Survival in Auschwitz : "You Who Live Safe"

Following from previous discussions of “bearing witness,” I started Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir wondering about the drive to survie extreme circumstances in order to recount them, i.e. to bear witness. In an early section of the book Levi even mentions a defiant impulse to survive, that one “must survive, to tell the story, to bear witness” (41). Again, we have a writer wishing to portray something others might not want the world to see, just as Balkian wanted to summon the voices of the Armenian dead in the face of Turkish denial, and as Orwell outlined an eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War to complicate the simplified reports of Eastern and Western propagandists. 

What I find interesting in this case is the sense that Levi lays a burden of witnessing on his audience, at least in the poem that precedes the memoir. The poem seems to dare readers to ignore Levi’s account, even going so far as to invoke a curse on those willing to forget the events he had to live through. Before even beginning his story, Levi pre-emptively attacks any attempts to deny these truths—whether they are straightforward denials or the mind’s impulse to balk at horrific events. It seems that all the writers before have trusted us to read and consider their testimonies, but Levi believes the stakes are higher. It’s as though, with this poem, he challenges us not simply to read (and then forget) this memoir but to absorb and repeat it. I think it is interesting that this elevates the importance and the responsibility of the reader when it comes to discussing and understanding events as dark and tangled as this.