I still have the paperback copy of his
IF THIS IS A MAN – with its red covers,
and an illustration on the front
of a menacing SS Officer
holding a horse whip – bought in Woolworths
more than sixty years ago. The clear,
precise, and almost dispassionate
prose, the self-deprecatory honesty,
the compassion, the scientific
pragmatism, the determination
to bear witness held me then, and still.
The title of the penultimate chapter
of IF THIS IS MAN is ‘The Last One’.
One evening, towards the end of December
1944, after the usual
day of forced labour, the inmates were not sent
to their huts but to the square used for roll call,
surrounded by guards with un-muzzled dogs.
It was lit by searchlights that illuminated
their wretchedness, and the scaffold before which
they stood in silent, shivering ranks to watch
an execution – that probably would be
the last before the Red Army arrived
in a matter of weeks. One of the ovens
had been blown up. The culprit was to be hanged.
As the noose was placed around his neck he shouted,
“Kameradan, ich bin der Letzte!”
‘I wish I could say that from the midst of us,
an abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur,
a sign of assent. But nothing happened…’
After his release from Auschwitz it was
nine months before he got home to Turin
in October 1945.
That December – starting with the last chapter –
he began drafting IF THIS IS A MAN.
In adulthood I have acquired few heroes.
Primo Levi was one – the survival of
intellect, creativity, humour,
and humanity. When I first heard
the announcement on the evening news
of his death by suicide I felt
disappointed – and then ashamed
to have been so facile, so censorious,
so proprietary, as if my respect
and his fame meant his life belonged to me.
In time doubts were raised about the how and why
of his death: had he jumped – or had he fallen
down the stairwell of his Turin apartment block;
had the horrors of Auschwitz finally
overwhelmed him, or was it a case
of a pre-occupied man in his late
sixties simply tripping? The doubts persist.
The evidence is circumstantial.
Ten minutes or so before he fell,
Levi – a secular Jew, with a troubled,
ambiguous attitude not to
the concept but the state of Israel:
its violent incursions into Lebanon,
for example, its appropriation
of the Shoah – had, for the first time ever,
spoken on the phone with the Chief Rabbi in Rome.
He explained that he and his wife looked after
her mother and his, who was sick with cancer
and whom he could not bear to look at.
She resembled the dying in Auschwitz.
Though he was someone for whom carefully chosen
words – poetry, memoirs, essays, prose fiction –
were all that might somehow baffle chaos
briefly, he left no note.
Pages:
By David Selzer