Review: Survival in Auschwitz

Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi
transl. Stuart Woolf

"[T]his was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: 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[.]" (41)


I am not going to review this book in the sense that I've done the others. I find it extremely difficult to pick apart narratives that "bear witness": The Reawakening, Levi's so-called sequel to this novel; Hope Against Hope and its sequels, by Nadezhda Mandelstam; Orwell's Homage to Catalonia with its killer last line. Anyway Survival in Auschwitz is a book that I think everyone has, or should, read, because Levi's language is simple and does not overdramatize or preach; he merely tells the story of what he lived through as he lived through it, and if he does often muse on the inner workings of man he does so in an unobtrusive fashion. He isn't out for pity or catharsis. This is essentially a work written to forever fix a terrible incident in history.

I will say that as a book I found The Reawakening to be more powerful, and I'm sorry I can't quote concrete examples; I left that book at home over break. Read as a pair, I think Levi's real power is in the simplicity of his expression, which (as I've been told) the translation tends to needlessly spruce up with extra language and/or descriptors. (Actually, I've heard this translation isn't so good, and that it's best read in Italian, so if you know Italian, read it in its original form and get back to me on that.) The fact that the reader recognizes that Levi doesn't have some ulterior motive in his language or expression, that he isn't trying to wring tears or provoke guilt, contains some kind of raw power.

That and the fact that (though this comes across more clearly in The Reawakening) he never fixes the blame on anyone. His capacity for forgiveness--no, that isn't right; his ability to understand and to explain with an objective eye how both the Germans and the Jews had devolved under camp conditions to something less than human; his ability to refrain from pointing the finger at Germany and leaving blame out of the question entirely--is what lends the memoir its most striking power. You start reading expecting some hint of anger that you never find. And actually, I think, in Philip Roth's Shop Talk Levi admits that he had no "literary intentions" but had an intense wish to understand. He takes the scientific chemist's approach to a lot of the material without sacrificing any of the emotional power of his story.

His accessible contemplations on man and the ways "in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties" (181) are what made the memoir work for me. Read it. It does make you think.