Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz)

Having just finished reading The Truce, Primo Levi’s memoir about his journey home from Auschwitz, I shall, I suppose, need some time to recover from Levi’s writings. But I’d like to write a bit about If This Is a Man, also known as Survival in Auschwitz. 

“… I understand that they are ordering me to be quiet, but the word is new to me, and since I do not know its meaning and implications, my inquietude increases. The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the manner of living here: one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide whoever fails to grasp the meaning. No one has time here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against the walls, afraid of being beaten.” (ch.3) 

(translated by Stuart Woolf) 

If This Is a Man perhaps does not appeal much to readers—the Holocaust is a heavy, depressing subject and the book itself is said to be indispensable and essential—but Primo Levi is a wonderful writer. “A perpetual Babel”, for instance, is a great way to distil his experience at Auschwitz.  

“The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog, was built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak, and they were cemented by hate; hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel, and it is this that we call it: – Babelturm, Bobelturm; and in it we hate the insane dream of grandeur of our masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.” (ch.7) 

The chief strength of Primo Levi’s writing is that it doesn’t scream of anger, nor self-pity—as Paul Bailey writes in the Afterword, “[there] isn’t even a hint of hysterical recrimination”—he adopts the cool, collected tone of a witness. But in a cool, collected way, he describes the horrors of the Holocaust; depicts the things done to the prisoners, especially the Jews; and exposes the way the Nazis treated them like beasts and tried to turn them all into beasts. 

“When this music plays we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills. There is no longer any will: every beat of the drum becomes a step, a reflected contraction of exhausted muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They are ten thousand and they are a single grey machine; they are exactly determined; they do not think and they do not desire, they walk.” (ch.4) 

And: 

“Buna is desperately and essentially opaque and grey. This huge entanglement of iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers or letters, not by weird and sinister names. Within its bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and slaves – and the former are more alive than the latter.” (ch.7) 

The Holocaust is evoked all the time now, but I can’t help feeling that most people today don’t know, don’t understand the full extent of its horrors. 

“Here, momentarily far away from the curses and the blows, we can re-enter into ourselves and meditate, and then it becomes clear that we will not return. We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labours, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.” (ch.4) 

But If This Is a Man is a great book because Primo Levi doesn’t simply recount his own experiences and describe the atrocities of Auschwitz—he also makes one think about what it means to be human, as he writes about the prisoners, including himself, striving to retain their humanity. 

“… precisely because the Lager 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.” (ch.3)

Primo Levi also writes about the humanity he saw whilst in the camp, he writes about what Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate calls the senseless acts of kindness. 

“... In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians. They think, more or less explicitly – with all the nuances lying between contempt and commiseration – that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises; they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair, without honour and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. […] 

Now nothing of this sort occurred between me and Lorenzo. However little sense there may be in trying to specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (ch.12) 

That is one of the memorable passages in the book. Another one is when, after the Germans evacuated the camp together with all the healthy prisoners on the way to their death, leaving behind all the ill and dying ones, Primo Levi and two Frenchmen go in search of a stove and food, and cook for others, and one of the other prisoners suggests that each person would share their bread with Levi and the Frenchmen as they have been working: 

“It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.” (ch.17)

This is why If This Is a Man must be read by everyone: it’s not just a witness’s account of one of the greatest horrors of the 20th century, it’s an examination of what it means to be human. 

PS: I have also seen The Zone of Interest. Disturbing film, a very different approach to the subject of the Holocaust. I like the red frame and the sound design.