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What Drove Survivor
Primo Levi To Despair?
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LOTHAR KAHN
Special to The Jewish News
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12
Friday, April 24, 1987
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n April 11, Primo
Levi, Italy's foremost
Jewish commentator
on the Holocaust and a
former inmate of
Auschwitz-Birkenau, fell
three flights down a stairwell
to his death at his residence
in his native Turin. The
police pronounced the death a -
suicide. A recent deep depres-
sion, confirmed by his wife
and friends, lent substance to
the official finding.
In 1944-1945, the year he
spent in the death camp, Levi
suspected that he might
never be the same, that liv-
ing out his natural life might
become an impossible feat.
Even as the day of liberation
dawned, he knew that it
would be difficult to "wash
his conscience and memories
clean from the foulness that
lay upon them."
Wrote Levi prophetically:
"...nothing could ever hap-
pen good and pure enough to
rub out our past, and ... the
scars of outrage would re-
main within us forever, and
in the memories of those who
saw it, and in the places
where it occurred, and in the
stories that we should tell of
it."
Although some of Levi's
most recent books dwelled on
the agonies of industrial
society, his literary reputa-
tionrests on his three works
of Holocaust recollections and
observations. .
The atrocities he had experi-
enced had filled him with re-
curring dreams, in the camps
and afterwards. Only fellow-
inmates understood the
dreams and confessed to hav-
ing had almost identical
dreams. For others, they were
"the unlistened-to story," one
they could not comprehend,
did not wish to be burdened
with.
Levi confessed that, at one
time, he, too, had not listened
to the stories of others. This
son of an established Turin
middle-class family had been
trained as a chemist and,
after the fall of Mussolini and
the occupation of Italy by the
Nazis, he escaped into the
mountains to join Italian par-
tisans. A member of Giustizia
e Liberta, a non-Marxist
anti-fascist group, he was
seized by Fascist militiamen,
ever more desperate as they
and their German allies were
staring defeat in the face.
,
Dr. Kahn is professor of
- modern languages and
modern Jewish literature at
Central Connecticut State
University at New Britain.
Primo Levi: Scars of
outrage remained.
He had not listened much
to stories of Hitler's extermi-
nation policies that were
vaguely making the rounds
in Italy even then. Levi
thought it was safer confes-
sing to being a Jew than
being a partisan. The former,
he was convinced, would be
merely interned; the latter
shot. Instead, many partisans
were merely arrested and de-
tained, while many Jews,
after detainment in camps,
were shipped off to extermi-
nation camps in the East.
After internment at Fossoli,
he was sent east. Few writers
have chronicled more effec-
tively the dehumanization
that occurred.
If he blames others and
himself for not listening to
the misery of others or to
tales of perils to come, Primo
Levi struggled desperately to
retain his humanity and help
fellowinmates to retain
theirs. He tells of one such
incident in Survival in Au-
schwitz. At the nadir of de-
spair, he suddenly remem-
bered a literary passage he
had learned in school long be-
fore. This link to Italy's
greatest poet, Dante, and the
wisdom of the passage drove
him into a state of frenzy
which he hastened to share
with another inmate. He had
to explain it to his closest
associate in the camp, ex-
plain what he had himself
only just seen, in a flash of
intuition. That literary pas-
sage instructed him on what
life was like and that perhaps
there was a reason for his
surviving.
Why did he survive? He
knew the reason was simple.
As a chemist, the Nazis had
use for him in the factories
near Auschwitz and they let
him toil for them during the
day so that they could tor-
ment him by night. The out-
side world had lost all reality