Remembering Primo Levi

It is impossible to comprehend the loss of six million Jews.  It is difficult to come to terms with the devastation of European Jewry.  All we can do is hold on to a few stories.  And so on this year’s Yom HaShoah I remember one person. 

Primo Levi was born in Turin, Italy on July 31, 1919, to middle class Jewish parents.  His father worked for a manufacturing firm.  His mother played piano and spoke fluent French.  Both were well-educated and avid readers.  Although the family was not observant, Primo became a bar mitzvah at a local synagogue.  He excelled in school and studied at the university to become a chemist.  When Mussolini formed an alliance with Nazi Germany, Italy began to enact racial laws.  It was then that Primo Levi discovered his Jewish identity.  His chemistry diploma was stamped with the mark “of the Jewish race.”

In 1943 when Germany took over Italy he and some friends fled to the mountains to join the partisans.  Inexperienced and ill trained, they were soon captured.  When he was told by his Italian captors that resistant fighters were executed, he confessed to being Jewish.  He was sent to an internment camp near Modena.  When the Germans took over the camp, the Italian Jewish prisoners were herded on to cattle cars and shipped to Auschwitz. 

Levi said of the long train trip, “We said to each other things that are never said among the living.  Everybody said farewell to life through his neighbor.”  Of these 650 prisoners only 20 survived the eleven months, when the Russian army liberated Auschwitz on January 18, 1945.  Primo Levi was one of these survivors.  As the Russians approached the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp and forced its Jewish prisoners on a long death march.  Levi was spared this march because he had recently fallen ill with scarlet fever.  His illness spared his life.

His number in the camp was 1-7-4-5-1-7.  He wrote: “We have been baptized.  We will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.”  Later in life when Primo Levi was the director of a paint factory and traveled to Germany for business, he wore short sleeve shirts to display his tattoo to his tormentors’ unwitting, or perhaps knowing, accomplices.  He published his first book in 1947.  In Italian the title would be rendered to English as If This is a Man.  Later, in 1961, the book would be translated into English under the title Survival in Auschwitz.  Levi’s chemistry background influenced his writing.

He writes with an almost scientific precision.  He describes Auschwitz without feeling, in direct and seemingly objective terms.  He argued that the camps required a new way of speaking.  He writes, 

Our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man.  In a moment with prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached bottom.  It is not possible to sink lower than this. Nothing belongs to us anymore; 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 of us what we were still remains.

No book gives voice to the horrors of Auschwitz better than Levi’s work.  It leaves one cold.  It strips away all remnants of sentimentality.  If the book has a hero, it is Lorenzo Perrone who shared his bread and soup ration with Primo Levi.  Soon after the war Lorenzo succumbed to depression and alcoholism, dying on the streets in 1952.  In 1957 when Primo and his wife, Lucia, had a son, they named him Renzo, almost certainly after the man who helped him survive Auschwitz.  Lorenzo never asked for anything in return, yet everyday he shared his ration with Primo.

Primo Levi also battled depression.  He remained tortured by his experiences in Auschwitz.  On April 11, 1987, he fell down the stairs of his third story apartment in Turin.  It was the same apartment in which he was born.  Scholars and writers, and even the town’s coroner, believe his death to be a suicide.  He threw himself down the stairs.  Yet he left no note.  It seems darkly fitting.  He was plagued by questions.  He asked: How could a violinist become a callous taskmaster?  How could a physician become a brutal murderer?

Even Levi’s suicide is a resounding question mark.  It is the question that continues to hover over our generation.  Why do human beings commit such unspeakable evils against each other?  How can we be capable of such demonic hate?

In addition to his many books, Primo Levi authored numerous poems.  He writes:

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

The poem is entitled “Shema.”  Our generation’s command is a question.  We ask, “Is this is a man?  Can this be a woman?”

The Holocaust continues to beckon questions.  And we continue to affirm our faith. 

Shema Yisrael!