If This Is a Man by Primo Levi

First published:Se questo e un uomo, 1947 (English translation, 1959; revised as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, 1961)

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1943-1945

Locale: Auschwitz

Principal Personages:

• Primo Levi, a young Jewish man imprisoned at Auschwitz
• Jean, ,
• Iss Clausner, ,
• Zero Eighteen, ,
• Schepschel, ,
• Alfred L., ,
• Elias Lindzin, ,
• Henri, and
• Steinlauf, several of his fellow prisoners
• Lorenzo, an Italian worker at the camp who helps Levi to survive

Form and Content

Beneath the Roman pavement are Jewish as well as Christian catacombs, for Jews have lived in Italy as long as anyone else. Primo Levi’s own family came to that country in 1500 and assimilated with their non-Jewish neighbors. Even Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws of 1938 changed little for Levi. Although he was legally barred from attending college, he took his degree in chemistry in 1941. Theoretically unemployable because of his “race,” he was working as a chemist in Milan in 1943 when Mussolini’s government fell and was succeeded by a Nazi-installed regime.

The twenty-four-year-old Levi then fled to the mountains, hoping to join a guerrilla force known as Giustizia e Liberta (justice and liberty) fighting against the Germans. He and the small group with him were instead betrayed and captured by three Fascist militia companies on December 13, 1943. If This Is a Man, the first volume in what proved to be a trilogy of autobiographical works, recounts what happened to Levi during the next thirteen months.

To explain his presence in the mountains, Levi thought it safer to claim that he was hiding because of his religion rather than because of his politics; had he been dealing with only his fellow Italians, his decision would have been correct. Only Denmark, which preserved all of its Jewish population, had a better record of protecting Jews from the Nazis; of the 36,000 Jews who lived in Nazi-occupied Italy, 80 percent survived, largely because of the aid of non-Jews. In the event, Levi’s confession proved a near-fatal mistake. He was turned over to the German Schutzstaffeln (SS) and sent by train, along with some six hundred of his coreligionists, to Auschwitz. Only about twenty of them survived the war.

The first chapter, “The Journey,” provides the prologue that brings Levi to the gates of the concentration camp. The next fifteen describe the life, or rather the death-in-life, within it. Although Levi’s memoir proceeds chronologically, it is not a journal or diary. Instead, each chapter focuses on a theme or particular event. Sometimes it will cover a month, sometimes a day, perhaps only an hour’s walk. Throughout, Levi interjects philosophical reflections. Only the final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days,” which recounts the German evacuation and Russian liberation of the camp, breaks this pattern, just as the pattern of camp life itself has been broken, to provide a daily account of events.

The book is short, the writing elegantly restrained. As The Times Literary Supplement of April 15, 1960, observed, “There are no horror stories” here, no tales of beatings or other tortures, no condemnation of the Germans—to indict a nation would be to become like the Nazis—no rancor, indeed, hardly any emotion at all. Such dispassion is the more surprising since Levi wrote the book shortly after returning to Italy and poured out his recollections as they came to him. Before submitting the manuscript for publication, though, he organized and revised his material, taking as his model the weekly report of a factory. As he told Philip Roth in an interview published in The New York Times Book Review (October 12, 1986), he wanted his account to be “precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody.” One of his recurring nightmares was of telling his story and not being understood or believed; thus, he chose understatement and clinical detachment. Nor does he emphasize the uniquely Jewish aspect of his experience. The characters he introduces are simply people, for the tragedy he describes is universal.

Critical Context

In 1963 George Steiner observed that silence is the only possible response to the Holocaust because “the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.” Levi makes a similar point when he comments that no words can describe his experience. Terms such as “hunger,” “fear,” and “pain” were created “by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes.” Only a new, harsher language

could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

Many who survived the concentration camps chose this path of silence, but Levi was not among them. As the patient in psychotherapy must purge his memory by bringing dark secrets to light, so Levi had a psychological need to tell his story. Like the Ancient Mariner he interrupted those who wanted to go to the wedding, who wanted to get on with life, to tell his tale of death. The writing also gave purpose to his existence; no longer was he engaged in the meaningless labor of Auschwitz. In writing he found work that could truly make him free.

If This Is a Man, like all other Holocaust literature, also represents a political act. As Steinlauf told Levi, each person at Auschwitz had a moral obligation to remain alive so that he could testify to the world about what had occurred and thus prevent the recurrence of the horror. Combining careful observation and philosophical insight with poetic elegance and imagination, Levi’s book recounts the fall of mankind as a warning for future generations.

Levi’s subsequent success as a writer and scientist suggested that the healing begun when the Germans abandoned the camp had been complete, that here was the story of man’s rise as well as his fall. Nevertheless, as the Belgian philosopher Jean Amery, a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz who took his own life in 1978, commented,

He who has been tortured remains tortured. . . . He who has suffered torment can no longer find his place in the world. Faith in humanity—cracked by the first slap across the face, then demolished by torture—can never be recovered.

Levi began to have nightmares about his experiences in the camp, and on April 11, 1987, he committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell. Just as the radioactivity from the atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to kill, so the horrors of Auschwitz still breed a hectic in the blood, still claim their victims.

Bibliography

Bailey, Paul. “Saving the Scaffolding,” in New Statesman. LXXXII (August 20, 1971), pp. 245-246.

Denby, David. “The Humanist and the Holocaust: The Poised Art of Primo Levi,” in The New Republic. CXCV (July 28, 1986), pp. 27-33.

Eberstadt, Fernanda. “Reading Primo Levi,” in Commentary. LXXX (October, 1985), pp. 41-47.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of Italian Jews, 1924-1974, 1983.

Motola, Gabriel. “Primo Levi: The Auschwitz Experience,” in Southwest Review. LXXII (Spring, 1987), pp. 258-269.

Sodi, Risa. “An Interview with Primo Levi,” in Partisan Review. LIV (Summer, 1987), pp. 355-366.

Sodi, Risa. “Primo Levi: A Last Talk,” in Present Tense. XV (May/June, 1988), p. 40.