A sort of semi-fictional coda to his Auschwitz memoirs in which a cluster of vignettes which didn’t fit into those earlier narratives are investigated through the prism of the short story form (having said that, at least a couple of them read more like essays). The common theme is explained perfectly by the collection’s title. The writing is precise and unsentimental.

Levi is one of the great chroniclers of the Holocuast having lived at the centre of it yet was able to maintain an objective commentators view of what happened. This book, whilst little more that the bits picked up off the cutting room floor, is an excellent complement to If This Is A Man.

I don't feel it added much to Primo Levi's story. Maybe my hopes were too high.

Writing decades after his incarceration in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recalls here the “human figures [which] stood out against that tragic background: friends, people I’d traveled with, even adversaries – begging me one after another to help them survive and enjoy the ambiguous perennial existence of literary characters.” The events of the stories are not always grand and epic, often they are bizarre moments of odd comedy in the midst of the nightmare, or strange rituals or pauses the madness. In these moments Levi “recognized the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue.”
Those character sketches, and brief moments of reaction and interaction, make up most of the substance of these engrossing stories, while the larger story of the Second World War and the extermination in the camps plays a lesser role than in other Levi works. It’s not entirely absent, though, such as Levi’s examination of the role of silence as an enabler of totalitarianism. A German Catholic chemist is sent to work at the plant at Auschwitz, obeying orders, and saying nothing, even when questioned by friends in the late years of the war at a time when knowledge of the camps and the atrocities of the Eastern Front was seeping out across the nation. Years later he was questioned by an ex-prisoner of Auschwitz and in reply answered that “he had agreed to move to Auschwitz to prevent a Nazi from going in his place, that for fear of punishment he had never spoken to the prisoners, but had always tried to alleviate their working conditions; that at the time he knew nothing about the gas chambers because he had not asked anyone about anything.”
“Didn’t he realize that his obedience was a concrete help to the Hitler regime?” he was asked. “Yes, today he did,” he replied, “but not that the time. It had never entered his mind.”
Levi pushes the point in a letter he writes to this chemist years later, telling him “if Hitler had risen to power, devastated Europe and brought Germany to ruin, it was because many good German citizens behaved the way he did, trying not to see and keeping silent about what they did see.” As always, the literature of those survivors continues to remind us to speak out, and not remain silent.

This is a companion piece to If this is a Man. A set of further anecdotes from Levi's time in Auschwitz that fill in some of the background, for instance there is mention of the factories where some of the inmates worked - Auschwitz was a sprawling tumble of interlinked camps, and not everybody got to die in gas chambers, others were worked to death in light industrial factories. Also a story in which a prisoner gets hold of a violin, too odd a story maybe to have been invented. No way as powerful, even taken together, as If this is a Man since it doesn't have the same narrative drive.

16 Well written stories, which Primo Levi wrote more than 30 years after Survival in Auschwitz (alternate title 'If this is a man'), but that can be read as a companion piece.
These stories are less horrific, and not as poignant as his initial memoir of Auschwitz was.

However there was one story that grabbed me by the throat : 'Lorenzo's return'. We already met Lorenzo in 'If this is a man'. Now Primo Levi tells us what happened to him. Although Lorenzo was a good man, who probably saved Primo Levi and others from starvation, his fate was not a happy one.
Lorenzo is the kind of guy who I find very inspirational - an ordinary, unremarkable man who has deep compassion for others and who would give away everything to save someone- and I won't forget him soon.

Also very interesting, was the last 'Story of a Coin'. Primo Levi found a coin in Auschwitz dated 1943, with the inscriptions 'Getto', 'Quittung über 10 Mark' and 'Der Aelteste der Juden in Litzmannstadt'. The other face has the Jewish star. For years he didn't pay any attention to it, but now he tells us the history of the coin. And that was the ghetto of Lodz in Poland and its controversial president, Chaim Rumkowski.
(You can still buy such a coin, to look at while reading this story : http://www.ma-shops.com/shops/search....)

As ever, Primo Levi is to my mind the foremost writer of the first person account of the Holocaust. This series of short vignettes is a further contribution to the canon.

Sketches of characters and very human moments that the author witnessed as a prisoner in Auschwitz. He avoids sensationalising the horror and atrocities - though it lingers in the background like a heavy fog - but instead focuses on little moments of connection and exchange between people who are trying their best to survive.

Primo Levi has written extensively about the Holocaust and his experiences in Auschwitz; If this is a man, The True, If not now, when?, The Wrench, The Drowned & The Saved.. But this is the first book I've come across of his in all my reading life. I first read briefly about Primo Levi not long ago in Bob Carr's "My Reading Life", but was prompted to seek Levi out after a conversation with Shellie(Layers of Thought) on GR. Shellie being the first person I had spoken to who had read and recommended Levi to me. Moments of Reprieve was the only book of Levi's my college library held - so I borrowed it. The local library did not stock any.

Compared to other Holocaust books and memoirs I've read Moments of Reprieve does not shock me overly, perhaps because of previous exposure to similar material (although I hope that is not the case because that can breed apathy) - but I think perhaps because Levi's focus is primarily on individuals that he knew or knew of, in Auschwitz. Individuals who despite their collective circumstances at finding themselves in a concentration camp were still able to behave like decent human beings - with compassion and virtue.

The moments that Levi writes about here are not so terribly tragic (and he says that in the introduction)- those more sinister events he wrote about in earlier books. These moments are vignettes, small scenes, like dreams, although precisely clear and lucid. Fully fleshed out and filled with details, but still minor incidents captured like short films -moments in Levi's memories that stand out above the greater picture of horror that was Auschwitz; & that which was the Holocaust - that unspeakable evil that must be spoken about and remembered. Small snapshots of selflessness - these are what Primo documents; images that haunted him after the trauma. He writes about the people he met there who for one reason or another made a difference in the camps by their actions & kindness, so that life was bearable.

To bear witness, is a Jewish form of Remembrance of the Holocaust & for the memory of those lost in it. Moments Of Reprieve I believe was Primo's way of bearing witness for those individuals that he perhaps did not mention in earlier books.

It is said that Levi committed suicide in 1987 and had survivor's guilt and the latter may well be true. Trauma of any kind can haunt the human mind forever. Trauma of the camps, the unexplained horror, the loss of friends, family, home, society & even country: basically everything previously known was lost, the idea of it is of such magnitude as to be mind shattering. Even the loss of a loved one under most normal circumstances can be impossible for many people to recover from, so I personally cannot imagine how many of the survivor's mentally adjusted after the camps, even though I did grow up next door to a neighbour who was a survivor; Irma, it did take her many years to seemingly fully re-enter society again. One thing I know I will never forget the sight of the tattooed number on her arm. It's one thing to see photographs. It's another to be faced with reality.

Survivors, like Irma, and like Primo would have memories surface - the horror stricken and also the small mercies that are documented within this book. Memories are difficult things to control. You can turn them off. Shut them down. Freud called it repression. You disassociate. Many do this to survive. Primo faced them and wrote about his experiences. The trouble is with keeping the tap open you run the risk of being overwhelmed. Drowning you in the dark thoughts of memory, repeatedly.

While I'm no expert and postulate with little real evidence, it seems possible that Primo found it impossible to hold back the memories. This slim volume is a testament to Levi's belief in the rightness of virtue and that humans do have the capacity for goodness and purity even in the direst of circumstances, despite Levi himself saying that this was the exception not the rule in the camps.

The fates of many of the people in this book remains unknown. Sadly he didn't know everyone's real name, so he could not trace them to assuage his fears for them. Writing these stories would have seemed the decent thing to do, in fact the only remaining thing to do where there are no remains to be found - to bless, pray or cry over. These people had no funerals, and there were no rituals of closure for those remaining. Valerio, Leon Rappoport, Eddy, Tischler, Lilith, Bandi, Lomnitz, Joulty, Hirsch, Janek, Elias, Wolf, Grigo, Vladek, Otton, Ezra, Frau Mayer, Alberto, Mertens, Fraulein Dreschsel, Avrom, Joel Konig, Cesare, Lorenzo, and Chaim Rumkowski whose face appears on a coin from Litzmannstadt ghetto. I mention their names because I could not do justice to their individual stories. For that read Primo's book.

I will mention Rumkowski, the last story in the book. Rumkowski's story is a warning to us all - he was not a "bad" man, not a Nazi, but a Jew. He was subject to the pitfalls of power & seduced by it. He was not a "MONSTER" but intoxicated by Nazi promises, and sent many to their death by co-operation in running the ghetto in Litzmannstadt.

Primo writes; Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and money, as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the Lords of Death, and not far away the train is waiting.

That's a frighteningly sobering thought and one that should make one assess what side of the fence you are on at any given point in your life. While no one want to be on that death train, no one should morally want to be one of the lords who is in charge of the selection. Unlike Rumkowski we should be ever alert to how our actions effect other people.








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Library borrow. (the edition I have has a different cover image).

I have 24 hrs reprieve to finish this before really getting stuck into writing my end of term assignment. Lucky it's not a big book.

Written late in his life, n  Moments of Reprieven depicts an assorted cast of friends, companions, and adversaries from Primo Levi's time in the infamous Nazi concentration camp, each essay rendered deftly from Levi's Italian into English by Ruth Feldman.

Inarguably enriched by a reading of Levi's other memoirs -- especially n  Survival in Auschwitzn and n  The Reawakeningn -- "Moments of Reprieve" nevertheless stands on its own. With the distinct tone of long hindsight, what it lacks in immediacy, it more than makes up for in gently powerful insight and the crafted polish of decades of telling these often quietly brutal stories.

"[T]he man who remains true to himself in what he writes," Levi writes, "even if he is not brilliant our sympathy goes immediately out to him." Indeed.

(Quoted from n  #SmallBooksMonthn)

good...

3.5-4*