He was sent to Fossoli as a Jew. This camp gathered all of the different categories of people who were no longer welcome in the newly established Fascist Republic. After a brief inspection by a small group of German SS soldiers, he and the other Jewish camp members were loaded onto a train for expulsion from the Republic.
Auschwitz was his destination. It was a name he had never heard before, but which at first gave him a feeling of relief because it implied that “somewhere on earth” was involved.
Only three of the 650 people who left Fossoli on that fateful day would return. Levi’s testimony of the Lager If This Is a Man – that he composed immediately after resuming his life in Turin – was published in 1947 and is not a heroic account of his “survival at Auschwitz,” as the American title of Levi’s text would suggest. It is, in a sense, a brave understanding of his “survival at Auschwitz” (as the American title would have it).
Levi’s contribution is still striking today because it lacks a heroic register. Its appropriateness for this context, which is largely what Levi teaches, must be just as doubtful as its appeal.
In a characteristically ironic, yet unsettling way, the first sentence in his text begins with the word fortune (“It was a good thing that I was deported only in 1944 …”)”) and sets the tone for the rest of the book. It is not fortune, but virtue that rules in the camp.
Levi was taken to the Fossoli detention camp after his capture. Jacqueline Poggi/Flickr, CC BY-SA
In truth, it is the title of Levi’s book which reveals his main concern. This is easily misunderstood. This is not a question, and it certainly does not ask for an answer. It is not a question that the text would answer, as it does not claim such a privilege.
The poem at the beginning of the text contains an implied imperative: “Consider whether this is man …” This is an order or command (“I command you these words”); and one that is also linked to an imprecation.
You can etch them into your heart
This is an instruction to not turn away from the world (“You who are safe/In your warm homes”) Levi includes himself, which is a remarkable feat. It’s a form of self-admonition.
Levi’s description of “the ambiguous life” of the Lager changes our understanding of how we witness. It does this by bringing into focus a pair of opposing characters that are less obvious in everyday life: the drowned and the saved.
All the humiliations that Levi called “the bottom” were performed in Auschwitz to speed up the prisoners’ descent. This process was accelerated even more in the case those Levi called drowned. “They followed the slope to the bottom like streams that flow down to the sea.”
The prisoners were those who never adapted to the harsh regiment of camp life, and there were many reasons for this. Their time in the camps was, therefore, very short. Yet their number seemed endless.
In the camp’s jargon, they were called the Muselmanner or the “Muslims,” and their tenuous existence hovered, even before being selected for the gas chambers, in a zone indistinct between life and death and human and nonhuman. Levi said that these were the only ones who truly saw the Gorgon.
In comparison to the “anonymous masses” of drowned people, the number saved was relatively small. It was not made up of the very best and most certainly not the chosen. Levi found it appalling that he should invoke providence’s guidance in the face of such horror.
He does not hesitate to make this point. With rare exceptions, those saved were those who had, through luck or savvy, managed to achieve a position of privilege within the hierarchical structure of the camp.
This meant, more often than not, a renunciation of at least a part of the moral universe outside of the camp. This is not to say that those who are saved or drowned should be judged by this standard. Levi insists that words like good and bad, just and unfair, cease to be meaningful on the other side of barbed wire.
He was still convinced that the witnesses who hadn’t gone to the very bottom of the matter were not the real ones. This did not invalidate the survivor’s testimony but rather made it more urgent.
Levi says that it is not only the saved but also the drowned who must be witnesses for the drowned. In him, he reflects what he saw.
“Consider whether this is a human …” The imperative of Levi’s text issues is not to persist in seeing humanity as inhuman. It’s more the opposite: one must bear witness to the inhumanity in the human. Our society depends in a certain sense on it.