If This Is a Man [Survival in Auschwitz]
(A work of nonfiction)
— 1947, 1958 —
New York: W. W. Norton, 2015; published in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1 translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf with author’s appendix and translator’s afterword; 165 pages; first published in 1947 and reissued in 1958 in Italian as Se questo è un uomo; first translated into English in 1959 as If This Is a Man; reissued in English as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf with “A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth”
FIRST LINES
I was captured by the Fascist Militia on December 13, 1943. I was twenty-four, with little common sense, no experience and a definite tendency—encouraged by the routines of segregation forced on me during the previous four years by the racial laws—to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships. I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.
PLOT SUMMARY
The story is agonizingly simple. A young chemist, an “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” is arrested in December 1943 by Italian Fascists and taken to Campo di Fossoli, near Modena in the north of Italy. Established by the Italians as a prisoner of war camp, it has come to serve as a detention camp for Jews and other political prisoners. Levi is one of them.
After a brief internment there, Levi and hundreds of other Italian Jews are transported to Auschwitz. The journey takes four days and four nights before the train is unloaded and the deportees separated:
In less than ten minutes all the able-bodied men had been gathered in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old people, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, we know that in that rapid and summary choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy only ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the camps, respectively, of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was alive two days later.
In stunning prose, sprinkled with dark humor, Levi offers an unsparing account of his ten months spent doing hard, dangerous labor in the hell of Auschwitz. Like so much Holocaust literature, the story is harrowing. The fact of his or anyone’s else’s survival defies reason.
But survive he did. After months of living through degradation, disease, and death, Levi became very ill early in 1945 and was sent to the camp infirmary with scarlet fever. As the Soviet army approached, the Germans abandoned the camp. Levi describes his liberation: “The camp was silent. Other starving specters wandered around like us, exploring: beards unkempt, eyes hollow, limbs skeletal and yellowish in tattered garments.”
Levi’s final entry comes on the day the Russians arrive on January 27, 1945. He and a companion had just carried out the corpse of a fellow inmate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: PRIMO LEVI
Primo Levi was born on July 31, 1919, in Turin to a family of Piedmontese Jews, whose ancestors had escaped the Spanish Inquisition. Except for his time in the camps, he would live and die in the family house where he was born.
By the time Levi went to elementary school and then Hebrew school, Mussolini had come to power and firmly established his Fascist dictatorship. When Levi enrolled in the University of Turin as a chemistry student in 1937, it was just before Italy adopted an anti-Semitic racial code modeled on Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. Jewish students like Levi were allowed to remain in the university, while new Jewish students were no longer admitted. Levi graduated with honors in 1941, but his diploma also noted he was “of the Jewish race.”
By then, Italy was at war, allied with Hitler’s Germany. Despite his religious heritage, Levi was able to find work as a chemist in Turin and then in Milan with a Swiss drug company. But wartime Italy was divided between Fascists fighting with Nazi Germany and anti-Fascist forces who had made a treaty with the U.S. and British allies. Late in 1942, without training, Levi and some friends joined a group of partisans who were battling the Fascists and Nazis. On a fateful night in December 1943, Levi’s luck ran out. He was captured and, after admitting to being Jewish, was detained and ultimately deported to Auschwitz.
Sick and emaciated when the Soviet army liberated the camp in late January 1945, he made his way circuitously back to Italy, starting in Russia and reaching Turin in October 1945. Finding work in a paint factory, Levi began writing a description of his camp experience. Rejected by Natalia Ginzburg (see The Dry Heart), then an editor with the prominent publisher Einaudi, Levi’s first version of his account was published in 1947 by a small press and went out of print. In 1958, the book was picked up, revised, and republished in a new edition by Einaudi, and it was translated into English the following year as If This Is a Man. It attracted little attention in the United States.
While working as a chemist, Levi began a sequel, recounting his return to Italy from Russia. Published in 1963 in Italy as La tregua (The Truce) and later in America as The Reawakening, it preceded Levi’s turn to fiction. In 1966, under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila, he published a group of Kafkaesque science fiction short stories collected in Storie naturali (Natural Histories).
After retiring from full-time work as a chemist in 1975, Levi wrote another semiautobiographical work, Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), tracing his life from childhood, with each chapter connected to one of the chemical elements. It became his most celebrated work and revived interest in his Auschwitz memoir.
He followed with a 1978 novel, La chiave a stella (The Wrench, also published in the United States as The Monkey Wrench), winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. With the American publication of The Periodic Table in 1984, Levi achieved a degree of critical recognition and success he had been missing in the United States.
During the forty years following his Auschwitz experience, Levi wrote memoirs and autobiographies, story collections, and novels. Internationally esteemed, he would be called on to testify in the trials of Auschwitz criminals. In time, he became a major voice in countering Holocaust denialism.
Primo Levi took his own life—it is generally agreed—at the age of sixty-seven on April 11, 1987, though some who knew him have argued his death was an accident. Suffering from severe depression, he died in a fall from the upper floor of a marble staircase in the Turin home where he was born.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
In the extensive and significant world of Holocaust literature—both fictional works and nonfiction—If This Is a Man is the most profound work I have yet encountered. While it is somewhat curious to praise a memoir by saying it reads like a great novel, that is the case with Levi’s book. Like a great fictional account of a human struggle against unthinkable odds, it is a brutal, chilling, yet ultimately triumphant examination of the human capacity for both evil and survival.
Some very notable Holocaust memoirs have been faulted for their author’s selective memory or the interference of an editor. Some critics have also said that no written account—whether memoir or fiction—can make “art” of Auschwitz.
Levi may have anticipated such critiques in his preface to If This Is a Man. “The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister signal of danger,” Levi wrote. He continues:
The need to tell our story to “others,” to make “others” share it, took on for us, before the liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with other elementary needs. The book was written to satisfy that need.
And that is why you should read it.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The obvious next step is to read The Truce, Levi’s sequel describing his harrowing liberation from Auschwitz and a nine-month trek through Russia and Eastern Europe back to Italy. Near its conclusion, Levi writes, “But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my gaze fixed on the ground, as if to look for something to eat or put in my pocket quickly and sell for bread; and a dream filled with fear has not ceased to visit me, at intervals now close, now rare.”
The series of stories collected in The Periodic Table are autobiographical. But they are told in an imaginative and unique style that combines the chemist’s precision with the lyricism of a gifted writer, which Levi was.
All of Levi’s writings, spanning decades, were edited by the noted translator Ann Goldstein and collected in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, published in 2015. In her introduction to the set, novelist Toni Morrison wrote:
For this articulate survivor, individual identity is supreme; efforts to drown identity inevitably become futile. He refuses to place cruel and witless slaughter on a pedestal of fascination or to locate in it any serious meaning…. Time and time again we are moved by his narratives of how men refuse erasure.