"Güç, kişiyi yıpratmaktan çok yozlaştırır."
"Biz efendilerin halkı, sizi yok eden kişileriz, ancak siz
bizden daha iyi değilsiniz; istersek, ki istiyoruz, yalnızca
bedenlerinizi değil, ruhlarınızı da yok edebiliriz, tıpkı kendi
ruhlarımızı yok ettiğimiz gibi."

In questi giorni mi sono dedicata ad ultimare la lettura de 'I sommersi e i salvati' perché ci tenevo a finire entro oggi.
Questo titolo ha avuto un destino emblematico. Era quello scelto da Levi per la sua opera prima ( che l'editore poi cambiò in 'se questo è un uomo') ed è stato quello definitivo della sua ultima opera.
'I sommersi e i salvati' apre e chiude il cerchio di una testimonianza letteraria e storica, si presenta come un binomio, ma si risolve in un equivalenza, nell'idea che l'opzione in realtà non esiste.
Nella proposizione iniziale i sommersi sono coloro che l'olocausto ha travolto e, di contro, i salvati sarebbero coloro che hanno avuto la possibilità di riemergere dal campo di sterminio alla vita, per fortuna e contingenze. Ma appare chiaro dall'esperienza di Levi e dalle sue parole che da un orrore di queste proporzioni non ci si salva. I Salvati restano Sommersi, travolti dall'atrocità di un esperienza inenarrabile, dalla responsabilità storica di narrarla comunque.
Non ci si salva, perché il nazismo applicò sulle sue vittime la disumanizzazione, un processo deliberato, e irreversibile come la memoria. La disumanizzazione era conseguenza e causa del concetto di razza inferiore, di subumanità: "non ti tratterò come un uomo, poiché non lo sei, e non lo sei, dal momento che non ti tratto come un uomo".
Tutto quello che accadeva ai prigionieri dal giorno della cattura al giorno della morte era un tassello di questo percorso. Ogni elemento che concorreva alla dignità e all'identità era semplicemente cancellato. Il nome, gli abiti, i trascorsi, la formazione, la professione, gli affetti.

E davanti a questo non c'è liberazione che tenga, le ferite inflitte al corpo e allo spirito restano e non guariscono. Anzi. Il martirio ricomincia davanti allo scetticismo degli increduli, perché nel senso comune "non possono esistere le cose di cui non è moralmente lecita l'esistenza"; le ferite si rinnovano ancora davanti alle offensive semplificazioni degli stereotipi, riassunti nelle domande 'perché non siete fuggiti all'estero? Perché non siete scappati dal campo? Perché non vi siete ribellati?' quesiti analizzati da Levi, che insinuano una responsabilità delle vittime, una loro mancanza di iniziativa o di amor proprio. E infine le ferite si rinnovano di fronte al revisionismo degli smemorati, che rivalutano per pigrizia o per comodo.

Gli anni passano e siamo sempre più distanti dall'olocausto, da questo passato scomodo, perché senza alibi, scomodo perché rivelatore di una ferocia che non riusciamo a guardare in faccia. La releghiamo al rango di eccezione storica. Il capolavoro del Diavolo. Nel rinnovare il ricordo dell'olocausto le future generazioni diventeranno incapaci perfino di commuoversi. Così come non ci commuoviamo per la mortalità infantile dell'ottocento, o per le condizioni dei contadini nel medioevo.
Non sono la comprensione e neppure le lacrime ciò che siamo tenuti a mostrare sulle tombe dei morti. Capire ci è precluso, piangere non serve. La nostra responsabilità verso il futuro non sono le lacrime.
E neppure a quel grand'uomo che fu – e che ancora è - Primo levi interessava la pietà. Gli interessava il valore della memoria, che se tramandata permette all'individuo di difendersi.

Scriveva una ragazza tedesca, H.L., dopo la lettura di 'se questo è un uomo'
«dovrei cucirLe un vestito, come quello che indossano gli eroi delle leggende, che La protegga contro tutti i pericoli del mondo»
E commenta Levi «non mi ravviso in questa immagine, ma non gliel'ho mai scritto. Le ho risposto che questi abiti non si possono regalare: ognuno deve tesserli e cucirli per se stesso».

quindi tessiamo e cuciamo, con ciò che i sommersi ci hanno lasciato.

It's really too bad that the whole art-about-the-Holocaust market in the U.S. has been cornered by sentimental war-is-bad treacle in the Life Is Beautiful mode. Because Primo Levi lays it down.

What I admire most about Levi is his refusal to accept any of the easy answers that have been provided since the Shoah to "explain" the events that took place in Europe in the '30s and '40s. Instead of laying blame or bestowing forgiveness, he simply accepts historical events, and looks at how people behaved in those historical events. Most Germans, in Levi's imagination, were opportunists, quick to accept Hitler when they thought it prudent and quick to hide behind the smokescreen of ignorance in the postwar years. Furthermore, by looking for easy blames, we ignore the potential culpability that we ourselves have, and in doing so fail to prevent future genocide.

As dark as that sounds, they're still stunning essays. Necessary reading for humans looking to be better humans.

Levi's last book is about several things:

- the necessity of witnessing to what happened in the Lager (camps), even though memory is fallible. Witnessing - telling the story - is not wholly possible, because those who have the truest vision did not survive. They reached bottom, and never came back.

- the moral structure of the Lager - the gray zone in which some prisoners collaborated with the guards, which improved their position slightly and also meant they would have to inflict suffering on other prisoners. The guards picked prisoners for this purpose. It was part of the strategy of making the victims complicit in the victimizing.

- understanding shame, which for Levi is the feeling of guilt during imprisonment in the camp, and afterward. It is "the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense." (The quote is from Levi's book The Awakening.) He sees shame written on the faces of the Russian soldiers who liberate his camp. Germans, he says, never knew shame. (In this instance. I don't think he means throughout all history.)

- trying to figure out why Germans allowed this to happen. This is probably impossible, but Levi tries when he has Survival in Auschwitz translated into German and published in Germany. He was extremely concerned that important things would be lost in translation, and that a German translator might fudge. He needn't have worried; his German translator turned out to be a lovely person who was entirely sympathetic both to the Holocaust's victims, and to the need to get every word right. They became friends, and when the German publisher asked Levi to write a preface to the edition, he asked that his thank you letter to the translator be used instead. ("I never harbored hatred for the German people. And if I had felt that way, I would be cured of it after having known you.") Though Levi didn't hate the Germans, nor did he understand them, as he explained. This preface induced about forty Germans to write him letters attempting to explain themselves as a people. Some excerpts of these form the book's last chapter.

He addresses why suicide was much more common after survivors were liberated, than in the Lager. Note: it is not at all clear that Levi himself committed suicide. There's evidence that he might have, but also evidence that he might not. There are also chapters on "useless violence" (completely gratuitous violence) and communicating in the camps. It was incredibly difficult to survive if you didn't understand any language being spoken and had no one who could help you understand. Knowing some extremely rudimentary German could help you get an extra bread ration. Knowing what a guard was yelling at you might save your life. The prisoners who were unable to communicate and understand usually died quickly.

"Few countries can be considered immune to a future tide of violence generated by intolerance,lust for power,economic difficulties,religious or political fanaticism,and racialist attritions. It is therefore necessary to sharpen our senses,distrust the prophets,the enchanters,those who speak and write 'beautiful words' unsupported by intelligent reasons."

It feels heretical to give this such a low rating, but in truth I didn't think it was great.

The subject matter is if course truly grim, but this account was, for me, strangely unfocused. There were new perspectives (for example the reflection on privilege and language), but there was also a lot of prior background knowledge assumed and required. I suppose in essence it skipped straight to the "why", neglecting the "what".

The structure of the book also felt bitty, with continual references to other works, some by the author, some not.

In all, while it's worth reading, I would sooner recommend "Night" by Elie Wiesel.

Riletto per non dimenticare.
Crudeltà e orrori inimmaginabili vengono descritti in uno stile analitico, piano e pacato che rende il resoconto delle vicende vissute dall'autore e le sue considerazioni in merito ancora più toccanti, terribili e sconvolgenti.
Bellissimo.

Primo Levi is best known today as the author of ‘If This is a Man’ and ‘The Truce’, a pair of memoirs which dealt respectively with his imprisonment in Auschwitz concentration camp and his subsequent long journey home to Italy after the liberation. Often published together, those books are (rightly) often regarded as two of the most important accounts of the holocaust and the immediate aftermath of the last war in Europe. His training and long career as a chemist inspired his writing and he also produced a collection of shorter pieces based around the Periodic Table of elements, and a couple of novels, including ‘The Wrench’, all of which are of a high standard.

His writing is both simple and eloquent; he isn’t shy of using difficult words, but only when they suit his purpose. He is refreshingly direct in his disregard for what he considers to be overly literary mannerisms, and maintains no exceptionalism for the vocation of writing. This last fact is impressive in itself because he is such an incredible, unassuming writer: his words have an exactitude about them, and this was never more true than in this book, where they seem to possess the weight that comes with the authority of a long life and lived experience.

In form, this is a series of essays which attempt an analysis of the concentration camp system. It’s not quite memoir, since there isn’t much in the way of new recollection here. It doesn’t have the academic rigour of a work of history or journalism, nor does it aspire to those things by presenting itself as wholly original research. It is simply the product of a man who has thought very hard about certain things and set them down in an honest and heartfelt manner. Despite the calm lucidity of the prose, I often felt while reading this that I was being drawn into a kind of special confidence between writer and reader. This is not to say that it wasn’t his intention to remain as accessible as possible — only that it is essentially a very personal, very intimate rumination on the crimes of the Nazis, on his own prior published works, and on the subsequent response to those works that he experienced in later years.

The book is especially good in its opening two chapters, ‘The Memory of the Offence’ and ‘The Grey Zone’. The first makes an attempt towards an explanation of the fallibility of human recollection, and how it affects both the survivors of the camps and those remaining Germans who later found themselves able to justify their actions with honesty and in good conscience. There’s a heartbreaking story here of the family of a man who vanished in the camp system, yet whose family refused to accept this, relying instead on a set of rumours that allowed them to believe he would return home soon.

The author looks on such stories with nothing in the way of moral judgment; naturally it is shocking and repulsive that men like Rudolph Hoss might absolve themselves in their own memories, that they might in fact not be tormented by the guilt we’d expect them to feel — but these failings are depicted as entirely human, and the end product of a totalitarian state which enabled the individual to point only towards the regime when queried as to their motives. ‘This scant reliability of our memory will be satisfactorily explained only when we know in what language, in what alphabet they are written, on what material, and with what pen,’ he explains, in a typically elegant sentence, adding only ‘to this day we are far from this goal.’

‘The Grey Zone’ dwells also on the issue of responsibility, but takes a slightly different angle. The author considers the position of a new prisoner who, on arriving at a concentration camp, considers the world in terms of white and black: the inmates (good) against the guards (bad). Their expectations are swiftly upended by the discovery that there are various levels of collaboration operating between these two parties, and that because the standard conditions of life in the camp are insufficient to sustain life, the only way to survive is to establish a degree of power over the other people around you, and to make the best possible use of one’s own privilege to stay alive. Because often the first blows to be aimed at a new arrival were not from the SS but from other inmates.

Suddenly altruism is almost inconceivable: you must look after yourself first, second, and third. This condition of competition to rise above the essential state of pain, terror and starvation is what leads to the indistinct moral states suggested by the title of the essay. It is the author's contention that power corrupts absolutely, and that in a civilised society it is essential to struggle against unearned privilege; but his point is also that the dilemma of the camps was such that if you did not leverage your own advantages, you would probably die. And there would be nothing heroic in your struggle, no victory in your death, even if you actively fought back against your oppressors — you would simply be crushed by the weight of an overwhelming opposite force.

The author is quite candid in his admission that what enabled him to survive Auschwitz was the privilege he earned by his training as a chemist. This made him more valuable than many others, and he goes so far as to admit that most of the surviving testimonies might be shaped by this privilege: ‘At a distance of years one can today definitely affirm that the history of the Lagers has been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralysed by suffering and incomprehension.’

One example of this comes in the form of the author's example of the Sonderkommando units within the prisoners, those who were specially selected on arrival by the SS to take on one of the worst duties imaginable: the cleaning out of the gas chambers after each period of execution. Perhaps some of those fathomed the thing to the bottom but we will never know because most of them did not occupy this post for long; though they were allocated special privileges for the time of their stay in the camp, including large amounts of alcohol, the SS were careful to ensure they too were murdered. Inevitably the first job of the next batch of Sonderkommando would be to clear the remains of the last group to perform the same task.

There is much else here I could write about, and many more stories that will shock and appall. We think — no, I think — I thought I knew most of the salient points about the horrors of the holocaust. And yes, much of this was familiar to me. But it is important to be reminded occasionally that what happened is still much worse than I could ever conceive, and that I basically cannot (by virtue of my own privilege) know what it is to live in such a world. I literally couldn’t imagine, for example, a place where the ashes of murdered prisoners could be used instead of gravel to cover the paths of a local village. But that this kind of thing was inconceivable — that the atrocity could be rendered so systematic as to exceed the expectations of a citizen far removed from it all — was partly the point of the whole enterprise. That’s why it is so important that we treasure books like this one, which understand exactly the most salient examples of horrors required to demonstrate to us the nature of the crime.

That was a hard read, particularly knowing that Levi topped himself and a large part of this book is about survivors guilt. The book is arranged into chapters, each of which can be seen as a standalone essay about a facet of life in the camps.

An important read.

Като свидетел и познавач на психологията на Холокоста, Примо Леви описва дехуманизацията на човечността в необичайни обстоятелства. Къде се коренят причинителите на злото и може ли всеки да се превърне в злосторник? Как да съхраним човешкото? Дали Аушфиц е повторяем феномен и как може да се повтори?

"Моята задача е да разбера, да ги разбера."

Изключително важна книга. За онези, които търсят отговорите.

Хиляди звезди

“Случило се е, значи пак може да се случи...”

В последните години сме буквално залети от художествена литература за нацистките концлагери. В повечето доминира тона на трагична романтика, разбира се, почиват на истински случки, а канонът на фабулата изисква в лагера да има поне двама изначално близки или впоследствие сприятелили или влюбили се хора, от които единият загива, а другият оцелява. Оформи се цяла попкултура около лагерния феномен. Не съдя нито книгите, нито техните почитатели. И аз съм чела някои от тях, а и не са излишни – за много хора това е първият и вероятно единствен начин, с който ще се запознаят с темата – преки послания, емоционална достъпност.

“Потъналите и спасените” рязко се разграничава от горните. Тя не е книга за концлагерите, поне не за лагерното ежедневие. Написана е от бивш (има ли такова понятие?) концлагерист – италианския химик Примо Леви. Концлагерът Аушвиц, тази зловеща класика в концлагернaта система, е поводът и основата, на които стъпва Леви, за да разсъждава върху темата за безсмисленото мъченичество, вината, срама и изкуплението. За тяхната възможност или невъзможност.

Най-мъчителен от всички въпроси, които така и няма да получат отговор, е този за колективната вина на един народ, уж толкова блестящ и цивилизован, истинско мерило за култура, който по ред причини се оставя да бъде завлечен към моралното и цивилизационно дъно, подведен от зловещ психопат. Дотолкова, че Третият Райх в масовото съзнание се е превърнал в устойчив символ на архетипното зло – методично планирано, осъществено къде с безразличие, къде със садистична наслада, но никога докрай изкупено. Убийство в индустриални мащаби, нацистките злини са най-добре документираният геноцид в световната история.

“Потъналите и спасените” е книга-мисия. Още преди появата на поп жанра по темата, тя предугажда и оборва стереотипите, които неизменно възникват около всяко митологизирана злина. Не е пропита с реваншизъм, патос или озлобление. Духовната висота на автора й не го позволява. Примо Леви не съди и отказва да борави с националните стереотипи, приложени с такава безсърдечна слепота към неговия народ и с които днешните демагози така лекомислено си играят. Той търси генезиса на злото и мотивацията на извършителите, но не може да примири отговорите, които получава или изводите, до които сам стига с постулатите на класическия морал, с базовия разум.

Стори ми се, че четох безкрайно тази книга. Сигурно заради гъстотата, в която се редиха смислите. Може и да е заради това, че по същото време посетих зала 600 в Нюрнберг, в която са съдени нацистките военопрестъпници. Германия сега е много различна държава. Светът е много различен. И точно от това се опасява Примо Леви – свикването с мира, опростяването на диалога, дистанцията на времето, пластовете от митове и клишета. Удобството на късата памет.

Великолепен, изпипан превод на Нева Мичева и абсолютно засължителни бележки под линия.

If you study WW II, you must read this book. It answers questions both spoken and unspoken.

A lucid and thoughtful examination of lingering questions about the meanings of the Holocaust 40 years after Levi survived his internment at Auschwitz, with the focus more on understanding than blame. He is well known for his compelling narrative of his experiences in "Survival in Auschwitz" and for his excellent account of the aftermath and long interlude in Russian hands in "The Reawakening".

Here, in his last book before he died, he strives to makes sense of it all in a series of penetrating essays organized around eight themes. Step by step, he shares his own personal and common sense-based thinking on tough issues without recourse to emotional invocations or scholarly inquisitions along philosophical or theological lines. His logical progressions cut to the heart of what it means to be human and the potential sources of distortion from such a distinction. His chapters cover: the fallibility of memory of the perpetrators and the German people who let it happen; the levels of culpability for the many in the "gray zone" of responsibility; the sources of the sense of shame felt by the victims; the barriers to understanding and communication between the lower class Germans who ran the camp and the polyglot mixture of Jews and political prisoners; the origins and destructiveness of the pervasive "useless" violence employed on the interned; the special hell experienced by intellectuals in the camp; answers to stereotyped thinking in naive questions on why so few Jews escaped or rebelled; and reflections on the letters he exchanged over the years with German readers of Levi's books.

I don't believe the concept of evil was raised anywhere in the book. In his looking for more simply human origins of destructiveness, I was relieved to glean some hope about our ability to prevent more such genocides happening in the future.