Primo Levi

As I read Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, I kept considering the tone of the writing, particularly after the video we watched in class last week that commented on his style and attributed it to his chemistry background. What amazes me is how beautiful the language of this book actually is. I'm reminded a bit of Lifton's book--how he is primarily an academic but his writing doesn't feel that way. We also talked in class last week about what makes "good writing" or "lyrical writing." I think (as Jen's blog title suggests), that Levi's language is beautiful even in its depiction of an "ugly world." Aside from perhaps being beautiful or pleasant, I think what makes writing good is its ability to produce an experience for the reader that engages their senses, though imagined. Being able to not only visualize the conditions in one's mind, but to smell, taste, hear, and feel the conditions. And to also experience an emotional reaction. Many of our blog posts touch on the idea of feeling disbelief in the Holocaust, in the sense that the conditions seem unimaginable and we wonder how this could really happen. Yet Primo Levi forces us to imagine it by holding nothing back in his details of the camp. And in this way, the tone does not necessarily sound hopeful but rather matter-of-fact and with a sense of urgency to reveal what he has witnessed. (I found his dream of telling his story to indifferent listeners to be quite significant to how he [and other survivors] must have felt. That fear of not being able to tell the story seems to feed the urgency of the book itself.) He also speaks to this need to tell the story in the preface: "The need to tell our story to 'the rest,' to make 'the rest' participate in it, had taken on for us, the character of an immediate and violent impulse....This book has been written to satisfy this need...as an interior liberation" (9).

After reading the preface, I moved forward with Levi's notion that this book's purpose is "to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind" (9). The key to survival in the camp, it turns out, is highly dependent on strength of mind.

A critical idea is of maintaining one's humanity--to try as hard as possible to remain men and not to become "beasts." On page 41, he explains, "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." Chapter 9 ("The Drowned and the Saved") proved to be a significant chapter in this distinction. At the beginning of the chapter, Levi writes, "We would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment."

On page 90, Levi explains what it means to be one of "the drowned"--a Muselmanner. "To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story." They "form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence...One hesitates to call them living: one hesistates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand."

To survive, in contrast, requires something much different: "Survival without renunciation of any part of one's own moral world was conceded only to very few superior individuals." But for the rest, they must rely on that renunciation. Levi tells us Henri's three methods to escape extermination: organization, pity, and theft.

I'll end with a quote from Chapter 14 "Kraus": "Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live" (131).