Table of Contents Excerpt Rave and Reviews. About The Book. I was twenty-four, with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency -- encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for 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. It had been by no means easy to flee into the mountains and to help set up what, both in my opinion and in that of friends little more experienced than myself, should have become a partisan band affiliated with the Resistance movement Justice and Liberty. Contacts, arms, money and the experience needed to acquire them were all missing.
We lacked capable men, and instead we were swamped by a deluge of outcasts, in good or bad faith, who came from the plain in search of a non-existent military or political organization, of arms, or merely of protection, a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes. At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly.
So that I can only consider the following sequence of events justified. Three Fascist Militia companies, which had set out in the night to surprise a much more powerful and dangerous band than ours, broke into our refuge one spectral snowy dawn and took me down to the valley as a suspect person. During the interrogations that followed, I preferred to admit my status of 'Italian citizen of Jewish race'.
I felt that otherwise I would be unable to justify my presence in places too secluded even for an evacuee; while I believed wrongly as was subsequently seen that the admission of my political activity would have meant torture and certain death. As a Jew, I was sent to Fossoli, near Modena, where a vast detention camp, originally meant for English and American prisoners-of-war, collected all the numerous categories of people not approved of by the new-born Fascist Republic.
At the moment of my arrival, that is, at the end of January , there were about one hundred and fifty Italian Jews in the camp, but within a few weeks their number rose to over six hundred. For the most part they consisted of entire families captured by the Fascists or Nazis through their imprudence or following secret accusations.
A few had given themselves up spontaneously, reduced to desperation by the vagabond life, or because they lacked the means to survive, or to avoid separation from a captured relation, or even -- absurdly -- 'to be in conformity with the law'. There were also about a hundred Jugoslavian military internees and a few other foreigners who were politically suspect. The arrival of a squad of German SS men should have made even the optimists doubtful; but we still managed to interpret the novelty in various ways without drawing the most obvious conclusions.
Thus, despite everything, the announcement of the deportation caught us all unawares. On 20 February, the Germans had inspected the camp with care and had publicly and loudly upbraided the Italian commissar for the defective organization of the kitchen service and for the scarce amount of wood distribution for heating; they even said that an infirmary would soon be opened.
But on the morning of the 21st we learned that on the following day the Jews would be leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the children, even the old, even the ill. Our destination? Nobody knew. We should be prepared for a fortnight of travel. For every person missing at the roll-call, ten would be shot. Only a minority of ingenuous and deluded souls continued to hope; we others had often spoken with the Polish and Croat refugees and we knew what departure meant.
For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all passions and anger have died down, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty towards society which moves even the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon.
But to us this was not granted, for we were many and time was short. And in any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon?
But that evening the children were given no homework. And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die. All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them.
Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need.
Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today? In hut 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and numerous children and grandchildren and his sons- and daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters, they had come from Tripoli after many long journeys, and had always carried with them the tools of their trade, their kitchen utensils and their accordions and violins to play and dance to after the day's work.
The language of survival is learned swiftly or not at all. Levi can perhaps speak for the survivors, but only indirect speech, figurative discourse, and subtexts can give voice to what is lost. Unlike Ulysses, he does not take revenge, and his homecoming is never complete. We must decode the narrative to see that the return is an illusion, the proper name hiding its irreparable loss. As Levi visits the fetid latrines he considers the slogans in German recommending hygiene.
Signs, like graffiti, are just that, pure signs, the direct speech of nobody, of the camp. Levi is inclined to interpret them as another example of German humor, but Steinlauf, the Austrian veteran, teaches him a lesson:.
I have forgotten, and it grieves me, the plain outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army. Iron Cross of the 14—18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his measured discourse of a good soldier to my language of incredulous man.
But this was the sense not forgotten then nor after: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to turn us into beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.
We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent.
Steinlauf delivers this speech as he is washing himself in the Auschwitz mode Levi finds useless. Hygiene is of the matter directly and indirectly, as Levi disguises the central argument within the mimetic scene.
In this book written by the survivor, Steinlauf, almost with his own voice, expounds the doctrine of survival, made worthwhile by the prospect of bearing witness. It is an argument against death, of resistance and defiance justified by the prospect of testimony. Levi does not declare his position, but the meaning of his inability to agree with Steinlauf, an intuitive insight he keeps referring to, becomes ever clearer in his later work. Facing this complicated infernal world, my ideas are confused: is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice?
Levi does not answer directly, but he rejects the justification of survival with testimony by claiming to lack a system. It is above all a problem of representation, what one needs to do in order to survive and bear witness for those he later realizes he cannot fully represent. The difference itself remains unclear and can be explained but never truly understood; nothing escapes the gravity of its realism.
Survival is the direct speech of the camp; it is a language with one word, one concept as langue and an infinite, infinitely unstable parole that are its ways. Survival determines that everybody is the enemy of nobody and that the most irrelevant enemy is the true one the SS. But with the muselmans, the men in decay, it is not even worth speaking. MLA Buller, Robin. APA Buller, R. Chicago Buller, Robin. Share on Facebook. Share on Twitter. The multilingual Greek Jews of Salonika, whose non-Germanic linguistic background isolated them from the majority of the prisoner population, serve as an excellent case study through which to we can understand the relationship between language and survival during the Holocaust.
Through close analysis of these two rich accounts, this study demonstrates the centrality of language to everyday concentration camp interactions, collective identity, and prisoner resistance.
It describes his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. Levi, then a year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months. This truly amazing story offers a revealing glimpse into the realities of the Holocaust and its effects on our world.
Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions x x 15mm g Publication date 30 Aug Publisher www. Rating details. Book ratings by Goodreads. Goodreads is the world's largest site for readers with over 50 million reviews. We're featuring millions of their reader ratings on our book pages to help you find your new favourite book. Close X.
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