Primo Levi: If This is a Man and the Truce

If This is a Man. The Truce, by Primo Levi

 It is in the midst of utter desolation that the Levi discovers the real meaning of his predicament:

‘That precisely because the lager was a great machine to reduce us to 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; that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization [...] We still possess one power, the power to refuse our consent.’

Indeed, Levi not only survives Auschwitz, but through his profound morality, was able to embody the personal and collective suffering of the Jewish Race. In turn, he became a champion for all the world. One of the truly great writers and emancipators of the modern era, who was able to raise the banner of freedom at all costs. Before this status however, he must content, with the nightmare world he found himself within. 

‘In an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared,’ and ‘for the first time we became aware, that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man. In a moment of prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: We had reached the bottom. It is is not possible to sink lower than this.' ‘Imagine now a man deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, habits, his clothes, in short of everything he possesses: He will be a hollow man reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of his dignity and restraint.’

Levi lost everything within Auschwitz. He became an shell of a man, beset with hunger, sickness and despair. Nevertheless, he believed his suffering had value. That ‘no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis.’  Furthermore by reflecting on the experience he was able to understand why the Holocaust occurred in the first place.

‘For those survivors remembering is a duty. They do not want to forget, because they understand that their experiences were not meaningless, that the camps were not an accident, an unforeseen happening. The nazi camps were the apex the culmination of fascism in Europe’ In the Truce he goes further stating, ‘we felt we had something to say, enormous things to say to every German [...] We felt an urgent need to settle our accounts. to ask them to explain and comment [...] they ought as a sacred duty to listen, to learn everything immediately from us.’ 

Of course this intellectual analysis doesn’t help in the camp itself, and Levi has to wrestle with the fundamental problem of why some men lived and others died. For him, the camp can be separated into a dichotomy of the ‘drowned and saved.’ Those who survive do so because they possess strength, cunning and treachery. The survivor ‘will become stronger, and so will be feared, and he who is feared, is ipso facto, a candidate for survival.’ Those that die, do so because they are weaker, ‘to sink is the easiest of matters [....] [men] who finished in the gas chambers have the same story or more exactly have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom like streams that run down to the sea.’

 Camp life is a microcosm of wider society, only without the necessary safe guards . The old law of jungle comes into play, man in a state of nature, bound to the principles of evolution, where one beast devours the other. Levi quite rightly asks, ‘is this a man?’ for when humanity is reduced to raw hunger and blind necessity, disturbing visions emerge. Nevertheless, Levi is able to see past this flaw  to the integrity beneath. In The Truce particularly, we learn of the gradual adjustment to living on the outside, and a life that offers a better future. 

While not a pleasant read ‘If This is a Man’ is a truly important book, for not only does it bear witness to such terrible events, but also shows with the moral clarity of a genius, why and how such experiences came to be. Levi shows, that literature is not redundant, that the world is not a dream, and life not a metaphysical event. That through all the bloodshed, we still share our common ground.  That kindness, tolerance and the idea of freedom, renew the world and a world that is as real as it gets. And as such, there is always a need for men to tell such stories, for suffering precedes wisdom.