“However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed – they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you.”

This is such a stunning statement. Levi puts it into the mouth of a contemptuous SS officer speaking to a Jewish kapo some time in 1943. Reading it in the 1980s I was thinking well, at least Primo Levi and all the other great writers and historians have made sure that this greatest of horror stories has been documented and believed. Reading the same speech 20 years later, I'm not so sure. Now we have many people telling us well, you know, the Holocaust was just one amongst many - they happen all the time. Which is not so, and misunderstands, even from well-meaning motives. And tragically the Holocaust is inextricably bound into the DNA of the creation of the state of Israel, so that Israel is accused of using the Holocaust to prop up its own ultra-defensiveness and expansionism. (Remember the "Eleventh Commandment" : "Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories.")And so this infests the whole pro-Palestinian rhetoric which has a vile tendency to shade over towards Holocaust denial (our current but by no means only example being Ahmedinejad).

Just another grand example of the hideous knots us human beings love to tie whilst living on a beautiful little planet on the edge of a galaxy, itself one of millions of others, spinning in the glistering vastness of this universe.

How can I even think that I can pass judgement on this in a literary sense? It would be wrong.

Quite simply the rawest and most moving book I have ever - and probably will ever - read. Not just because of the personal experiences that Primo describes, but also for the inconceivable way in which he rises above the inconceivable evil.

The end of the books contains a list of the questions he was often asked after writing the book and his answer that he doesn't hate Germans because that is the root of the evil that he endured, is incredible. A truly great man.

An absolute must-read.

An Italian classic. The chronicle of almost two years of internment at Auschwitz between 1943 and 1945 by one of the very few survivors. Nothing to say, except maybe for this: it helps to have my memory refreshed about those horrors, as I believe it would help most people. It helps me feel even more grateful for all the blessings I have. I say a prayer for the souls of the victims of Auschwitz, and of any other Lager, and for all the people for whom every day is deep and constant suffering, because of illness or any other reason. A very important, useful book.

Difficult to write a review of such a great book; but a book which describes such horror and depicts the depths of inhumanity our species is capable of. everyone should read this book.

This book is one of the best books I’ve read so far, and every day you just want to get more and more involved with Levi. As he said, this book is not only a way of stating the atrocities committed by the nazis in the WWII but also to show us the life in the Lager and how to survive, or not, in it.
And the most interesting part is something that I’ve not seen so far in books about concentration camps… He tells us about how people, when faced with such difficulties, become animals.

First you start by losing your faith, your hopes, then you make it worse by having all this so long gone memories of your friends and family back in your home town, and then you understand you’ve nothing to lose, so you stop being a person and start acting by your primal instincts of survival. They all knew they were going to die, in a matter of time, but it was better to make their last time on earth the least unpleasant possible.

So, you start to robe the miserable people in the same condition as you, because you need to find a spoon to eat, or you need a better shirt… Or the smarter ones, that robe “the system” in all possible ways in order to get more bread or soup (the currency on the Lager).
This people were living in -20ºC with only a shirt, pants and wooden shoes, working and being starved to death in this conditions. Especially now I’m disturbed about this, since I’m living in Berlin, and some days you barely want to go out because it’s -18ºC and you freeze even with clothes on.

I don’t wanna talk anymore about this; I just have to say that this book profoundly touched me and even made me want to cry at times and it’s for sure, one of the best Auschwitz testimonials ever written

Каквото съм споделил за „Периодичната система“, важи дори в още по-голяма степен за „Нима това е човек/Примирието“. Майстор на словото е Примо Леви, тъкач на емоции, летописец на ужасното. Но все пак, въпреки жигосания завинаги лагерен номер на плътта му, който за две години замества качеството му на личност, скромният химик съумява да отсее островчетата на доброто и човечността сред океана от зло и антихуманност.

Книгата е и наръчник за нравствено оцеляване, докато изгарят душата ти, отнемайки човешкото ти достойнство – характерен похват в лагерните условия, описан великолепно и от Александър Солженицин. Във всяка отделна глава Примо Леви вплита едновременно изпитанията, пред които са изправени лагерниците, начините, чрез които успяват да ги преодолеят, за да достигнат до следващия ден, унижението, което изпитват, тихите проблясъци на добротата един към друг и точицата надежда, кръжаща из отровния въздух. И сред всичко горепосочено има все пак място и за хумор, ирония, нелепи ситуации и битово щастие от допълнителна порция водниста чорба или открита случайно потребна вещ например.

Който е харесал „Периодичната...“, да не се колебае да си потърси и „Нима това е човек“, която от емоционална гледна точка определено е по-завладяващата от двете по моему. Няма да споделям цитати от творбата, а единствено стихотворението, с което започва втората ѝ част:

Сънувахме в жестоките нощи
сънища плътни и устремени,
сънувани с душа и тяло:
да се завърнем, да се нахраним,
да разкажем
как кратко и глухо звучеше
в ранни зори командата:
“Wstavac!”
и замираха сърцата в гърдите ни.
Сега сме отново в дома си,
сит е коремът ни,
докрай разказахме всичко.
Време е. Скоро ще чуем отново
чуждата заповед
„Wstavac”.

P.S. Wstavac - стани (полски)

There are a lot of books, movies that cover the holocaust and life in the camps but I guess there aren't many, that cover what it was like returning home for people, after the liberation. And after reading The Truce, it now seems the return trip was nothing short of a challenge in itself, with the constant thought of "where to next...?"

In my understanding, there are usually two types of struggles - the first one in which, you voice your concerns, you retaliate, you even fight and try to take back what's rightfully yours. There's always this underlying notion that if you fight hard enough, if you mount a repression strong enough, and if you hit the enemy strategically enough, you will win.

And then there's the second type of struggle, in which, apart from not being able to do anything of the above, you're not allowed to speak, not allowed to have the basic freedom of will and not even allowed to ponder if anything is rightfully yours. The underlying notion in this case is that there could never be an end to this and you get up everyday with the thought that today might be your last.

While in the first, the hope of finally being able to win is what motivates most people to see it through till the end, what's peculiar about the 2nd type of survival is although you've two types of hopes to hang on to, they're mere abstract - you endure everything with the hope of seeing / meeting that one person after everything is over (incarnated by Viktor Frankl) or with the belief that no matter how worse, I WILL LIVE (personified by Primo Levi)!

Few excerpts from the book,

On Primo Levi's return to Munich after liberation, on the way to Italy.

“As I wandered around the streets of Munich, full of ruins, near the station where our train lay stranded once more, I felt I was moving among throngs of insolvent debtors, as if everybody owed me something, and refused to pay. I was among them, in the enemy camp, among the Herrenvolk; but the men were few, many were mutilated, many dressed in rags like us. I felt that everybody should interrogate us, read in our faces who we were, and listen to our tale in humility. But no one looked us in the eyes, no one accepted the challenge; they were deaf, blind and dumb, imprisoned in their ruins, as in a fortress of wilful ignorance still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still prisoners of their old tangle of pride and guilt. I found myself searching among them, among that anonymous crowd of sealed faces, for other faces, clearly stamped in my memory, many bearing a name: the name of someone who could not but know, remember, reply; who had commanded and obeyed, killed, humiliated, corrupted. A vain and foolish search; because not they, but others, the few just ones, would reply for them.”


On a response to a question about why there weren't any escapes / revolts from the camps.

“Fierce reprisals were employed to discourage escape attempts. Anyone caught trying to escape was publicly hanged – often after cruel torture – in the square where the roll-calls took place. When an escape was discovered, the friends of the fugitive were considered accomplices and were starved to death in cells; all the other prisoners were forced to remain standing for twenty-four hours, and sometimes the parents of the ‘guilty’ one were arrested and deported to camps. The SS guards who killed a prisoner in the course of an escape attempt were granted special leaves. As a result, it often happened that an SS guard fired at a prisoner who had no intention of trying to escape, solely in order to qualify for leave. ”


On the will to survive,

“After only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness completely disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) “but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth… We will all die, we are all about to die… Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson… This was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: 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 must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.”


On Lorenzo,

“An Italian civilian worker 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… His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.”

Vital reading for all humans.

Um retrato na primeira pessoa, nu e cru da passagem de Primo Levi por Auschwitz.

Nesta leitura não há um antes e um depois, nao há texto acessório, não há uma tentativa de embelezamento da escrita, somente um relato dos acontecimentos decorridos através dos olhos do autor.

Se isto é um homem...

One of the most important books of the 20th century.

This book is beyond any possible rating. It is, I believe, the book that says the definitive word about holocaust and about human cruelty. After this, nothing else can be said and no explanation can be given to what men can do to other men.

4.5/5

n  'Hier ist kein warum' (there is no why here)

It was a naïve hope, like all those that rest on too sharp a division between good and evil, between past and future, but it was on this that we were living.n

For reasons obvious to those who have been paying attention, I've been focusing more on Jewish people in my reading than I had been previously. This particular dearth in the past has everything to do with my continued fumbling through the biases of my appetites when it comes to the written word, as sweeping through and categorizing my shelves with the labels of 'people of color' and 'women' left no room for what antisemitism has wrought for millennia. The United States is no Europe, but when looking to its regional history, the concrete if seemingly disparate existences of a settler state, slavery (still legal if one is incarcerated), concentration camps (try 'immigration detention' on for size), the MS St. Louis, WASPS, Catholics, eugenics, and the El Paso 'disinfection' plant make for a potential that, in the century of the drone and the DNA databases, beats the best of both dystopia and science-fiction. There is no 'if' here. There is only a when.

n  In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of [humanity], and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.

He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, and the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible., But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?n

If humanity ever figures out a way in which to manipulate a brain into never forgetting without resort to externalized processors, it won't be without breaking most, if not all, of the other functions the average neurotypical takes for granted. As such, I don't understand how Levi remembered all that he did, in such detail, in such times. Research and cross collaboration were not forbidden once a semblance of home had been achieved once again, of course, but as the author stated many times, the vast majority of those who shared his story are dead, and not every survivor wishes to remember what they survived.

n  Now I do not know Polish, but I know how one says 'Jew' and how one says 'political'; and I soon realized that the translation of my account, although sympathetic, was not faithful to it. The lawyer described me to the public not as an Italian Jew, but as an Italian political prisoner.
I asked him why, amazed and almost offended. He replied, embarrassed: 'C'est mieux pour vous. La guerre n'est pas finie.'

[O]nly at first glance does it seem paradoxical that people who rebel are those who suffer the least. Even outside the camps, struggles are rarely waged by Lumpenproletariat. People in rags do not revolt.n

This isn't a handbook of how to combat what its pages contain in the future. Nor is it a model or an ultimate say on one of the many mass annihilation that have occurred since the time human beings evolved enough to segregate themselves and define the other as a worthy target of extermination. Primo Levi himself says he survived by chance, and so these writings, much as all writings are in the days of academic stagnation and capitalistic popularity contests (it took If This Is a Man eleven years and a republication to become what it is recognized as today), are beholden to chance, if perhaps in higher than average measure when the journey of the author is taken into account. The fact that he chose to target specific mythologies in his afterword (examples being the rise of the angry masses and the lack of courage of Jewish people) arose from even more chance, wherein audiences asked questions about certain topics and Levi responded to a certain few of those questions. Put together, you don't get the finale of the trilogy The Drowned and the Saved, or Levi watching the German translation and publication like a hawk, or his final years before he passed. What you get is a text written before decades of simplification into a trope wiped away the fact that the United States waging war against the Nazis was birthed out of chance, not a sizable difference in ideologies. Simply put, the clues are all there. All that is needed is the murder.

n  They were "charismatic leaders"; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the soundness of the things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practiced. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannahs and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.n

The knocked off half star is for the characterization of various evils and uncanny survival mechanisms as 'madness'. You can get mad at me for it right after you look up "the elimination of the incurably ill", "T-4", Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Muenster, and euthanasia of disabled people up until the present day. In any case, it is not impossible to be both Jewish and disabled. Writings that reject such that occurred during the body of the memoirs, sunk into the present as they are, would have been understandable. Re-occurrences as a final conclusion in the afterword, written long after the diverse background of those condemned to the crematories had been revealed, are dangerously obtuse. As such, I recommend this book to those who are willing to learn from history, but do not equate it to swallowing any particularly history whole.

n  All the same I would not want my abstaining from explicit judgment to be confused with an indiscriminate pardon. No, I have not forgiven any of the culprits, nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them, unless he has shown (with deeds, not words, and not too long afterward) that he has become conscious of the crimes and errors of Italian and foreign Fascism and is determined to condemn them, uproot them, from his conscience and from that of others. Only in this case am I, a non-Christian, prepared to follow the Jewish and Christian precept of forgiving my enemy, because an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.n