“You who live safe in your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, without hair and without name With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold like a frog in winter.”
If This Is a Man starts with this poem. It is a fitting prelude to the book, for it details the harrowing personal experience of the author, Primo Levi, in the concentration camp of Buna-Monowitz. Levi calls the camp an “extermination camp”. “Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself…It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp’…”
If This Is a Man recounts the period from Levi’s capture by the Germans to the time of their liberation by the Red Army. With an impassive voice, he narrates his transport to the concentration camp, his hellish life in the camp, the humiliation, the degradation, and the suffering he had to endure there. Although he is a victim of unjust hatred, Levi maintains a balanced account of his life in the camp. He is justly indignant but not bitter. Yet, it’s a powerful account written with tragic beauty. Even with Levi’s impassive tone, the account distresses and emotionally taxes the readers.
The history tells us of the Holocaust – the genocide of over six million European Jews – but it fails to emphasize the equally heinous crime of the subtle murder of personalities, for that’s what happened in these concentration camps. Nazis killed the personalities of their victims way before they killed their persons. Levi’s narrative unfolds how their personalities were destroyed like that of breaking horses. “To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement…That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another mettle than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us, could not bend him. Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue and cold, even if we return home…”. My heart broke at these words.
Even after the liberation, Levi and the few Auschwitz survivors didn’t have an easy time. The war had wrecked Europe. Everywhere there was damage, destruction, and disorder. So the journey back home was another trial for them. The second book The Truce recounts this trying time. To Levi, however, the journey home was a time for reflection and adjustment, for though they were free, they were still yoked to an invisible hell that lived through their thoughts and memories. “A dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. 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.” One cannot even imagine the weight of the scars these survivors carried. They were never truly free from their horrific experience. And what retribution could avenge the monstrous crimes committed against them? “Now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever…It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it.”
Levi’s need to tell his story was urgent. While passing a part of German soil on his journey back home, he strongly felt the need to tell his story to the Germans. “We felt we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and we felt that every German should have something to say to us; we felt an urgent need to settle our accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at the end of a game. Did ‘they’ know about Auschwitz, about the silent daily massacre, a step away from their doors? If they did, how could they walk about, return home and look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If they did not, they ought, as a sacred duty, to listen, to learn everything, immediately, from us, from me; I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore.” There was yet another reason for Levi to chronicle his Auschwitz experience. “The danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue and ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and by stages finally deny – actively or by default – the horror of the extermination camps and the witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who experienced them. The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually.” I fully comprehend Levi’s reasoning. Knowing full well that concentration camps existed and having visited Auschwitz, some of the accounts still felt too fantastic even to me. As Levi says, there is the danger of disbelieving. Not yet but in the future. By writing these two books, Levi is not only giving voice to the Holocaust survivors but also performing a historical duty.
