Mark Bold

Primo Levi did not want a film or theatrical adaptation made of his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man. It is not difficult to see why, given the way Hollywood rewrites history and trivialises human experience. Imagine how a Zemeckis-Hanks film of Levi’s testimony would ladle on the sentimentalism and sensation until it became an obscene tear-jerking hero myth of one man’s struggle against his Nazi oppressors. No, actually don’t.

Instead, If This Is A Man is free of all sentimentalism, and does not turn away from describing the full horror of a work camp within Auschwitz in clear and calm prose. There is no self-pity, or a defining moment that makes a man determined to survive; there is no place in the memoir where it is the heroic character of the narrator that leads to his final freedom. This is a simple and honest account of what happened to an Italian Jew when he was transported to Auschwitz.

The title of the book reveals a main theme that runs through the memoir, and also taunted Levi while he was imprisoned in the concentration camp – what is a human capable of? How can we equate humanity with the inconceivable horrors that are happening all around? The question has been asked again and again of the Nazi war criminals, but it also immediately applies to the prisoners, for within hours of arrival at the camp, they have been stripped of every quality with which we might associate the adjective human. Of course, women, children and elderly/incapable men are straightaway removed from these concerns, as they are murdered in the gas chambers on arrival at Auschwitz. For the remainder, they are not regarded as human beings, but purely as units of utility value. They are men able to labour, but expendable as soon as that utility value begins to wane.

This is the initiation into the way the camp operates and why it exists, the descent into an inhuman hell. It is about reaching the very lowest depths of existence. Describing the way the new arrivals are processed on entering the camp, Levi writes, “the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more, they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand.”[p32] Stripped of all human-defining aspects, even their names, and tattooed with the number with which they will now be identified, they begin a new existence as labouring units and nothing more.

Writing is memoir, Levi often runs across the problems imposed by the limits of language. For how can he use the languages that have accompanied the growth of human cultures to describe the inhuman environment around him? Even at the beginning of the book, he realises “that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.”[p32] How to put down in words the arbitrary brutal treatment and inconceivable extent of suffering and death, the smells and fears and hunger, the bestial surroundings and demeanour of the Kapos and SS officers. A new lexicon is required to describe the camp: “We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this 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.”[p129] The evolution of a new language is apparent in the slang words that are constructed from the varied tongues of Europe that have been forced to coexist in the camp. Klepsiklepsi, for instance, originating from the Greeks in the camp, becomes a slang term for theft. Sometimes the new phrases betray the dark subculture shared by the inmates – the slang for ‘never’ literally translates as ‘tomorrow morning’.

Apart from having to disregard these subtle concerns, the Hollywood treatment would also need to invent some action, because the most notable aspect of camp life as described in If This Is A Man is its routine. It is the unending, extraordinarily boring routine that acts to crush the last few dregs of humanity out of the inmates. Every day means long hours of hard work, punctuated with brief breaks for watery soup and the journeys in and out of the assembly area, accompanied by an absurd band playing marching music. It is a slow process of destroying each man – his shoes and feet rotting away, his muscles weakening, his strength fading and disease easily overpowering the exhausted. It happens every day. Then there are the routine roll-calls, the queueing for sanitation and meagre food, for repairs to clothes and rare medical treatment. It is not a place where days have a meaning, or can even be distinguished. Only the seasons mean anything – the warmer spring sun, the determination to get through winter.

At the heart of Levi’s story is the strange thing that happened to him, and to only two others out of 650 who were transported with him – he survived. What is his survival strategy, the tactics that made him successful where so many died? It cannot be understood like that, in the individualistic gloss that the filmscript would require. Mostly, it was luck that he lived. At one point, it seems as if only an admin error has saved him from selection for the gas chambers. And then, as the camp is evacuated at the prospect of the Russian army’s advance, he is too ill to move, and to be murdered with the majority of evacuees. But he also delineates a polarity amongst the inmates that indicates their likelihood to survive – the drowned and the saved. All other social distinctions and subtleties, good and bad, wise and foolish, and the cushions of the law, social habits, and morals, are reduced to zero. There is only survival, or death. The result is a ‘pitiless process of natural selection.’[p95] And adaption is the key to this survival. Levi shows us the varied forms this adaption can take through brief studies of characters that share his misery – Elias, a muscular thief who is “an atavism, different from our modern world, and better adapted to the primordial conditions of camp life” [p103] or Henri, who uses his charm to avoid hard work and to use the exchange of goods and services to his favour.

That he managed to survive and afterwards to produce this testimony is important as the events of the Holocaust slip further into history. As attention spans and memories become shorter, we are in danger of forgetting perhaps the most inhuman period of recent history. The enduring value of If This Is A Man is that it is a first-hand testimony of these horrors, told in a non-judgemental, lucid manner. Primo Levi’s unassuming words have far more power to shock and disturb than the SFX style of Hollywood’s historical rewrites or TV’s bombastic docudrama reconstructions.

LEVI, Primo (2004) If This Is A Man, London: Abacus