by Primo Levi
I myself had found the block of beeswax in the Elektromagazin; I remember the expression of disappointment of those who saw me carry it away and the dialogue that followed:
‘What do you want to do with that?’
It was inadvisable to reveal a shop secret; I heard myself replying with the words I had often heard spoken by the old ones of the camp, expressing their favourite boast — of being hardboiled, ‘old hands’, who always knew how to find their feet: ‘Ich verstehe verschiedene Sachen.’ I know how to do many things …
25 January. It was Sómogyi’s turn. He was a Hungarian chemist, about fifty years old, thin, tall and taciturn. Like the Dutchman he suffered from typhus and scarlet fever. He had not spoken for perhaps five days; that day he opened his mouth and said in a firm voice:
‘I have a ration of bread under the sack. Divide it among you three. I shall not be eating any more.’
We could not find anything to say, but for the time being we did not touch the bread. Half his face had swollen. As long as he retained consciousness he remained closed in a harsh silence.
But in the evening and for the whole of the night and for two days without interruption the silence was broken by his delirium. Following a last interminable dream of acceptance and slavery he began to murmur: ‘Jawohl’ with every breath, regularly and continuously like a machine, ‘Jawohl’, at every collapsing of his wretched frame, thousands of times, enough to make one want to shake him, to suffocate him, at least to make him change the word.
I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man.
Outside the great silence continued. The number of ravens had increased considerably and everybody knew why. Only at distant intervals did the dialogue of the artillery wake up.
We all said to each other that the Russians would arrive soon, at once; we all proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but at bottom nobody believed it. Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager, and even of believing in one’s own reason. In the Lager it is useless to think, because events happen for the most part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful, because it keeps alive a sensitivity which is a source of pain, and which some providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a certain limit.
Like joy, fear and pain itself, even expectancy can be tiring. Having reached 25 January, with all relations broken already for eight days with that ferocious world that still remained a world, most of us were too exhausted even to wait.
In the evening, around the stove, Charles, Arthur and I felt ourselves become men once again. We could speak of everything. I grew enthusiastic at Arthur’s account of how one passed the Sunday at Provencheres in the Vosges, and Charles almost cried when I told him the story of the armistice in Italy, of the turbid and desperate beginning of the Partisan resistance, of the man who betrayed us and of our capture in the mountains.
In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight invalids did not lose a syllable, even those who did not understand French. Only Sómogyi implacably confirmed his dedication to death.
26 January. We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist.
Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune from it, and we owe each other mutual gratitude. This is why my friendship with Charles will prove lasting.
But thousands of feet above us, in the gaps in the grey clouds, the complicated miracles of aerial duels began. Above us, bare, helpless and unarmed, men of our time sought reciprocal death with the most refined of instruments. A movement of a finger could cause the destruction of the entire camp, could annihilate thousands of men; while the sum total of all our efforts and exertions would not be sufficient to prolong by one minute the life of even one of us.
The saraband stopped at night and the room was once again filled with Sómogyi’s monologue.
In full darkness I found myself suddenly awake. ‘L’pauv’-vieux’ was silent; he had finished. With the last gasp of life, he had thrown himself to the ground: I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his shoulders, of his head.
‘La mort I’a chassé de son lit,’ Arthur defined it.
We certainly could not carry him out during the night. There was nothing for it but to go back to sleep again.
27 January. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful wreck of skin and bones, the Sómogyi thing.
There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash ourselves, so that we dare not touch him until we have cooked and eaten. And besides: ‘… rien de si dégoutant que les débordements,’ said Charles justly; the latrine had to be emptied. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.
The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Sómogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher on the grey snow.
Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having a beret.
Of the eleven of the Infektionsabteilung Sómogyi was the only one to die in the ten days. Sertelet, Cagnolati, Towarowski, Lakmaker and Dorget (I have not spoken of him so far; he was a French industrialist who, after an operation for peritonitis, fell ill of nasal diphtheria) died some weeks later in the temporary Russian hospital of Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice, I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has reached, his family happily and Charles has taken up his teacher’s profession again; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day.
A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth
On the September Friday in 1986 that I arrived in Turin—to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before — I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist and, afterward, until retirement, as manager. Altogether the company employs fifty people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled laborers on the floor of the plant. The production machinery, the row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes—all of it is encompassed in four or five acres seven miles from Turin. The machines that are drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never distressingly loud, the yard’s acrid odor—the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two years after his retirement—is by no means disgusting, and the thirty-yard dumpster loaded to the brim with the black sludgy residue of the antipolluting process isn’t particularly unsightly. It is hardly the world’s ugliest industrial environment, but along way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmark of Levi’s autobiographical narratives.
However far from the spirit of the prose, the factory is nonetheless a place clearly close to his heart; taking in what I could of the noise, the stink, the mosaic of pipes and vats and tanks and dials, I remembered Faussone, the skilled rigger in The Monkeys Wrench, saying to Levi, who calls Faussone “my alter ego”: “I have to tell you, being around a work site is something I enjoy.”
As we walked through the open yard to the laboratory, a simply designed two-story building constructed during Levi’s managerial days, he told me: “I have been cut off from the factory for twelve years. This will be an adventure for me.” He said he believed that nearly everybody once working with him was now retired or dead, and, indeed, those few still there whom he ran into seemed to str
ike him as specters. “It’s another ghost,” he whispered to me, after someone from the central office that had once been his had emerged to welcome him back. On our way to the section of the laboratory where raw materials are scrutinized before moving to production, I asked Levi if he could identify the chemical aroma faintly permeating the corridor: it smelled like a hospital corridor. Just fractionally he raised his head and exposed his nostrils to the air. With a smile he told me: “I understand and can analyze it like a dog.”
He seemed to me inwardly animated more in the manner of some quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence. Levi is small and slight, though not so delicately built as his unassuming demeanor makes him at first appear, and seemingly as nimble as he must have been at ten. In his body, as in his face, you see—as you don’t in most men—the face and the body of the boy that he was. The alertness is nearly palpable, keenness trembling within like his pilot light.
It is probably not as surprising as one might initially think to find that writers divide like the rest of mankind into two categories: those who listen to you and those who don’t. Levi listens, and with his entire face, a precisely modeled face that, tipped with its white chin beard, looks at sixty-seven both youthfully Pan-like but professorial as well, the face of irrepressible curiosity and of the esteemed dottore. I can believe Faussone when he says to Primo Levi early in The Monkey’s Wrench: “You’re quite a guy, making me tell these stories that, except for you, I’ve never told anybody.” It’s no wonder that people are always telling him things and that everything is recorded faithfully before it is even written down: when listening he is as focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall.
In a large, substantial-looking apartment house built a few years before he was bom—indeed the house where he was born, for formerly this was the home of his parents—Levi lives with his wife, Lucia; except for his year in Auschwitz and the adventurous months immediately after his liberation, he has lived in this same apartment all his life. The building, whose bourgeois solidity has begun slightly to give way to time, is on a wide boulevard of apartment buildings that struck me as the Northern Italian counterpart to Manhattan’s West End Avenue: a steady stream of auto and bus traffic, trolley cars speeding by on their tracks, but also a column of big chestnut trees stretching all along the narrow islands at either side of the street, and the green hills bordering the city visible from the intersection. The famous arcades at the commercial heart of the city are an unswerving fifteen-minute walk straight through what Levi has called “the obsessive Turin geometry.”
The Levis’ large apartment is shared, as it has been since the couple met and married after the war, with Primo Levi’s mother. She is ninety-one. Levi’s ninety-five-year-old mother-in-law lives not far away, in the apartment immediately next door lives his twenty-eight-year-old son, a physicist, and a few streets farther on is his thirty-eight-year-old daughter, a botanist. I don’t personally know of another contemporary writer who has voluntarily remained, over so many decades, intimately entangled and in such direct, unbroken contact with his immediate family, his birthplace, his region, the world of his forebears, and, particularly, the local working environment, which, in Turin, the home of Fiat, is largely industrial. Of all the intellectually gifted artists of this century— and Levi’s uniqueness is that he is even more the artist-chemist than the chemist-writer—he may well be the most thoroughly adapted to the totality of the life around him. Perhaps in the case of Primo Levi, a life of communal interconnectedness, along with his masterpiece on Auschwitz, constitutes his profoundly civilized and spirited response to those who did all they could to sever his every sustained connection and tear him and his kind out of history.
In The Periodic Table, beginning with the simplest of sentences a paragraph that describes one of chemistry’s most satisfying processes, Levi writes: “Distilling is beautiful.” What follows is a distillation too, a reduction to essential points of the lively, wide-ranging conversation we conducted, in English, over the course of a long weekend, mostly behind the door of the quiet study off the entrance foyer to the Levis’ apartment. His study is a large, simply furnished room. There is an old flowered sofa and a comfortable easy chair; on the desk is a shrouded word processor; perfectly shelved behind the desk are Levi’s variously colored notebooks; on shelves all around the room are books in Italian, German, and English. The most evocative object is one of the smallest: an unobtrusively hung sketch of a half-destroyed barbed-wire fence at Auschwitz. Displayed more prominently on the walls are playful constructions skillfully twisted into shape by Levi himself out of insulated copper wire—that is, wire coated with the varnish developed for that purpose in his own laboratory. There is a big wire butterfly, a wire owl, a tiny wire bug, and, high on the wall behind the desk, are two of the largest constructions: one the wire figure of a bird-warrior armed with a knitting needle and the other, as Levi explained when I couldn’t make out what the figure was meant to represent, “a man playing his nose,” “A Jew,” I suggested. “Yes, yes,” he said, laughing, “a Jew, of course.”
Roth: In The Periodic Table, your book about “the strong and bitter flavor” of your experience as a chemist, you tell about Giulia, your attractive young colleague in a Milan chemical factory in 1942. Giulia explains your “mania about work” by the fact that in your early twenties you are shy with women and don’t have a girlfriend. But she was mistaken, I think. Your real mania about work derives from something deeper. Work would seem to be your chief subject, not just in The Monkeys Wrench but even in your first book about your incarceration at Auschwitz.
Arbeit Macht Frei—”Work Makes Freedom”—are the words inscribed by the Nazis over the Auschwitz gate. But work in Auschwitz is a horrifying parody of work, useless and senseless— labor as punishment leading to agonizing death. It’s possible to view your entire literary labor as dedicated to restoring to work its humane meaning, reclaiming the word Arbeit from the derisive cynicism with which your Auschwitz employers had disfigured it. Faussone says to you: “Every job I undertake is like a first love.” He enjoys talking about his work almost as much as he enjoys working. Faussone is Man the Worker made truly free through his labors.
Levi: I do not believe that Giulia was wrong in attributing my frenzy for work to my shyness at that time with girls. This shyness, or inhibition, was genuine, painful, and heavy—much more important for me than devotion to work. Work in the Milan factory I described in The Periodic Table was mockwork that I did not trust. The catastrophe of the Italian armistice of 8 September 1943 was already in the air, and it would have been foolish to ignore it by digging oneself into a scientifically meaningless activity.
I have never seriously tried to analyze this shyness of mine, but no doubt Mussolini’s racial laws played an important role. Other Jewish friends suffered from it, some “Aryan” schoolmates jeered at us, saying that circumcision was nothing but castration, and we, at least at an unconscious level, tended to believe it, with the help of our puritanical families. I think that at that time work was for me a sexual compensation rather than a real passion.
However, I am fully aware that after the camp my work, or rather my two kinds of work (chemistry and writing), did play, and still play, an essential role in my life. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz’s Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy. In my case, and in the case of my alter ego, Faussone, work is identical with “problem-solving.”
At Auschwitz I quite often observed a curious phenomenon. The need for lavoro ben fatto—”work properly done”—is so strong as to induce people to perform even slavish chores “properly.” The Italian bricklayer who saved my life by bringing me food on the sly for six months, hated Germans, their food, their language, their war; but when they set him to erect walls, he built them straight and solid, not out o
f obedience but out of professional dignity.
Roth: Survival in Auschwitz concludes with a chapter entitled “The Story of Ten Days,” in which you describe, in diary form, how yOu endured from 18 January to 27 January 1945 among a small remnant of sick and dying patients in the camp’s makeshift infirmary after the Nazis had fled westward with some twenty thousand “healthy” prisoners. What’s recounted there reads to me like the story of Robinson Crusoe in Hell, with you, Primo Levi, as Crusoe, wrenching what you need to live from the chaotic residue of a ruthlessly evil island. What struck me there, as throughout the book, was the extent to which thinking contributed to your survival, the thinking of a practical, humane scientific mind. Yours doesn’t seem to me a survival that was determined by either brute biological strength or incredible luck. It was rooted, rather, in your professional character: the man of precision, the controller of experiments who seeks the principle of order, confronted with the evil inversion of everything he values. Granted you were a numbered part in an infernal machine, but a numbered part with a systematic mind that has always to understand. At Auschwitz you tell yourself, “I think too much” to resist: “I am too civilized.” But to me the civilized man who thinks too much is inseparable from the survivor. The scientist and the survivor are one.
Levi: Exactly—you hit the bull’s eye. In those memorable ten days, I truly did feel like Robinson Crusoe, but with one important difference. Crusoe set to work for his individual survival, whereas I and my two French companions were consciously and happily willing to work at last for a just and human goal, to save the lives of our sick comrades.
