Survival in Auschwitz

Levi ensinou-me que as histórias do Holocausto terminam sempre com perguntas. E, sim, é bárbaro escrever Poesia depois de Auschwitz; mas vejam: é possível! Costumo pegar neste excerto e dizer ao mundo o quanto gostava de ter sido eu a escrevê-lo:

“E veio a noite, e foi uma noite tal, que se sabe que olhos humanos não deveriam assistir e sobreviver. Todos sentiram isso: nenhum dos guardas, quer italianos, quer alemães, teve a coragem de vir ver que coisas fazem os homens quando sabem que vão morrer. Cada um se despediu da vida da maneira que melhor sabia. Alguns rezaram, outros beberam além da conta, outros inebriaram-se numa nefasta e última paixão. Mas as mães mantiveram-se acordadas e prepararam, com cuidado amoroso, o alimento para a viagem, lavaram os seus meninos e prepararam as bagagens; ao raiar do dia, o arame farpado estava cheio de roupas de criança estendidas ao vento, a secar; e não esqueceram as fraldas, e os brinquedos, e os travesseiros, e centenas de outras pequenas coisas das quais as crianças sempre necessitam. Não fariam também vocês a mesma coisa? Se fossem morrer amanhã com os vossos filhos, não lhes dariam hoje de comer?”

خط به خط، کلمه به کلمه، بوی درد می‌دهد. پریمو لوی، در جوانی از بند آشویتس رها شد و این شاهکار را نوشت ولی تا زمان مرگِ خود خواسته‌اش، که از بلندی سقوط کرد، از آشویتس خلاصی پیدا نکرده بود.
آشویتس نقطه‌ی صفر مرزی انسان بود، وقتی احساسات به حداقل میرسند و میگویم انسان، چون این بی‌مرامی در هیچ حیوانی نیست.
شیمیدانِ ایتالیایِ یهودی، در پی اقدامات آزادی‌خواهانه‌ش، دستگیر و به آشویتس منتقل میشود، و یکی از زیباترین بخش‌های کتاب، این‌همانی هایی است که لوی با دوزخِ دانته انجام میدهد و مدام دوزخ را با آشویتس تطبیق میدهد. همچنین به برج بابل تشبیه میکند که از هر ملت و زبانی در آنجا حضور دارند و بی آنکه حرف یکدیگر را بفهمند، در کنار هم زجرکش میشوند.
پیشتر، « یک روز از زندگی ایوان دنیسوویچ » را از الکساندر سولژنیتسین، که درباره اردوگاه کار اجباری سیبری، در زمان استالین بود خوانده بودم. وحشتناک بود. این یکی شاید وحشتناک‌تر هم بود، چون آنجا کوره آدم سوزی نداشت.
هر اثر این چنینی که میخوانم، چیزی درونم له میشود ولی پوستم کلفت‌تر.
شاید صبوری را یاد میگیرم
شاید بی‌حس میشوم
شاید گاهی از خود خجالت میکشم...

آذرِ هزار و چهارصد

This clearly stands out in the oeuvre of Primo Levi, because it's the gripping, autobiographical story of Levi's stay in the nazi-concentration camp of Buna, near Auschwitz. He arrived there in February 1944 and was lucky to be selected for the labour camp (instead of immediate extermination). The book offers a gruesome description of camp life and especially of the struggle for life, foremost between the prisoners. In August 1944, Levi was transferred to the Department of Chemistry (after a so-called exam), where a milder regime prevailed, and where he started to take notes that are the basis of this book. What distinguishes this testimonial from others is the focus on what remains of the human in inhumane conditions. It's Levi's subtlety (in contrast with for instance Elie Wiesel) that makes the reading of this book an incredible touching experience. Read in Italian ("Se Questo è un uomo").

Primo Levi narrates a moving autobiographical memoir of his survival in an Auschwitz concentration camp while deciding to spare the reader from the horrifying details and descriptions of the horrendous acts he and his fellow inmates had both witnessed and endured during their imprisonment. Hence, Levi, with his considerate approach, only in brief sentences and in a subtle manner, recalls the atrocities for which these concentration camps were so infamous.

Rather, we learn more about Levi's thoughts and dreams of sating his hunger, quenching his thirst, and struggling to overcome the harsh cold winters. We discover that gold teeth, spoons, tobacco, and bread were the main commodities of the camp. While the recipe for survival was achieved by evoking a sense of pity from your superiors, regularly engaging in theft, and learning the "underground art of economizing on everything, on breath, movements, even thoughts."

This English edition of the original book is titled Survival in Auschwitz but I prefer the original title If This Is a Man (1947). Levi is an Italian Jewish citizen that worked as a chemist by day and a writer by night. I found his accounts convincing and his observations real. He doesn't ask for pity, he remains gentle with the reader but at the same time honest. His objective is not to emotionally exhaust his audience but to correctly depict the remaining images in his mind of the events that had occurred and to accurately illustrate the thoughts he had at the time.

Ένα αντιπροσωπευτικό δείγμα του πώς ένα πονημα χωρίς ιδιαίτερες εκφραστικές και υφολογικές αρετές, μπορεί να μετουσιωθεί σε ένα κλασικό αριστούργημα. Ένα βιβλίο με στρωτή, δωρική γλώσσα, χωρίς ωραιοποιημένες περιγραφές και καλλιέπεια έκφρασης, ακροβατεί ανάμεσα στο χρονικό, τη μαρτυρία, το ημερολόγιο, το μυθιστόρημα και το δοκίμιο, συμπυκνώνοντας πολυεπίπεδα νοήματα σε κάθε ξεχωριστή φράση.

Με απίστευτα ψύχραιμη ματιά (πολλώ δε μάλλον για κάποιον που έζησε το Άουσβιτς εκ των έσω) προκαλεί πόνο χωρίς να το επιδιώκει, γεννά την οργή στον αναγνώστη χωρίς να καταφεύγει σε εξάρσεις και συναισθηματικές κορώνες. Ενας άνθρωπος που θα είχε κάθε λογο να εξαπολύσει ένα δριμύ «κατηγορώ» για το Ολοκαύτωμα, μας δίνει μια σπάνια αντικειμενική οπτική, σαν να υπήρξε ενας εξωτερικός παρατηρητής.

Σε λίγες σελίδες προλαβαίνει να μας προβληματίσει για τον βιολογικό ντετερμινισμό και το πώς διατήρησαν ή όχι τα βασικά στοιχεία του χαρακτήρα τους οι κρατούμενοι των στρατοπέδων συγκέντρωσης, ή πώς αντίστοιχα παραδόθηκαν στην επίκτητη κόλαση των κρεματορίων, απεκδυόμενοι κάθε ανθρώπινο χαρακτηριστικό.

Η ανθρωπογεωγραφία, η εθνολογική κατανομή, η κοινωνική ιεραρχία του Άουσβιτς, γίνονται μερικά μόνο από τα βέλη στη φαρέτρα του κορυφαίου Ιταλού, ο οποίος παραδίδει σε όλες τις επόμενες γενιές ένα πραγματικό λογοτεχνικό διαμάντι

27 de Janeiro de 1945: Libertação do campo de concentração de Auschwitz-Birkenau pelas tropas soviéticas.
Hoje, 27 de Janeiro de 2015, faz 70 anos que Primo Levi saiu, fisicamente, vivo de Monowitz-Auschwitz, um campo nazi de trabalho e morte.
Posteriormente - para dar conhecimento ao mundo e para sua própria libertação interior - escreve Se Isto é um Homem. De uma forma contida, relata os acontecimentos de que foi protagonista desde Dezembro de 1943 - data em foi detido - e fala de alguns prisioneiros para exemplificar certas características da personalidade do ser humano, as quais contribuem para que, em situação de extremo sofrimento, uma pessoa soçobre rapidamente e outra sobreviva aos maiores tormentos.
Toda a leitura apesar, ou por isso, da beleza e simplicidade da escrita, é terrivelmente dolorosa, pelo que descreve e por sabermos que tudo foi real.

Destaco uma passagem, tão comovente como todas, mas uma...:
Para o homem livre a vida tem de ter um objectivo, mas "Agora e aqui, a nossa finalidade é chegar à Primavera. (...) dentro de um mês, o frio dar-nos-á tréguas, e teremos um inimigo a menos. (...) Hoje pela primeira vez o Sol nasceu vivo e nítido por cima do horizonte lamacento (...) e quando senti a tepidez através da roupa, compreendi como se pode adorar o Sol."

Li este livro há cerca de três anos e quis relê-lo agora. Li-o como quem balbucia uma prece: por aqueles, e outros, milhares de seres que sofreram e morreram sem culpa; e por mim, para que jamais esqueça o que o homem pode fazer ao homem e nunca nunca permitir que me convençam que alguém não merece viver só por não acreditar no mesmo que eu…

"Vós que viveis tranquilos
(…)
Considerai se isto é um homem
Quem trabalha na lama
Quem não conhece a paz
Quem luta por meio pão
Quem morre por um sim ou por um não.
(…)
Meditai que isto aconteceu”

A survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau cannot be said merely to have “beaten the odds”; a term like “beating the odds,” in this context, is grossly inadequate. After all, Auschwitz-Birkenau was a Nazi death camp; the whole point of Auschwitz was to kill off all its prisoners, after having extracted from each prisoner the last possible bit of forced labour. Yet Primo Levi did survive Auschwitz, and it is fortunate for history that he set down his recollections of the camp in a 1947 book that remains one of the most important books ever written on any topic. Upon its original Italian publication, it bore the title Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man); today, in the English-speaking world, it bears the title Survival in Auschwitz.

Author Primo Levi came of a Jewish family that had lived in Turin, in the Italian Piedmont, for many generations. A summa cum laude graduate in chemistry at the University of Turin, he responded to the Nazi occupation of northern Italy by joining a partisan unit operating in the Italian Alps. Captured by the Nazis in December of 1943, he was transported to Auschwitz two months later. Looking back to his journey to Auschwitz, Levi recalls that “Among the forty-five people in my wagon, only four saw their homes again; and it was by far the most fortunate wagon” (p. 6).

Survival in Auschwitz provides a powerful, unrelenting look at every aspect of the experience of being imprisoned at Auschwitz. After he and other newly arrived prisoners have been “processed” – crudely shaved and showered, given their ragged and inadequate prison uniforms – Levi reflects that “Then, for the first time, we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man” (p. 16). The manner in which the death-camp system of the Nazi Holocaust sought to destroy its victims’ humanity before killing them outright is a major theme of Survival in Auschwitz, as when Levi writes that “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’” (p. 16).

An awareness of every little detail of Auschwitz life is necessary, it becomes clear, for a prisoner even to have the slightest chance of survival. Even if a person is lucky enough to survive the “selections” in which prisoners are chosen for transportation to the gas chambers and crematoria of Birkenau, there are many ways in which a prisoner can become so ill, or so badly injured, that their transfer to Birkenau becomes inevitable: “Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores which become fatally infected” (p. 23).

Levi had an important moment of realization near the beginning of his imprisonment at Auschwitz –

that 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. (p. 30)

From his time in “Ka-Be” (Krankenbau, the infirmary) – where officers and nurses are regularly telling him, in a jocular tone, that the injury that he has suffered means that he will soon be sent to the gas chambers of Birkenau – Levi reflects “that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life”; and he adds that “If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here” (p. 45).

Survival in Auschwitz also provides insights into the often brutal nature of the struggle for survival in the camp. “In history and in life,” Levi states, “one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: ‘To he that has, will be given; to he that has not, will be taken away’” (p. 81) The reason for the grim Biblical allusion to Matthew 13:12 (“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath”) or Mark 4:25 (“For he that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath”) is subsequently made plain.

Those who are physically, psychologically, and/or spiritually strong, and are able to adapt to the monstrous circumstances of the camp, may survive; those who lack that sort of strength, that capacity for adaptation, will inevitably weaken further and die. Moreover, any attempt at reaching out to help those who cannot adapt only increases the prospects that one will weaken and die oneself. “In the Lager, where man is alone, and where the struggle for life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust law is openly in force, is recognized by all” (p. 81).

Throughout Survival in Auschwitz, the many passages of untranslated words and phrases that one encounters, in a bewildering array of languages – Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian – convey the idea that understanding a seemingly random word or phrase, in a language that one ordinarily would not speak, can constitute the difference between life and death.

And yet there are moments of human kindness, even at Auschwitz. Levi emphasizes the importance of his friendship with an Italian civilian worker named Lorenzo, who helped Levi during his imprisonment at the death camp. Levi sums up the practical parameters of the friendship succinctly: Lorenzo “brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward” (p. 113). Levi later reflects on the significance of his friendship with 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. (p. 114)

Toward the end of Survival at Auschwitz, Levi describes how the SS hanged a prisoner who was involved in a sabotage attack in which one of the Birkenau crematoria was blown up. After an SS officer finishes his speech regarding the reasons why the prisoner is to be hanged, the man on the gallows calls out, “Kamaraden, ich bin der Letzte!” (“Comrades, I am the last one!”), and Levi reflects grimly that as far as he is concerned, the man who is about to be hanged is indeed the last fully human person at Auschwitz: “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 judgment” (pp. 142-43).

The book’s final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days,” is set in January 1945. The Soviet army is approaching the camp from the east, and Allied bombardments are occurring with increasing regularity. Ill with scarlet fever, Levi had been sent to Ka-Be – something that helped him avoid an SS evacuation of 20,000 “healthy” prisoners, virtually all of whom disappeared to an unknown death. After one bombardment, Levi observes, “The Germans were no longer there. The towers were empty”, and the attention of Levi and the other prisoners turns to the question of how to survive until the Soviets arrive:

Today, I think that, if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence. But without doubt, in that hour, the memory of biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity passed like a wind through all our minds. (p. 151)

Levi died in 1987, in a fall from a third-floor stairwell in his Turin apartment building. Biographers and historians still disagree over whether his death was an accident or an act of suicide. Whatever the case may be, Levi unquestionably did the world a great service in setting down, in such meticulous detail, the story of his imprisonment at, and survival of, the Auschwitz death camp. Even if the traumatic memories of Auschwitz caused Levi to take his own life 42 years after liberation, his testimony of life and death at Auschwitz lives on – a lesson about the past, and a warning for the future.

این کتاب عین یه پتک خورد تو سرم. سپهر خوب گفته بود: تک‌تک کلمات این کتاب بوی درد می‌دهد.

"اگر این نیز انسان است" بی‌نهایت هولناک بود. چه بر سر بشر رفته بود؟ این بشر چطور تونست انسان و انسانیت رو تو اردوگاه‌های آشتوییتس "منهدم" کنه؟ چطور شد که این کتاب رو خوندم و از میزان شوکه‌شدن، توانایی‌ نوشتن راجع بهش رو از دست نداده باشم؟

پریمو لوی تو این کتاب روایت‌گر تحقیر انسان از تمامی جهات و به تمامی روش‌ها از تمام سمت و سوها بود. انسان‌های خاطرات نویسنده حتی دیگر "آنقدر زنده نبودن که به مرگ بینیشند". چطور میشه مردگان رو باز کشت؟ چطور میشه یه کاری کرد که دقیقا خلاف خلق کردن انسان و متفاوت از مرگ باشه؟ این کتاب به شما نشون میده چطور.

و همونطور که اگه این کتاب رو تا به انتها بخونید متوجه می‌شید، پریمو لوی بیشتر از هرچیزی بر اساس شانس زنده موند تا روایت‌گر این خاطرات تکان‌دهنده باشه. سرگذشت مرگبار نویسنده از صفحات اول تا آخرین صفحه‌ی کتاب، دردی بینهایت رو به مغز استخوان خواننده تزریق میکنه.

از عجیب‌ترین و همذات‌پندارانه‌ترین قسمت‌های کتاب برای من بخش‌های ابتدایی کتاب بود که همه‌چیزش عین دوران آموزشی سربازی بود: دیسیپلین‌ها و روتین‌های به غایت پوچ و مسخره، فرمالیته بودن تمامی قانون‌ها، واقعا بی‌هدف بودن تک‌تک اعمال اونجا و... حقیقتا که حس سربازای تازه وارد فکر نکنم دست کمی از پریموی لوی‌ای داره که تازه وارد آشویتس وحشتناک شده. همونقدر عذاب‌آور، پوچ و فرسایندهٔ روح انسانی. از طرفی، همزمان شدن خوندن این کتاب با دوران پر از بدبختی و چالش و سختیِ قبل رفتن، کلی حس‌وحال متناقض و عجیب‌وغریب رو توی من بیدار کرد. واقعا تجربه شخصیِ متفاوت و عجیبی داشتم با این کتاب.

اگر این نیز انسان است به نظر من گرانبارترین کتابی هست که چاپش خیلی وقته تموم شده و به شدت نایابه.