Noel's review of If This Is a Man & The Truce (original) (raw)

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If This Is a Man & The Truce by Primo Levi

If This Is a Man & The Truce
by

86486355

I’ve read some other reviews on here expressing disappointment that Levi doesn’t write more impassionedly about the Holocaust. He’s so objective as to be almost too restrained and even chilly, as if he were writing about someone else. Lately I’ve been reading quite a bit about the humanly inflicted catastrophes of the twentieth century and they make me wonder why I’m doing it—perhaps out of some deep-seated need for emotional intensity beyond the pale of my existence? I think it’s really quite remarkable that someone who went through what Levi did could write about the Holocaust this way. The only art to his treatment is to let the facts speak for themselves, to let the reader draw their own conclusions. Sprinkling with sentimental tears, coloring with melodrama—none of that is necessary; besides, this is serious.

Instead of a chronological narrative, If This Is a Man is discontinuous with self-contained chapters, each developing a single topic. By blunting the sense of narrative continuity, Levi can turn to studying “certain aspects of the human mind.” But this timeless quality is also a fact of camp life itself: “hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the past, always too slowly, a valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought to rid ourselves as soon as possible. … For us, history had stopped.” On the train journey to Auschwitz, a threshold is crossed from mortal time to Timelessness. The realm of the dead, to which a “Charon” leads them, has marked over its gate the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work gives freedom”), the synonym to “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Unlike Dante, who descends through the various circles of Hell, Levi is already at the bottom of Hell at the beginning of the second chapter, beyond which there is no descending. “Every day, according to the established rhythm, Ausrücken and Einrücken, go out and come in; work, sleep and eat; fall ill, get better or die.” The prohibitions are innumerable; the rites (such as the “control of buttons on one’s jacket, which had to be five”) are “infinite and senseless”—especially senseless since the SS guards are often invisible: camp administration is largely turned over to the prisoners themselves. Behind two rows of electrified barbed wire, prisoners are trained in apathy and blind obedience. Levi recounts an episode that occurs soon after his arrival at the camp: he reaches out a window to quench his thirst with an icicle. An SS guard immediately snatches it away from him. “Warum?” Levi asks. The guard answers: “Hier is kein warum.” (“Here there is no why.”)

In the early days after his arrival at Auschwitz, Levi gets his first lesson in moral survival from Steinlauf, a former sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army (who will eventually be selected for the gas chamber), furious that Levi thinks it’s a waste of energy to try to wash “without soap in dirty water”:

[P]recisely because the Lager [camp] 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 are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

Levi isn’t entirely convinced because, in this netherworld, he can’t accept a system created by others—especially since it’s this Teutonic rigidity of rule that underlies the camp itself. But Steinlauf’s lesson will always be of use to him, even after he’s forgotten the words.

Levi conceptualizes Auschwitz as a colossal scientific experiment, governed by the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, in the sense that Jews are fighting a war among themselves—not in the sense that those who survive are worthier of survival than those who don’t. Levi would certainly reject such a notion. In fact, he suggests quite the opposite: that those who survive do so largely by sinking their teeth into the flesh of others. In an inversion of Dante’s moral hierarchy, Levi divides the prisoners into two categories: “the saved,” those who, like Levi, through luck or skill or both, never touch bottom, and “the drowned” (i.e., the damned), called Muselmänner:

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.

Here, the real horror of Auschwitz is not, or not only, the mass production of corpses, but the production of a new—that is, _modern_—form of life, the Muselmann, the mere empty husk of a man whose soul has been entirely worn away, wandering about in a nightmare world as his very name is forgotten. It’s on the behalf of the Muselmann that the Holocaust survivor has to speak, even though he has no story to tell:

Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralysed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish.

[…]

During the night we listened carefully: … from Hurbinek’s corner there occasionally came a sound, a word. It was not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on a name.

[…]

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

As the souls of the drowned are destroyed, the souls of the saved are _corrupted_—especially if they’re privileged prisoners from the upper stratum of camp society, such as Kapos (trusties), who are rewarded for brutality against their fellows. You can’t exist in this system for long without being implicated, without “absorb[ing] its poison”:

The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the Prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge [prisoners], all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.

For Levi, our humanity isn’t something to be taken for granted, as if it were a god-given gift, but something rather to be striven for, attained and maintained through ceaseless struggle against stereotyping, scapegoating, passivity in the face of evil, and conformity—although perhaps even this system needs to be constantly questioning itself and not taken as paradigm for its own sake.

Dante the pilgrim shades into Homer’s Odysseus in the second book The Truce, an account of his journey back to the realm of the living. What emerges from both books is a sense of how fragile our humanity is, how precious. And worth fighting for. But, in a deep psychological sense, Levi, unlike Odysseus, will never be able to return home from Auschwitz:

I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation, of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawàch’.

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Reading Progress

January 29, 2023 – Shelved

March 17, 2023 –Finished Reading

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