Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved

I have been reading The Drowned and the Saved. Quite different from If This Is a Man, The Truce, and Moments of Reprieve. The other books are narratives, this one is analytical. And it is, as people say, Primo Levi’s angriest book. 

He writes about the hatred, cruelty, sadism, and “useless violence” of the Nazis; about the degradation, humiliation, and dehumanisation in the camps; about the things the inmates had to do to survive and the compromises they had to make; about the insurmountable gap between what people think it was like in Auschwitz and what it was actually like; about moral judgement and “the grey zone”; about the shame of Holocaust survivors; about memory; about bearing witness… 

Just so you get an idea of the writing, here’s an excerpt from the chapter “Useless Violence”: 

“You entered the Lager naked: more than naked, in fact, deprived not only of your clothing and shoes (which were confiscated) but also of all the hair on your head and body. […] A man who is naked and barefoot feels as if his nerves and tendons had been severed: he is defenceless prey. Clothing, even the filthy clothes that were handed out, even the shoddy wooden-soled clogs, is a tenuous but indispensable defence. Without it, a man no longer feels like a human being. He feels like a worm: naked, slow, ignoble, prostrate on the ground. He knows that he might be crushed at any moment.” 

(translated by Raymond Rosenthal) 

Lucid, sharp, unsentimental. Makes me think of that passage in King Lear: “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art.” 

There are so many great passages, so many haunting passages that it’s impossible to quote them all, so I’m just going to pick another one from the same chapter:

“Until September 1944, there were no children in Auschwitz: they were killed with gas upon arrival. After this date, entire Polish families began to arrive, families who had been arrested at random during the Warsaw uprising: all of them were tattooed, including newborns.

The procedure was relatively painless and lasted less than a minute. Its symbolic meaning was clear to everyone: this is an indelible sign that you will never get out of here alive; this is the mark branded on slaves and on livestock being sent to the slaughter, which is what you have become. You no longer have a name; this is your new name. The violence of the tattoo was gratuitous, an end in itself, a pure insult: wasn’t it enough to have three cloth numbers sewn on your pants, jacket, and winter coat? No, something more was needed, a nonverbal message, so the innocent would feel their sentence inscribed in their flesh. The tattoo also constituted a return to barbarism that was particularly upsetting to Orthodox Jews, since it is precisely in order to distinguish the Jews from the barbarians that tattooing is forbidden by Mosaic law (Leviticus 19:28).” 

I don’t think many people today—I’m especially thinking of those who compare other things to the Holocaust—are fully aware of its horrors. Not only so, Primo Levi says a few times throughout the book that the survivors cannot convey the worst of the camps—they did not touch bottom:  

“Let me repeat that we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is a troublesome notion that I became aware of gradually by reading other people’s memoirs and rereading my own years later. We survivors are an anomalous and negligible minority. We are the ones who, because of our transgressions, ability, or luck, did not touch bottom. The ones who did, who saw the Gorgon, did not come back to tell, or they came back mute. But it is they, the “Muselmänner,” the drowned, the witnesses to everything—they are the ones whose testimony would have had a comprehensive meaning. They are the rule, we are the exception.” (from the chapter “Shame”) 

It is an intense book, one of the most powerful books I have ever read. The great thing about Primo Levi is that he doesn’t only describe his experiences, he ponders and makes one think about evil, about tyranny, about degradation, about hopelessness, about senseless violence, about senseless kindness (to use Vasily Grossman’s phrase in Life and Fate), about moral judgement, about outsiders’ inability to understand, about what it means to be human, and so on. It is a book everyone should read. 

Recent reads: Primo Levi, Flannery, Pamela, Shamela

In September, I read Moments of Reprieve, my third Primo Levi book after If This Is a Man (aka Survival in Auschwitz) and The Truce (aka The Reawakening). Wonderful writer. Primo Levi writes about the people he knew at Auschwitz—the moments of reprieve—he’s got a gift for portraiture and for images. Certain images get imprinted on one’s mind: a man playing the violin in the camp (at which point the listeners, for a brief moment, have a vision of a better world), the guided tour for Hitlerjugend, the “revenge” of the inmates through “bacteriological warfare”, etc. 

The last chapter, about Rumkowski, is thought-provoking.

The most moving chapter in the book is the one about Lorenzo, which is reminiscent of Vasily Grossman’s idea in Life and Fate about “senseless kindness”. Among my favourite writers, I especially like the temperament of Vasily Grossman and Primo Levi, men who have seen some of the worst horrors of the 20th century and yet still believe in salvation and goodness.  

(Today marks one year since the Simchat Torah Massacre, or the October 7 atrocities). 

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Is Flannery O’Connor the best writer of bigotry? She must at least be one of the best at depicting and dissecting it. 

In October, I read “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “Greenleaf” from her second short story collection, but I’m also thinking of “The Artificial Nigger” and “The Displaced Person” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. There’s something cold, uncompromising, even harsh about Flannery O’Connor, but she is so good, so striking—she hits you right in the face. Some writers (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Cao Xueqin, Carson McCullers…) depict their characters with love and compassion; some others (Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert, Ibsen…) dissect them. 

Over the past 2 years or so, I’ve discovered a few short story writers: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro, etc. and Flannery O’Connor is the most striking one, much more interesting than Alice Munro. She’s got a distinct voice, she picks strong images, and her stories are “the axe for the frozen see within us.” 

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Speaking of “the axe, etc.”, I went to the Kafka exhibition in Oxford. Finally got to see the original manuscripts and drawings! 

Last year, on my work trip to Prague, I visited the Kafka Museum and realised, in disappointment, that most of the originals were in Oxford or in Germany. 

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I read and gave up, nearly halfway through, on Pamela. How many times is the wench going to faint? And she goes on and on and on about her virtue.

Is there a Richardson vs Fielding split (like Tolstoy vs Dostoyevsky)? I seem to be Team Fielding. I know I cannot say till I’ve read Tom Jones and Clarissa, but Shamela is a hoot, and I’m now having a blast with Joseph Andrews.

Funnily enough, I’ve noted that both of these works are spin-offs from Pamela, but Joseph Andrews accompanies Pamela rather than Shamela. 

Characters and images in Primo Levi’s The Truce

The Truce is sequel to If This Is a Man—the two books should be read together—but it is a rather different book: depicting Primo Levi’s journey from Auschwitz back to Italy, it is more life-affirming and exuberant; and Levi writes more about the people he met. 

“Jadzia was a small and timid girl, of a sickly-rosy colour; but her sheath of anaemic flesh was tormented, torn apart from inside, convulsed by a continual secret tempest. She had a desire, an urge, an impelling need of a man, of any man, at once, of all men. Every male who crossed her path attracted her; attracted her materially, heavily, as a magnet attracts iron.” (ch.2) 

(translated by Stuart Woolf) 

The people he describes are all fascinating, sometimes rather grotesque. A few strokes, and they appear so vivid. 

“… But Gottlieb was there, as sharp as a knife; there was no bureaucratic complication, no barrier of negligence, no official obstinacy which he was unable to remove in a few minutes, each time in a different way. Every difficulty dissolved into mist in the face of his effrontery, his soaring fantasy, his rapier-like quickness. He came back from each encounter with the monster of a thousand faces, which lives wherever official forms and circulars gather, radiant with victory like St George after his duel with the dragon, and recounted the rapid exchange, too conscious of his superiority to glory in it.” (ch.8)

The main characters of the book (the Greek, Cesare) are full of life, but the passing characters, the ones we meet only once, are also striking. 

“In the Moor’s chest, skeletal yet powerful, a gigantic but indeterminate anger raged ceaselessly; a senseless anger against everybody and everything, against the Russians and the Germans, against Italy and the Italians, against God and mankind, against himself and us, against day when it was day, and against night when it was night, against his destiny and all destinies, against his trade, even though it was a trade that ran in his blood. He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come.” (ch.7) 

Primo Levi is a wonderful writer. If that doesn’t make you want to pick up The Truce, I don’t know what can. 

Sometimes he picks a single image to characterise someone and it’s so striking that it’s imprinted on your mind, such as this image about a man who has given up:  

“… Since then, Ferrari had not been at all enterprising. He was the most submissive and docile of my patients; he undressed immediately without protest, handed me his shirt with the inevitable lice and the morning after submitted to the disinfection without putting on airs like an offended lord. But the following day, the lice, heaven knows how, were there again. He was like that; he was no longer enterprising, he no longer put up resistance, not even to the lice.” (ch.4) 

Later on, Levi mentions lice in another passage and it makes you think of Ferrari: 

“The disinfected clothing presented interesting phenomena; corpses of exploded lice, strangely deformed; plastic pens, forgotten in a pocket by some plutocrat, distorted and with the cover sealed up; melted candle ends soaked up by the cloth; an egg, left in a pocket as an experiment, cracked open and dried out into a horny mass, but still edible.” (ch.12) 

Sometimes he creates a character sketch so outlandish, so absurd that you feel as though reading a Dickens novel: 

“Then we saw that it was a car all of us knew well, a Fiat 500A, a Topolino, rusty and decrepit, with the suspension piteously deformed.

It stopped in front of the entrance, and was at once surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive people. An extraordinary figure emerged, with great effort. It went on and on emerging; it was a very tall, corpulent, rubicund man, in a uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet General, a Generalissimo, a Marshal. When all of him had finally emerged from the door, the minute bodywork rose a good six inches, and the springs seemed to breathe more freely. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible how he had got inside. His conspicuous dimensions were further increased and accentuated, when he took a black object from the car, and unfolded it. It was a cloak, which hung down to the ground from two long wooden epaulettes; with an easy gesture, which gave evidence of his familiarity with the garment, he swung it over his back and fastened it to his shoulders, with the result that his outline, which had appeared plump, became angular.” (ch.14) 

But Primo Levi doesn’t stop there—he goes further: 

“Seen from behind, the man was a monumental black rectangle one yard by two, who strode with majestic symmetry towards the Red House, amid two rows of perplexed people over whom he towered by a full head. How would he get through the door, as wide as he was? But he bent the two epaulettes backwards, like two wings, and entered.” (ibid.)  

It is delightful! Levi doesn’t mention Dickens—he references Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Dante, a few others—I wonder if he likes Dickens or just shares a liking for the grotesque. 

But the best, the most interesting image in The Truce, if I have to choose, would be this moment when Caesar tries to get a woman named Irina to buy his fish: 

“… Now it is Cesare’s turn to grow angry; he brandishes the fish (‘untreated’), dangles it in the air by its tail with an enormous effort, as if it weighed a hundredweight, and says: ‘Look at the size!’, then runs its entire length under Irina’s nose, and while doing this closes his eyes and draws in his breath deeply, as if inebriated with the fragrance of the fish. Irina takes advantage of the second in which Cesare’s eyes are closed to snatch the fish from him as quickly as a cat, to bite off its head cleanly with her white teeth, and to slap the flaccid mutilated corpse in Cesare’s face, with all her considerable strength.” (ch.12) 

What even is that? 

Primo Levi is such a magnificent writer. 

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. 

Things I read and saw in February

Films 

In February, I watched Past Lives, The Holdovers, Maestro, and American Fiction. 

It probably says something about me—I know not what—that people say the biggest films of 2023 are Oppenheimer, Barbie, and Killers of the Flower Moon and I either dislike them or, at best, feel indifferent (in the case of Killers of the Flower Moon). My favourite film of 2023 is Anatomy of a Fall, followed by The Holdovers. What is wrong with those people who sneer at The Holdovers and call it a cosy film? Most modern films exasperate me with their badly written dialogue, probably resulting from dismissive attitudes about dialogue in film (hello, Denis Villeneuve), so it’s refreshing to watch something with such good dialogue. 

Past Lives mostly has boring and mundane dialogue except for one great scene, between the main character and her husband in bed. About 2-3 good scenes, and one great scene. 

Maestro I can only comment on as a pleb—for I have not seen much of Leonard Bernstein to critique Bradley Cooper’s performance—but perhaps ignorance is an advantage in that, not distracted by the differences between the actor and the man he portrayed, I could judge the film as a film and I thought it was a mess. Why is it called Maestro when it’s more about the wife? 

American Fiction is funny and enjoyable, though sometimes a bit ham-fisted. I like though that the main character is named after Thelonious Monk and Ralph Ellison. 

But my favourite is Anatomy of a Fall, a film I still think about long after. 

Books

In February, I read Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (also known as Survival in Auschwitz), then read G. Wilson Knight’s The Imperial Theme on my work trip, and returned to Primo Levi with The Truce, the sequel. 

If This Is a Man is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, not just because of its importance as a testimony and a record, but also because of Primo Levi’s talent as a writer and insights about people. Reading the book, I thought of the differences between it and a famous memoir by a Vietnamese man who was imprisoned by the communists—both wrote about their own experiences, but if the Vietnamese writer was a storyteller and no more, Primo Levi got one to think about what it meant to be human. 

G. Wilson Knight’s book is brilliant, especially for those of you who love Antony and Cleopatra. 

Museums 

My favourite museum in Geneva is the Patek Philippe Museum, followed by Musée Ariana. 

The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire and Maison Tavel in Geneva were not without interesting things, but they made me realise how lucky, how spoilt I was, living in London. 

Play

Today I saw my first Shakespeare production onstage: Simon Godwin’s Macbeth, with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma as the Macbeths. 

That would be the fourth version, after Trevor Nunn (Ian McKellen – Judi Dench), Joel Coen (Denzel Washington – Frances McDormand), and Orson Welles (Orson Welles – Jeanette Nolan).

It’s too early to comment at length. My immediate reaction is that it’s very different from Trevor Nunn’s production, which to me is perfect as a Shakespeare production can be. I did enjoy it, and I liked the comic touch in Ralph Fiennes’s performance as Macbeth—I hadn’t seen the potential for something comic, darkly comic, in the text and in the other performances—but it worked.

One complaint is that the porter scene is removed. Another complaint is that Simon Godwin increased the presence and significance of the witches, but they didn’t look right—they didn’t look striking, frightening, unnatural, like they’re not the inhabitants of the earth—compare them to the witches in Trevor Nunn’s production, or Kathryn Hunter in Joel Coen’s film. 

But I need to think some more about the play. 

Primo Levi and King Lear

I’m currently reading If This Is a Man (known in the US as Survival in Auschwitz), a memoir by Jewish Italian chemist/writer Primo Levi. 

I don’t need to tell you that the book is full of horrors. 

“Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; 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 ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” (ch.2) 

(translated by Stuart Woolf)

How could people do this to other human beings? Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? The Holocaust is invoked a lot these days—unfortunately I have seen a lot of Holocaust inversion—but I think people cannot imagine, till they have read such an account, the awfulness, the enormity of what the Nazis did to the prisoners at the 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. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp’, and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: ‘to lie on the bottom’.”

That paragraph makes me think of a key passage in King Lear, when Lear sees the disguised Edgar:

“Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on’s are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art.” (Act 3 scene 4) 

But the power of If This Is a Man, at least it’s my impression so far, is that Primo Levi writes about how the prisoners strove to retain their humanity, even in the most inhuman conditions of the camp: 

“… 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) 

That is a powerful passage.