Primo Levi

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.