primo Levi, Registration No. 174517, Survivor of Monowitz-Buna
Notes
3: Deposition
Note
4: Deposition on Monowitz
Note
5: Statement for the Höss Trial
Note
6: Deposition for the Höss Trial
Note
7: Testimony for a Fellow Prisoner
Notes
8: Anniversary
Note
9: Denunciation against Dr Joseph Mengele
Notes
10: Letter to a Fascist's Daughter Who Wants to Know the Truth
Notes
11: Miracle in Turin
Note
12: The Time of the Swastikas
Note
13: Deposition for the Eichmann Trial
Notes
14: Testimony for Eichmann
Note
15: Deportation and Extermination of the Jews
Notes
16: Statement for the Bosshammer Trial
Notes
17: The Deportation of the Jews
Note
18: Questionnaire for the Bosshammer Trial
Notes
Fragebogen
/ Questionnaire
19: Questionnaire for the Bosshammer Trial
Fragebogen
/ Questionnaire
Notes
20: Deposition for the Bosshammer Trial
Notes
21: The Europe of the Lagers
Note
22: This Was Auschwitz
Note
23: Political Deportees
Notes
24: Draft of a Text for the Interior of the Italian Block at Auschwitz
Notes
25: A Secret Defence Committee at Auschwitz
Note
26: That Train to Auschwitz
Note
27: In Memory of a Good Man
Note
28: To Our Generation…
Notes
Appendix: The Train to Auschwitz
Note
Afterword: A Witness and the Truth
At Kattowitz
A Scientific Account
Writings of Primary Intent
Testimonies for Trials
Major Public Statements
Questioning His Own Memory
Comparison with Others: Leonardo
In the Darkest Places of the Lager
The Reasons for Silence
Why Speak?
A Straight Path
How to Tell the Truth
The Touch of Words
Notes
Acknowledgements
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure 1 Testimonial given to Primo Levi at Kattowitz on 30 June 1945 by the ‘Head of Medical Service 125’ (Private papers of the Levi family). Levi describes the presentation of the document in
The Truce
, slightly altering its wording: ‘Danchenko…took out two testimonials written in a beautiful hand on two sheets of lined paper, evidently torn from an exercise book. My testimonial declared with unconstrained generosity that “Primo Levi, doctor of medicine, of Turin, has given able and assiduous help to the Surgery of this Command for four months, and in this manner has merited the gratitude of all the workers of the world.”’ (See Primo Levi,
The Truce
, in
If This is a Man and The Truce
, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 282.) The document actually reads as follows: TestimonialPrimo Levi (from Turin) During his time in Medical Service 125 of the Command he has worked with all his might for the good of the people With his attentive and kindly conduct towards the sick he has deserved due gratitude both from them and from the Russian Command We thank you in order that your work may be appreciated by hundreds of people in all the countries of the world. The Head of Medical Service 125Captain [illegible] [stamp]Petr Vladimirovi KlimcenkoDoctor A similar testimonial was given to Leonardo De Benedetti, and is reproduced on p. 38 of Anna Segre's
Un coraggio silenzioso. Leonardo De Benedetti, medico, sopravvissuto ad Auschwitz
[A Silent Courage: Leonardo De Benedetti, Doctor and Auschwitz Survivor] (Turin: Zamorani, 2008).
Figure 2 Unpublished typescript of first page of the ‘Report’ (Istoreto Archive, Turin).
Figure 3 Title page of
Minerva Medica
, 24 November 1946.
Figure 4 First page of the ‘Report’ in
Minerva Medica
.
Figure 5 Primo Levi, ‘Statement for the Höss Trial’ (Archive of the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Research (CDEC), Milan, Fondo Massimo Adolfo Vitale, b. 3, fasc. 115).
Figure 6 Primo Levi, ‘Questionnaire for the Bosshammer Trial’, 2 September 1970, first page (Archive of the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Research (CDEC), Milan, Fondo Processo di Berlino, b. 6, fasc. 56).
Figure 7
La Stampa
, 9 February 1975, first page (by kind permission of the
La Stampa
Archive, Turin).
Figure 8 Map of Nazi concentration camps (the borders are those of 1938). Primo Levi published this for the first time in 1973, in the edition for secondary schools of
Se questo è un uomo
[
If This is a Man
].
Figure 9 Primo Levi. List of fellow deportees who entered Monowitz with Levi, compiled for Bosshammer trial (1971) (Primo Levi's private papers).
Figure 10 Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti. Copy by Levi of list in figure 9 (1971), with undated notes by De Benedetti (Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione).
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CHAPTER 1
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Copyright page
First published in Italian as Così fu Auschwitz. Testimonianze 1945–1986 © Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin, 2015
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS
Segretariato Europeoperle Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Via Val d'Aposa 7 – 40123 Bologna – Italy
[email protected] – www.seps.it
Chapter 1, Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews, first published in English in Auschwitz Report (Verso, 2006). Reprinted with permission from Verso Books.
English translation of Chapter 1 © Judith Woolf, 2006
This English edition (excluding Chapter 1) © Polity Press, 2018
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1336-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1337-6 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levi, Primo, author. | Benedetti, Leonardo De, author.
Title: Auschwitz testimonies, 1945–1986 / Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti.
Other titles: Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz – Alta Slesia). English
Description: Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017010122 (print) | LCCN 2017010642 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509513369 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509513376 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509513390 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509513406 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Auschwitz (Concentration camp)–Sanitation. | Monowitz (Concentration camp)–Medical Services. | Concentration camp inmates–Health and hygiene–Poland–Oświęcim.
Classification: LCC D805.5.A96 L4713 2017 (print) | LCC D805.5.A96 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1853862–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010122
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Figures
1 Testimonial given to Primo Levi at Kattowitz, 30 June 1945, by the ‘Head of Medical Service 125’.
2 Unpublished typescript of first page of the ‘Report’.
3 Title page of Minerva Medica, 24 November 1946.
4 First page of the ‘Report’ in Minerva Medica.
5 Primo Levi, ‘Statement for the Höss Trial’.
6 Primo Levi, ‘Questionnaire for the Bosshammer Trial’, 2 September 1970, first page.
7 La Stampa, 9 February 1975, first page.
8 Map of Nazi concentration camps.
9 Primo Levi. List of fellow deportees who entered Monowitz with Levi.
10 Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti. Copy by Levi of list in figure 9 (1971).
Translator's Note
Judith Woolf
Given the status of many of these documents as an unmediated part of the historical record, I have followed the criteria already adopted by Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa in the Italian text by preserving irregularities of spelling and errors in the dating of events or in recalling the number or the names of fellow prisoners. On the basis of the same criteria, I have not standardized the various forms in which the German word Lager (camp) appears. I have translated the Italian word crematorio as ‘crematory’ rather than ‘crematorium’, to make the distinction between a mass incineration plant and a civilized funeral facility. Documents recorded and transcribed by Colonel Massimo Adolfo Vitale, the founder of the Comitato Ricerche Deportati Ebrei (Search Committee for Jewish Deportees), bear the unmistakable signs of his indignation in the capitalizing of key words and the addition of multiple exclamation marks to the otherwise sober prose in which both Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti offer their testimony.
The first document in the book, the ‘Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews’, was originally published in Italy in a medical journal whose readers would have known, for instance, that famine oedema is a form of dropsy caused by malnutrition; that phlegmons are inflammations of the subcutaneous connective tissue, leading to ulceration and the formation of invasive abscesses; and that Panflavin, grotesquely employed to treat diphtheria in the camp infirmary, was a brand of throat lozenge. Such details matter because they reveal the stark facts of a time and place in which human beings were condemned to die from diarrhoea and diphtheria and invasive ulcers as deliberately as they were condemned to die by gas. For a complete glossary of the medical and pharmaceutical terms used in the ‘Report’, see Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti, Auschwitz Report, trans. Judith Woolf, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 79–88.
Introduction: Bare Witness
Robert S. C. Gordon
Primo Levi's work has become something of a touchstone of Holocaust writing and of the moral authority of the survivor to give voice to the very worst sufferings of the twentieth century. In 1944–5, Levi spent almost a year battling against the humiliations and deprivations of a prisoner's half-life in Auschwitz – specifically Auschwitz-III, the concentration and labour camp near Monowitz [Monowice] – and nearly another year, following his miraculous survival and liberation, on a tortuous, stop–start journey home from Poland to Turin. His writings first emerged, locally, almost invisibly, in Turin in 1947, starting with the small-scale publication of If This is a Man, a pellucid exploration of the human body and the human mind as it adapted to life, or rather non-life, at Auschwitz. His profile and authority grew a little in the 1950s and 1960s, including glimmerings of an international presence, following the republication of that first book and the appearance of its sister volume, The Truce (1963), the story of his meandering return across the wastelands of post-war central Europe. He continued to write, publish, speak, and all the while work at his daytime profession as an industrial chemist. In a quite unique and unclassifiable book, The Periodic Table (1975), he brought to the page a fizzing chronicle of his life in/through chemistry, overshadowed only occasionally by memories of Fascism, anti-Semitism and genocide. The 1980s brought a step-change in his international reputation, with bestselling translations and lionization in the English-speaking world, crowned by the publication of his final book of essays on the Holocaust and its moral and historical legacy forty years on, The Drowned and the Saved (1986). His death in 1987, almost certainly by suicide, prompted genuine and widespread grief at the loss of such a voice, such a companion in dialogue, such testimony.1
Levi himself was one of the first and most eloquent writers to embrace the terminology of testimony. It is there, for example, in one of the most powerful passages of If This is a Man (of the 1958 second edition, that is: the passage is not in the 1947 edition):2 in the very early days after Levi's arrival in Auschwitz, Steinlauf, a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army and now a filthy shell of a man mired in Auschwitz, teaches Levi his first lesson in the persistence of human dignity:
It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, clear words, the words of ex-Sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Iron Cross in the 1914–1918 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet speech, the speech of a good soldier, into my language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten 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.
(The Complete Works of Primo Levi, p. 37)
That other great Holocaust survivor-writer Elie Wiesel, perhaps the only one who is Levi's equal in terms of the moral force and clarity of their work, eloquently captured the specific power of this vocation for testimony, as a vessel for containing in words the scale and the inhuman extremes of the Shoah: ‘if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony’.3 As Wiesel's formulation suggests, this new literature of ‘testimony’ – the writing of and out of suffering, from the bare body of the victim at the edge of death, to the essentially human act of voicing, of stating that ‘this happened’ (as Levi's poem at the start of If This is a Man baldly puts it) – has hidden depths. It has the force, complexity and depth of literature, of the profoundest forms of expression that the civilization of the word has invented, even if the terminology of testimony suggests the legalistically mute courtroom witness (one who must neither comment nor elaborate, who is a camera lens, a microphone, a vessel more than a voice). Levi's published work taken as a whole – much like Wiesel's, although in profoundly different ways – shows him constantly striving to go beyond bare witnessing, inventing multiple, complex dynamics for testimony, rich hybrids of neutral record and literary elaboration, in a searching, attentive, balanced style that is yet acutely attuned to fracture, hesitation and muted confusion. Levi's testimony is a fluid, sophisticated layering of truths, from fact to reflection, from court deposition to writerly composition.
There are risks as well as rewards in navigating this path, however, since it is also a path between fact and the tools of fiction. In recent critical debate on Levi's work, there has been a fascinating discussion of one telling case in point, the chapter of The Periodic Table called ‘Vanadium’, in which Levi recounts his chance contact in the 1960s with one of the German chemists who had briefly been his supervisor in the factory laboratory where Levi had been assigned as a slave labourer for a few weeks at Monowitz. This German, called Müller in the story, had on occasion acted kindly towards him in the camp; but he was a German, on the other side, part of the system of persecution at Auschwitz, part of the Nazi state, a bystander actively complicit with genocide. He was, in other words, deep within what Levi would later call ‘the grey zone’. In ‘Vanadium’, Levi and Müller correspond; Levi is hesitant, unsure, unwilling to offer the impossible absolution that Müller seems to want from him, and troubled by the unsettling effect that this encounter has had on him. Before they can meet, Müller dies, suddenly, a difficult dialogue is cut short, perhaps necessarily. Biographers and critics have since discovered that ‘Vanadium’ is a remarkable mix of fact and narrative reshaping: Müller's real name was Ferdinand Meyer, and Levi had asked a friend and intermediary to trace him, and several other figures he remembered from the camps, rather than stumbling across him by chance, spotting a misspelled word that triggers a flash of memory; and the two had spoken and possibly even met before Meyer's death. In other words, Levi reshaped the episode seven years on for The Periodic Table, in an effort to express adequately the tense legacies and complex truths of complicity and individual humanity in the ‘grey’ figure of the bystander.4
Testimony, then, at least in the hands of a writer of Levi's subtlety, is best thought of as malleable and fluid in form, and as one all the more profoundly engaged with truths historical, moral and imaginative for that. If it is practised and applied too narrowly, it risks becoming a straitjacket, as if the survivor were being told not to try out new ways of seeing, new ways of voicing, to stick to what s/he saw and heard, courtroom-style. In this sense, Levi's essays, his newspaper columns, his poems, his anthologies, his translations, his science-fiction and fantasy, his novels and stories of work, resistance and science – his entire eclectic body of work, whatever its many other virtues and qualities, can be said also to express this mode of flexible testimony: the on-going elaboration of a reflection on the fact that ‘this happened’. Perhaps more than any other survivor-writer, Levi's practice of testimony was capacious, stretching the definition and the boundaries of Wiesel's grim twentieth-century invention.
Which brings us to this remarkable collection of fragments, Auschwitz Testimonies: 1945–1986, painstakingly compiled and edited by Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa of the Centro Primo Levi in Turin. Auschwitz Testimonies is not a new book by Primo Levi as such, certainly not one of those often unsatisfactory posthumous fragments of an incomplete work.5 Nor is it a mere miscellany of occasional articles, however.6 This is because it has a powerful coherence as a collection and the editors have a powerful point to make with it: that beneath the surface of Levi's extraordinary creative testimony carried out across his published oeuvre – his lifelong work of observation, truth-telling and reflective, imaginative elaboration – there lies another layer of testimony, a hidden seam in the work of witness, sustained just like the layer above it across the four long decades of Levi's post-war career, indeed integral to it.
Auschwitz Testimonies contains around two dozen short documents by Primo Levi, accompanied by a handful written by or with his older friend and fellow Auschwitz survivor, Leonardo De Benedetti, all fragments of the most direct, raw attempts at setting the record or setting it straight. These documents – some familiar, others entirely new, unpublished or long forgotten, recovered by the editors from obscure archives, journals and catalogues – are in many respects typical of the detritus of words left behind by the past, only a fraction of which are destined to survive, ready for rediscovery by diligent future historians. There is a professional technical report, an exchange of letters, signed statements and legal questionnaires, lists, notes, brief occasional articles. This is Levi (and De Benedetti) busy at a low-level, behind-the-scenes, quiet and sporadic labour: a sort of minimal or bare witnessing, all but unelaborated, in contrast to the complex elaborations of the published work, but neither reductive nor restrictive for that.
Many of the pieces are partial, provisional, often marked by uncertainty and even error – a good example is the distorted figure, originating in Soviet documents that circulated for many years after the war, of 4 million victims at Auschwitz, which is used here by Levi (e.g. in ‘This Was Auschwitz’; or 5 million in ‘Political Deportees’; 3.5 million in ‘That Train to Auschwitz’). Later research has corrected this number to only (only!) just over 1 million, of the 6 million Jewish victims of genocide all told. Even in their personal recollections, Levi and De Benedetti contradict themselves and each other on minor details, such as over the exact number on their deportation trucks or the ages of the oldest and youngest victims on the convoy. Were a historian to come upon these fragments in their research, they would no doubt look for corroboration and correction from dozens of other sources; perhaps, were their author's name not one so well known and admired, they would be set to one side, to disappear once more into the vast war archive. But we do not need to read these traces of the past and of the work of testimony they enact quite like professional historians. There are other truths, other kinds of human and humanizing effort at stake here.
The book's mosaic of documents reflects different moments in Levi's career as a public and private witness, as a researcher and writer, and the form they take reflects the different kinds of requests and contexts that produced them. Several are interestingly strained or constrained by their form (and the slips and gaps are one symptom of this): we should not go looking for the powerful rhetoric and equipoise of Levi's books here. On the contrary, the strain is a marker of the distinctive value these pieces hold: their struggle to get clear facts and essential truths down on paper, unadorned, their quiet work of transmission.
We can identify five loose types of document in these Auschwitz Testimonies. The first and longest entry in the book also gives us possibly the most surprising type of the five: this is a 1946 medical and hygienic report on the sanitary conditions at Monowitz, a document that Levi drafted together with De Benedetti – in all probability, in fact, De Benedetti took the lead here, as he was a professional physician – while they were both in a Soviet holding camp at Kattowitz [Katowice], following liberation from Auschwitz in early 1945.7 The Soviets asked many Auschwitz survivors, and especially doctors, to set down on record their observations as they prepared their own state report on Nazi atrocities. On their return home to Turin, De Benedetti and Levi refined it and submitted it to a local professional medical journal, Minerva Medica, where it was published in late 1946 with all its dry detail of pathologies, nutrition, patent medications and treatments in the camp, in particular in its awful clinic (later the subject of a potent chapter in If This is a Man, ‘Ka Be’), in reality more likely an entry-point to the gas chambers than a place of care or cure.
Like the medical report, the second type of bare witnessing sampled here also has its origins in the ferment of the weeks and months immediately following Levi's return. Writing, talking, thinking and pushing in many directions as he struggled to come to terms with what he had experienced, Levi was variously drafting chapters of If This is a Man, writing poems, strange fictions, war tales and Auschwitz memories, as well as starting a career, meeting his future wife, working on the medical report with De Benedetti, and looking to help discover who of his many companions survived and who did not, amongst all those whose paths he had crossed since he had taken refuge in the Alps in late 1943. A cluster of documents in Auschwitz Testimonies – the briefest but also in some ways the most talismanic and moving of them all – sees Levi leaving traces of these people in the archive. Especially pregnant are the bare lists, one present here also in facsimile image, where Levi transcribes and recovers as many names as he can from the maelstrom. From 1945, there is a report listing the names he can recall of those evacuated from Monowitz on the Nazi death marches as the Soviets closed in; from 1971, there is another list, of seventy-six names: those who were with him on his first entry into Monowitz. (The several hundred others who had reached Auschwitz on the same train as Levi and De Benedetti were, of course, gassed immediately on arrival.) Levi annotates his list, with precision and hideous, necessary clarity: letter codes, symbols and boxes stand for different nationalities and categories: those who died of illness, those in selections for the gas chambers, those deported elsewhere, the few (fourteen) who survived.8
These lists have a bare power in their own right, but from as early as 1945 and throughout the post-war decades, such information-gathering was also pursued with a specific further purpose in mind: prosecution of Nazi perpetrators. Trial documents are the third and most numerous type on display in Auschwitz Testimonies, also the type where De Benedetti stands most consistently and steadily alongside Levi, the two giving evidence for the same trials, on occasion travelling abroad to provide depositions, but more often drafting clipped, short documents in Italy for prosecutors’ files. Here, the two are literal witnesses, deposed for the prosecution. In 1946–7, for example, both provide generic statements for Italian-Jewish research authorities on their experience of and conditions in Monowitz, drawing on their medical report and on their lists. They also draft declarations for the trial of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss, tried and executed in Poland in 1947. In 1959–60, De Benedetti documents his knowledge of his fellow doctor and infamous torturer Joseph Mengele, as part of failed West German efforts at extradition and prosecution. Around the same time, Levi provides a deposition for the Jerusalem trial of the prime bureaucrat and architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann. (Levi also writes a powerful article on Eichmann for a cultural journal, included here as ‘Testimony for Eichmann’, and a devastating poem, ‘For Adolf Eichmann’: The Complete Works of Primo Levi, p. 1906). Both friends, finally, contribute in the 1960s and again in the early 1970s, to the long process of evidence-gathering leading to the war-crimes prosecution of Friedrich Bosshammer, Eichmann's lieutenant and operator of the Final Solution in Italy. Bosshammer was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1972, for the murder of more than 3,000 Italian Jews, on the basis of research coordinated by West German prosecutors and CDEC, a Milanese Jewish research centre, who gathered Levi and De Benedetti's evidence – declarations, questionnaires and depositions – alongside that of many others. Bosshammer died only a few months later, before the final verdict was confirmed.
The last two forms of bare witnessing sampled here draw on Levi's public occasional writings and press articles (e.g. for the Turin national daily La Stampa, for a Jewish community magazine Ha Keillah, and for anti-Fascist or campaigning journals). These are perhaps more familiar kinds of writing – these or comparable pieces have been anthologized before in The Black Hole of Auschwitz and elsewhere. They belong to the more civic and public role Levi increasingly took on over the last twenty to thirty years of his life, as he became the single most prominent and powerful Holocaust voice in Italy (and in due course internationally also). These strands find a starting-point as far back as 1955, however, in a piece called ‘Anniversary’, a short article but a watershed in this trajectory from private to public. In it, Levi uses the tenth anniversary of Italy's liberation and the end of the war to lay down several lines of future Holocaust memory, lamenting the silence that surrounds the genocide and calling for renewed, honest attention to all its horrors (honest because Levi writes here, perhaps for the first time, about the shame of the camps, the degradations and complicities they forced on their victims, later one of the great themes of The Drowned and the Saved). Further anniversary pieces follow from 1960 and again 1975. The 1960 article (published 1961, ‘Deportation and Exportation of the Jews') draws on Levi's contribution to one of several major cycles of public lectures and talks, on Fascism and the war, that took place in Italian cities to mark the fifteenth anniversary of 1945, and coincided with events to commemorate the centenary of Italy's modern nationhood and, indeed, with a recent flowering of neo-Fascism in Italy. (This talk, given in Bologna, was one of the rare occasions when Levi shared a public platform with the other great Italian-Jewish writer and chronicler of Fascist anti-Semitism, Giorgio Bassani.)
From the late 1950s and for the following decades, another crucial strand of civic engagement with Holocaust memorialization opened up for Levi: Holocaust exhibitions and monuments. Auschwitz Testimonies gives us three examples of such sites and Levi's contributions and responses: in Turin in 1959, a travelling exhibition on deportation of anti-Fascists, Jews and other victims from Italy to the concentration camps produced a remarkable outpouring of interest, especially among the younger generations, which touched Levi deeply. He calls it here the ‘Miracle in Turin’ in one article and publishes a fascinating exchange of letters with a young girl who signs herself, ‘A Fascist's daughter who wants to know the truth’, which allows him to address the confusions of the young and Italy's failure to reflect on its long, generational complicity with Fascism. (The final piece published here, ‘To Our Generation…’, shows this generational perspective stayed with Levi until the end.) The letters bring out a pedagogical impulse in Levi's voice, one carried through to his contributions to Italian Holocaust museums and memorials. In 1973, he pens a piece (‘The Europe of the Lagers’) for a new national Museum of Deportation, displaying objects from the camps, letters from victims executed by Nazis, and artworks by Picasso, Léger, Guttuso and others, which opened in the small central-northern town of Carpi, near Bologna. A few miles from Carpi stood Fossoli, the largest detention and pre-deportation camp in Italy, where Levi and De Benedetti were held by Italian Fascists and German SS before transportation to Auschwitz. Fossoli is named in the very first line of the 1947 edition of If This is a Man (the 1958 edition added a page on Levi's time as an anti-Fascist partisan prior to his arrest) and is the site of excruciating scenes of premonition:
Night came, and it was such a night one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive…All took leave of life in the manner that most suited them. Some prayed, some drank to excess, others became intoxicated by a final unseemly lust. But mothers stayed up to prepare food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out to dry in the wind. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the pillows, and the hundred other small things that mothers remember and children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not feed him today?
(The Complete Works of Primo Levi, p. 11)
The same collection of artists, survivor groups and civic officials that worked on the Carpi museum also worked on the project for an Italian national memorial and monument at Auschwitz itself, which opened in 1980. Here too, Levi lent his voice, and we can read it in the form of a draft notice here, ‘Draft of a Text for the Interior of the Italian Block at Auschwitz’: a quite formal (once again, strained) piece of pedagogical writing that synthesizes an arc of history that led from Fascist thugs burning buildings in Italy in 1919–20 to Nazis burning books and then people in 1930s and 1940s Germany and Europe.
Levi's achievements as a writer-witness and as a writer (which are not quite the same thing) would not have been possible without his below-the-radar activity of bare witnessing. But these pieces show us more than just a laboratory source of a great writer's oeuvre (and to have shown this is a signal achievement of Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa's work of excavation, editing and commentary). They speak also to a larger enterprise and to something beyond the individual voice. They are minimal moments of a large-scale collective effort at remembering and recording carried out over decades, by individual survivors, families, groups and associations (Levi mentions more than once ANED, an Italian association of ex-deportees to which he dedicated much time and effort), by communities and indeed entire generations. They constantly practise or lean towards forms of contact and transmission, of both facts and awareness, and in this they express a constant facet of Levi, an ethical tension towards others, towards dialogue and attention. For this reason, it is powerfully apt that Auschwitz Testimonies is not in fact authored by one single writer, Primo Levi – even one now rightly canonized as a great voice of twentieth-century history and literature. It is rather a shared enterprise, by Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti, fellow victims and fellow witnesses, companions in suffering and indeed friends – as is movingly evident in Primo's commemoration of Leonardo on his death in 1983, ‘In Memory of a Good Man’, another act of witness; and as had already been powerfully clear as they finally, nervously, together crossed the border back into Italy in Autumn 1945, witnesses to a shared, fragile rebirth:
After dark we passed the Brenner, which we had crossed into exile twenty months before – our less tested comrades in cheerful tumult, Leonardo and I in a silence charged with memory. Of six hundred and fifty, the number who had left, three of us were returning. And what had we lost, in those twenty months? What should we find at home? How much of ourselves had been eroded, extinguished? Did we return richer or poorer, stronger or weaker? We did not know; but we knew that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. Flowing through our veins, with the weary blood, we felt the poison of Auschwitz. Where would we draw the strength to resume living, to knock down the barriers, the hedges that grow up on their own during all absences, around every abandoned house, every empty den? Soon, even tomorrow, we would have to join battle, against still unknown enemies, within and outside us. With what weapons, what energy, what will? We felt old with the weight of centuries…
(The Truce, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, p. 396, adapted)
Figure 1
Testimonial given to Primo Levi at Kattowitz on 30 June 1945 by the ‘Head of Medical Service 125’ (Private papers of the Levi family). Levi describes the presentation of the document in
The Truce
, slightly altering its wording: ‘Danchenko…took out two testimonials written in a beautiful hand on two sheets of lined paper, evidently torn from an exercise book. My testimonial declared with unconstrained generosity that “Primo Levi, doctor of medicine, of Turin, has given able and assiduous help to the Surgery of this Command for four months, and in this manner has merited the gratitude of all the workers of the world.”’ (See Primo Levi,
The Truce
, in
If This is a Man and The Truce
