Our generation has had the unenviable fate to live through events of historical importance. I don’t mean to say that afterward nothing more happened in the world: natural catastrophes and collective man-made tragedies have followed everywhere. Yet, in spite of the omens, nothing has happened in Europe that compares to the Second World War. Therefore, each one of us is a witness, whether he likes it or not; and the research carried out by the Piedmont Region regarding the memories of the survivors of deportation is justified and timely, since the deportation, owing to its extent and the number of its victims, is emerging as an event that is unique, at least until now, in human history.
I was asked to participate in my double capacity as a witness and as a writer. I am honored and, at the same time, burdened by a responsibility. A book is read; it may or may not entertain, it may or may not educate, it may or may not be remembered or read again. As someone who wrote about the deportation, this is not enough for me. Since the publication of my first book, If This Is a Man, I have hoped that my writings, even though they are signed by me, would be read as collective works, as a voice representing other voices. More than that: that they would be an opening, a bridge between us and our readers, especially young ones. It is soothing for us former deportees to sit at the same table and tell one another about our by now distant ordeals, but this serves little purpose. As long as we live, it’s our duty to talk, of course, but to talk to others, to those who weren’t born yet, so that they know “how far man can fall.”
Therefore, it’s no accident that a good part of my current work consists of a sort of uninterrupted dialogue with my readers. I receive many letters full of “whys?” and requests for interviews; and above all I am asked, especially by young people, two fundamental questions: How could the horror of the Lagers happen? Will it happen again?
I don’t believe in prophets, in people who can read the future; those who have passed themselves off as such have, so far, failed miserably, often becoming ridiculous. Even less do I see myself as a prophet, or as a legitimate interpreter of recent history. However, these two questions are so pressing that I felt obliged to attempt an answer, or, rather, a cluster of answers, those which were distributed on the occasion of this conference. Some answers are addressed to Italian, American, and British readers; other, I believe more interesting answers are the outcome of an intricate network of correspondence that for many years put me in contact with the German readers of If This Is a Man. These are the voices of the children and grandchildren of those who were responsible for what happened or who allowed it to happen or who didn’t care to learn about it. There are also here the voices of different Germans, who did what they could, whether little or much, to oppose the crime their country was committing. I thought it right to give space to both groups.
We survivors are witnesses, and every witness is obliged (in part by law) to give complete and truthful answers. In our case, however, this is also a moral duty, as our ranks, always small, are thinning. I tried to fulfill this duty with my recent book, The Drowned and the Saved, which some of you may have read and which will soon be translated into English and German. This book, too—which consists of questions about deportation (not only by the Nazis) and of tentative answers—is part of my dialogue with readers, which by now has lasted more than forty years; I see it as very much in tune with this meeting. I hope readers will find that the book accomplishes the same purpose as the meeting: that it makes a modest contribution toward an understanding of the history of our time, whose violence is the child of the violence that we fortuitously survived.
In 1976 Levi added an appendix to If This Is a Man, in which he answered the questions that were most frequently asked by students he met in the schools and by other readers of the book. For an American edition of Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) and The Reawakening (The Truce) (published by Summit Books in 1986), he wrote this text, which was then added as an introduction to the appendix. The Italian version appeared in the anthology Storia vissuta (Living History) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988).