Preface to Moments of Reprieve1

Writing and publishing If This Is a Man and The Truce marked a goal in my life as a writer. For many years afterward, I had the impression that I had fulfilled an obligation, in fact the only obligation I had that felt clearly defined. In Auschwitz, and on the long journey of return, I had suffered and seen things that not only seemed important for myself but demanded imperiously to be told. I had told them, I had borne witness; I was a chemist, I had a profession that gave me a living and occupied me thoroughly, and I did not feel the need to write anything else.

It didn’t turn out that way. As the years passed, the job of writing made room for itself beside my professional activity, and eventually replaced it; at the same time I realized that my experience of Auschwitz was far from being used up. I had described its fundamental features, which today fall within the realm of history, in my first two books, but a crowd of details continued to surface in my memory, and I didn’t want them to fade away. In particular, a large number of human figures stood out against that tragic background: friends, traveling companions, even adversaries, who, in their turn, asked to survive, to enjoy the ambiguous perpetuity of literary characters. It wasn’t the anonymous mass of the shipwrecked, without voice and without face, but the few, the different, those in whom (if only for a moment) I had perceived the will and capacity to react, that is, a rudiment of virtue.

In these stories, written in different periods and on different occasions, and not, certainly, with any plan, it seems to me that precisely this common feature emerges. Each story centers on a single character, and he is never the object of persecution, the predestined victim, the prostrate man—the one to whom I dedicated my first book, and of whom I wondered obsessively whether “he was still a man.” The protagonists here are “men” beyond any doubt, even if that virtue, the quality that allows them to survive and makes them exceptional, isn’t always one of those which ordinary morality approves of. Bandi, my “disciple,” draws strength from the holy joy of believers, Wolf from music, Grigo from love and superstition, Tischler from a patrimony of legends; but Cesare from a cunning without scruples, Rumkowski from a craving for power, Rappoport from a feral vitality.

Rereading them, I notice another peculiarity: the settings, which I chose instinctively, are almost never tragic. They are bizarre, marginal: moments of reprieve, in which the identity that has been suppressed regains its features for a moment.

The reader may be surprised at this recovered lode, thirty or forty years after the events narrated here. Well, it has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two sharply defined groups: those who repress their past wholly, and those in whom the memory of the offense endures, as if carved in stone, dominating all other experiences, before or after. Now, not by choice but by nature, I belong to the second group. Of my two years of life outside the law I have forgotten nothing. With no deliberate effort, memory continues to retrieve facts, faces, words, sensations: as if at that time my mind had been in a state of exalted receptivity, in which no detail was lost. I remember, for example, the way a tape recorder or a parrot might, entire sentences in languages that I didn’t know then, and do not know today. A few years ago I encountered, after thirty-five years, a fellow prisoner with whom I hadn’t had any special friendship, and I recognized him immediately in the midst of a crowd of unknown faces, although his face was much changed. Even now, odors from “down there” make me jump. Today it seems evident that the attention I had then, turned to the world and to the human beings around me, was not only a symptom but also an important factor in my spiritual and physical salvation.

It’s possible that the distance in time has increased the tendency to fill out the facts, to embellish: this tendency, or temptation, is an integral part of writing, and without it one writes not stories but reports. Nevertheless, the episodes on which I have constructed these stories really happened, and their protagonists existed, even though, for obvious reasons, I have frequently changed their names.

In Moments of Reprieve (New York: Summit Books, 1986)

1. The first section of Levi’s collection Lilith and Other Stories was published separately in English under the title Moments of Reprieve.