Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What about your final choice, If This Is a Man by Primo Levi?
Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and he was arrested as a member of the anti-fascist resistance towards the end of the war, after Germany had occupied Italy. He was deported to Auschwitz. He survived and then he wrote a book about his experiences there. This really is a book that everybody should be made to read because he very sensitively describes what people become in a concentration camp.
What went on at Auschwitz were some of the most serious crimes that were addressed in Nuremberg. If you read Airey Neave’s book, many of the senior officials in the Nazi regime simply denied that they knew anything about these concentration camps. They would say: ‘I knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews.’ When you read Primo Levi’s book, you cannot possibly imagine these people did not know about the industrial killing of millions of people.
It’s the complete inhumanity – much in the same way as Pol Pot’s Cambodia, just erasing people who become nothing.
Absolutely. He is showing us the situation where we could very easily lose our humanity. It’s an absolutely shocking book. More than anything, he examines human behaviour and how people adapt in order to survive.
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Andrew Cayley has worked as both prosecutor and defender in genocide trials around the world and is about to take up his post as prosecutor at the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal. He reflects on the pity of war, the power of inspirational leadership and the importance of bringing people to justice in order to create a better world.
Can you describe Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man?
It’s called Survival in Auschwitz in the US to give it a positive spin – that’s the American publishing world: the Holocaust is all right as long as there are survivors. Primo Levi was an Italian Jew, arrested in 1944 after Italy capitulated and the Nazis took over. He was shipped off to Auschwitz, but because he had a chemical degree, or because he was lucky – which was how he saw it – he was working in the chemical factory in Auschwitz, which was a technological venture. So he managed to survive and see the end, and in fact the book also deals with the last ten days when the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz and the Russian troops had not yet arrived. Levi went back to Italy, indeed to the very same apartment where he was born, so his life was interrupted horribly. And then he wrote about his experiences, and eventually he committed suicide.
He bears witness to the Holocaust, but he’s a scientist, and he needs to understand the ethical system, as it were, behind those crimes. However perverted it is, he’s trying to understand how it works. So he talks about individual experiences, including his own. They’re always examples of a larger – I don’t want to say theory – but of a larger proposition or explanation. He unpacks the formula, as it were, behind it all. So it’s the victory of reason – or the proper kind of reason, as opposed to the Nazi kind of reason. The Holocaust was not madness: it was a technology, a system, and therefore rational. And Levi regains reason, by treating his experience in Auschwitz as something that is subject to rational analysis.
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Aleksandar Hemon is a novelist, short-story writer and journalist, born in Bosnia. Visiting America as a tourist in 1992, he found himself stranded when his home city of Sarajevo came under siege. Hemon undertook a variety of jobs in America while learning English, in which language he soon after wrote his first book, The Question of Bruno. He was later awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant and is frequently compared to Nabokov and Conrad. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters, and teaches creative writing at the Northwestern University.
La Tregua or The Truce by Primo Levi is your next choice.
La Tregua is an extraordinary book. Levi wrote his first book, If This Is a Man, immediately after being repatriated to Italy after his time in Auschwitz, so that book was much more vivid. He wrote this book 20 years later and it is much more considered and, in many ways, more carefully constructed. The events occur after the liberation of Auschwitz and the book is almost a picaresque novel. Initially the prisoners are kept in the camp, but they are fed and more or less looked after. It’s a very curious slant on the whole period and is actually very funny in places. Later he undergoes this extraordinary odyssey around central Europe, being shifted here and there by the Russians over a period of about almost a year.
The Russians were dealing with so many displaced people and Levi is actually extremely complimentary towards the Russian army. Again, there is this acceptance. The question of forgiveness is an extremely difficult one. Primo Levi was directly involved as a victim. Giorgio Bassani was involved slightly less directly because he was never imprisoned although he had to take to the hills to escape the Fascists. None of them actually in any way say ‘I forgive’, but they do accept their past.
And do they make peace with it?
I think yes for Bassani, but with Primo Levi you never really know. There is this mystery surrounding his death: did he commit suicide or not? I once sat next to his sister at a dinner party but feebly didn’t dare address the question directly as to what she thought had happened, although I believe the family think that his death was an accident.
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Simon Mawer published his first novel 21 years ago and has since written seven others and two works of non-fiction. He is a trained biologist and has lived and worked in Italy for the last 30 years. Perhaps these two facts bring a different slant to his approach to writing, which The Economist has described as having ‘an inquisitive and quite un-English interest in history and science’.
