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A review by selfmythologies
Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi
5.0
I'm deeply convinced this is a book everyone needs to read in their lifetime.
Let me make this clear: There was a time when I thought I knew 'enough' about the Holocaust. In terms of understanding what it meant for humanity looking forward, the responsibility to never let it happen again , the importance of a culture of remembering - I understood all of that perfectly fine. And also, I'd seen 'The Pianist' and 'Schindler's List', both of which deeply shocked and unsettled me as they should, and visited a lot of memorial sites, what more could I do? Surely everything else would just say the same thing in different ways, and I'd understood now, hadn't I?
As such, I probably would've not read Primo Levi's report about his year in Auschwitz for at least another few years if I hadn't had to for a seminar. It was on my TBR, and I did want to get to it at some point, but there were so many other books I wanted to read first, it would have been dragged along at the bottom of my list for a long time. And that would have been a mistake.
This book is about dehumanization. Which is easy to understand as an abstract concept, but pretty much impossible to actually grasp. Even when I hurt, or feel worthless, I still feel unmistakably like a human being. I've never not felt like one. How could I possibly understand what it's like to be stripped of the whole of your identity and dignity? Truth is, I can't, but Levi manages to bring you incredibly close with his detailed, yet really matter-of-fact and objective descriptions - the objectivity is almost haunting because it actually 'fits' the process of becoming devoid of any strong emotions perfectly.
Just after a few weeks, he describes, he was completely immersed in the 'world' of the camp, which was its complete own, grotesque nightmare world with rules, hierarchies and morals that were completely removed from the 'normal' world outside. Pretty much automatically, people stopped thinking about anything because work and hunger took up their entire energy, becoming numb to anything but the most animalistic instincts. people started looking out for themselves only, the only way to actually survive was to try and make yourself look better than the rest so you had the chance to 'move up' in the hierarchy and have access to more goods that you could sell to the others for more food - it is pure hell, the lowest point of existence possible, as Levi describes it. No normal terms like 'good' or 'evil' can even apply anymore - everyone has to be immoral to an extent to survive, and no one even has time or energy to reflect on themselves.
The special thing is - this book is not about the perpetrators of violence (or more accurately those on top of a chain of violence), at all - they are barely mentioned because they were not much in contact with the prisoners at all - it is 100% about the victims, what happened to their humanity, their self-image, that complete destruction of a human both inside and outside. The most unsettling thing to me was in the end, when the news that the Russians were coming spread through the camp, Levi says something like 'a normal person might have felt relief or fear or any other emotion' - but he didn't, and pretty much everyone else around him didn't either, or only faintly. And he saw this as the true 'success' of the Nazis - that even after their defeat, they had managed to destroy them as humans so far as to completely alienate them from experiencing any regular emotions, or even imagining regular lives again, imagining hope. There was no hope, that was what they'd learned. It was absurd to believe in it.
Spread throughout his report are a lot of references to Dante's Inferno, that most important and influential text of Italian literature, both in obvious thematic comparisons of the inferno to the concentration camp, and in actual mentions of Dante in a chapter where Levi tries to teach Italian to a fellow prisoner. It is one of the few moments of something like positivity and even a sort of short-lived triumph in the book - a moment of beauty and humanity in the midst of a subhuman wasteland. Literature as a tool of memory, and as a tool of rediscovering your own human agency and identity - these are important themes of the book as well.
I'm well aware that with this book - more than probably anthing else I've reviewed - I can't actually accurately describe what it's like, and everything I have so far is incredibly inadequate - you just have to read it for yourself. I really think this is something that everyone needs to have heard and experienced at a point in their lives - we need to know what that 'bottom' of what humans are capable of doing to other humans looks like. We need to be aware of it to understand the weight of our own responsibility.
In the end, I'm not really sure anymore if there is such a thing as reading 'enough' about the Holocaust, about a large-scale human atrocity like this. We need to keep reminding ourselves that this actually happened, that humans are capable of this, that we need to watch out for our democracy and each other's human rights, because there is really no limit as to what can happen if we don't.
Let me make this clear: There was a time when I thought I knew 'enough' about the Holocaust. In terms of understanding what it meant for humanity looking forward, the responsibility to never let it happen again , the importance of a culture of remembering - I understood all of that perfectly fine. And also, I'd seen 'The Pianist' and 'Schindler's List', both of which deeply shocked and unsettled me as they should, and visited a lot of memorial sites, what more could I do? Surely everything else would just say the same thing in different ways, and I'd understood now, hadn't I?
As such, I probably would've not read Primo Levi's report about his year in Auschwitz for at least another few years if I hadn't had to for a seminar. It was on my TBR, and I did want to get to it at some point, but there were so many other books I wanted to read first, it would have been dragged along at the bottom of my list for a long time. And that would have been a mistake.
This book is about dehumanization. Which is easy to understand as an abstract concept, but pretty much impossible to actually grasp. Even when I hurt, or feel worthless, I still feel unmistakably like a human being. I've never not felt like one. How could I possibly understand what it's like to be stripped of the whole of your identity and dignity? Truth is, I can't, but Levi manages to bring you incredibly close with his detailed, yet really matter-of-fact and objective descriptions - the objectivity is almost haunting because it actually 'fits' the process of becoming devoid of any strong emotions perfectly.
Just after a few weeks, he describes, he was completely immersed in the 'world' of the camp, which was its complete own, grotesque nightmare world with rules, hierarchies and morals that were completely removed from the 'normal' world outside. Pretty much automatically, people stopped thinking about anything because work and hunger took up their entire energy, becoming numb to anything but the most animalistic instincts. people started looking out for themselves only, the only way to actually survive was to try and make yourself look better than the rest so you had the chance to 'move up' in the hierarchy and have access to more goods that you could sell to the others for more food - it is pure hell, the lowest point of existence possible, as Levi describes it. No normal terms like 'good' or 'evil' can even apply anymore - everyone has to be immoral to an extent to survive, and no one even has time or energy to reflect on themselves.
The special thing is - this book is not about the perpetrators of violence (or more accurately those on top of a chain of violence), at all - they are barely mentioned because they were not much in contact with the prisoners at all - it is 100% about the victims, what happened to their humanity, their self-image, that complete destruction of a human both inside and outside. The most unsettling thing to me was in the end, when the news that the Russians were coming spread through the camp, Levi says something like 'a normal person might have felt relief or fear or any other emotion' - but he didn't, and pretty much everyone else around him didn't either, or only faintly. And he saw this as the true 'success' of the Nazis - that even after their defeat, they had managed to destroy them as humans so far as to completely alienate them from experiencing any regular emotions, or even imagining regular lives again, imagining hope. There was no hope, that was what they'd learned. It was absurd to believe in it.
Spread throughout his report are a lot of references to Dante's Inferno, that most important and influential text of Italian literature, both in obvious thematic comparisons of the inferno to the concentration camp, and in actual mentions of Dante in a chapter where Levi tries to teach Italian to a fellow prisoner. It is one of the few moments of something like positivity and even a sort of short-lived triumph in the book - a moment of beauty and humanity in the midst of a subhuman wasteland. Literature as a tool of memory, and as a tool of rediscovering your own human agency and identity - these are important themes of the book as well.
I'm well aware that with this book - more than probably anthing else I've reviewed - I can't actually accurately describe what it's like, and everything I have so far is incredibly inadequate - you just have to read it for yourself. I really think this is something that everyone needs to have heard and experienced at a point in their lives - we need to know what that 'bottom' of what humans are capable of doing to other humans looks like. We need to be aware of it to understand the weight of our own responsibility.
In the end, I'm not really sure anymore if there is such a thing as reading 'enough' about the Holocaust, about a large-scale human atrocity like this. We need to keep reminding ourselves that this actually happened, that humans are capable of this, that we need to watch out for our democracy and each other's human rights, because there is really no limit as to what can happen if we don't.