Se questo è un uomo/La Tregua
"It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is."
Finally got down to reading these books after many years- taking some stern advice from the title of one of Levi's other titles 'If not now when?'
His memoirs begin shortly after the collapse of Mussolini's regime, and opens with Levi trying to contact a partisan group in the north of Italy as a very inexperienced young man. "I was twenty-four with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency ... to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships." He is captured shortly after joining the partisans in December 1943 and sent to Auschwitz.
This memoir then tells the tale of Levi working as a slave labourer at a company making synthetic rubber for the Nazi war economy. Through a variety of accidents, a friendship with a non-Jewish guest working and by happening to know that he could safely eat cotton wool and drink paraffin (because he was a trained Chemist) he is spared the gas chamber. Almost every other character is dead by the end of the book, and the closing pages of the festering snowfields of Auschwitz after the Nazi's flee are probably the most horrifying passages of writing that I have ever read.
Liberated by the Soviets in January 1945, its sequel, The Truce, tells of Levi's hungry wanderings in war-torn eastern Europe in Poland, Belorussia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania, and really opened my eyes to how little the survivors of the war were attended to at all. Levi eventually returns home on the last pages of his account after a year of trying to get there, but he has a continual nightmare in which his present life turns out to be a mere illusion and he wakes up with Auschwitz's morning call: "Wstawac" (get up).
As usual I hesitate to actually write what I think in any detail about these excellent books , but hey, I can sure post a link to one here.
1 comment:
Thanks - your review prompted me to actually get round to reading Levi at last - his inspiring humanism in the face of utter barbarism shines throughout his writing. I was also quite impressed by the afterword/'frequently asked questions' that was in my edition - in which he dealt well with the quite common argument that there was no difference between the Stalinist GULAGs and the Nazi Holocaust. Levi insists that while both were barbaric there were different social logics involved with each and demonstrates that the Nazis 'final solution' still stands as the very greatest evil experienced in humanity's history so far.
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