Survival in Auschwitz

In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight invalids did not lose a syllable, even those who did not understand French. Only Somogyi implacably confirmed his dedication to death.

26 January. We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist.

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune from it, and we owe each other mutual gratitude. This is why my friendship with Charles will prove lasting.

But thousands of feet above us, in the gaps in the grey clouds, the complicated miracles of aerial duels began. Above us, bare, helpless and unarmed, men of our time sought reciprocal death with the most refined of instruments. A movement of a finger could cause the destruction of the entire camp, could annihilate thousands of men; while the sum total of all our efforts and exertions would not be sufficient to prolong by one minute the life of even one of us.

The saraband stopped at night and the room was once again filled with Somogyi’s monologue.

In full darkness I found myself suddenly awake. ‘L’pauv’-vieux’ was silent; he had finished. With the last gasp of life, he had thrown himself to the ground: I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his shoulders, of his head.

‘La mort I’a chasse de son lit,’ Arthur defined it.

We certainly could not carry him out during the night. There was nothing for it but to go back to sleep again.

27 January. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful wreck of skin and bones, the Somogyi thing.

There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash ourselves, so that we dare not touch him until we have cooked and eaten. And besides: ‘…rien de si degoutant que les debordements,’ said Charles justly; the latrine had to be emptied. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.

The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Somogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher on the grey snow.

Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having a beret.

Of the eleven of the Infektionsabteilung Somogyi was the only one to die in the ten days. Sertelet, Cagnolati, Towarowski, Lakmaker and Dorget (I have not spoken of him so far; he was a French industrialist who, after an operation for peritonitis, fell ill of nasal diphtheria) died some weeks later in the temporary Russian hospital of Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice, I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has reached, his family happily and Charles has taken up his teacher’s profession again; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day.

A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth

On the September Friday in 1986 that I arrived in Turin—to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before — I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist and, afterward, until retirement, as manager. Altogether the company employs fifty people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled laborers on the floor of the plant. The production machinery, the row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes—all of it is encompassed in four or five acres seven miles from Turin. The machines that are drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never distressingly loud, the yard’s acrid odor—the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two years after his retirement—is by no means disgusting, and the thirty-yard dumpster loaded to the brim with the black sludgy residue of the antipolluting process isn’t particularly unsightly. It is hardly the world’s ugliest industrial environment, but along way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmark of Levi’s autobiographical narratives.

However far from the spirit of the prose, the factory is nonetheless a place clearly close to his heart; taking in what I could of the noise, the stink, the mosaic of pipes and vats and tanks and dials, I remembered Faussone, the skilled rigger in The Monkeys Wrench, saying to Levi, who calls Faussone “my alter ego”: “I have to tell you, being around a work site is something I enjoy.”

As we walked through the open yard to the laboratory, a simply designed two-story building constructed during Levi’s managerial days, he told me: “I have been cut off from the factory for twelve years. This will be an adventure for me.” He said he believed that nearly everybody once working with him was now retired or dead, and, indeed, those few still there whom he ran into seemed to strike him as specters. “It’s another ghost,” he whispered to me, after someone from the central office that had once been his had emerged to welcome him back. On our way to the section of the laboratory where raw materials are scrutinized before moving to production, I asked Levi if he could identify the chemical aroma faintly permeating the corridor: it smelled like a hospital corridor. Just fractionally he raised his head and exposed his nostrils to the air. With a smile he told me: “I understand and can analyze it like a dog.”

He seemed to me inwardly animated more in the manner of some quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence. Levi is small and slight, though not so delicately built as his unassuming demeanor makes him at first appear, and seemingly as nimble as he must have been at ten. In his body, as in his face, you see—as you don’t in most men—the face and the body of the boy that he was. The alertness is nearly palpable, keenness trembling within like his pilot light.

It is probably not as surprising as one might initially think to find that writers divide like the rest of mankind into two categories: those who listen to you and those who don’t. Levi listens, and with his entire face, a precisely modeled face that, tipped with its white chin beard, looks at sixty-seven both youthfully Pan-like but professorial as well, the face of irrepressible curiosity and of the esteemed dottore. I can believe Faussone when he says to Primo Levi early in The Monkey’s Wrench: “You’re quite a guy, making me tell these stories that, except for you, I’ve never told anybody.” It’s no wonder that people are always telling him things and that everything is recorded faithfully before it is even written down: when listening he is as focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall.

In a large, substantial-looking apartment house built a few years before he was bom—indeed the house where he was born, for formerly this was the home of his parents—Levi lives with his wife, Lucia; except for his year in Auschwitz and the adventurous months immediately after his liberation, he has lived in this same apartment all his life. The building, whose bourgeois solidity has begun slightly to give way to time, is on a wide boulevard of apartment buildings that struck me as the Northern Italian counterpart to Manhattan’s West End Avenue: a steady stream of auto and bus traffic, trolley cars speeding by on their tracks, but also a column of big chestnut trees stretching all along the narrow islands at either side of the street, and the green hills bordering the city visible from the intersection. The famous arcades at the commercial heart of the city are an unswerving fifteen-minute walk straight through what Levi has called “the obsessive Turin geometry.”

The Levis’ large apartment is shared, as it has been since the couple met and married after the war, with Primo Levi’s mother. She is ninety-one. Levi’s ninety-five-year-old mother-in-law lives not far away, in the apartment immediately next door lives his twenty-eight-year-old son, a physicist, and a few streets farther on is his thirty- eight-year-old daughter, a botanist. I don’t personally know of another contemporary writer who has voluntarily remained, over so many decades, intimately entangled and in such direct, unbroken contact with his immediate family, his birthplace, his region, the world of his forebears, and, particularly, the local working environment, which,