174517

Is a sequel ever as good as its original? Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) is a celebrated book while its follow-up (The Truce) remains less well known. But that does not tell the whole story.

Levi, born in 1919 to a literate Italian-Jewish family, was brought up in Turin. He studied chemistry at Turin University, which was to prove his salvation. The times were unpropitious for European Jews, and as the Nazis took control of northern Italy Levi joined the disorganized Italian Resistance. He was betrayed, captured and sent to a transit camp at Fossoli – described in Ian Thomson’s biography of Levi as ‘a halfway house to death’. Soon afterwards he was one of 650 ‘pieces’ (Nazi terminology for prisoners) put on a train for Auschwitz. Of the 45 people in his wagon, only 4 were to see their homes again. Levi had certain advantages in Auschwitz. He arrived there relatively late in the war, was young, of an inquisitive disposition and without dependants. He had a facility for making friends that was  unusual in the camp. With his chemical qualifications he was eventually detached from the lethal heavy labour to work in the laboratory. On top of all this he had several enormous slices of luck. Levi wrote about the camp in the present tense and without humour (for how could there be any?). In a famously dispassionate tone he analysed the prisoners’ lives: the exhausting work, the beatings and humiliations, the ‘selections’ for the gas chamber (when a man’s life depended on whether his card went on the left-hand pile or the right), the absurd rituals (like the requirement to have five buttons on prison jackets), the importance of the prisoner’s spoon (without which he could not eat his soup). There are many details that the brain wants to shut out, like the old man ordered to remove his truss when the prisoners were stripped naked. Oddly enough, the most readable section covers the last, unspeakable events after Auschwitz is bombed by the Russians. Levi – lucky again – is sick in the infirmary when thousands of prisoners are taken off to die marching in the snow. He describes the ‘starving spectres’ left behind when the Germans abandon the camp, their sufferings from dysentery, scarlet fever and typhus, the hunt for food and warmth, the rigid corpses in beds. The book ends as the first Russian troops enter Auschwitz. Against all the odds Levi survived these experiences, and after many further travails made it back home to Turin. Six months after returning he began to write his account of life in the camp, at first slowly, then in a burst of furious activity. This was the text that eventually carried the title If This Is a Man. Like many illustrious predecessors the book had trouble finding a publisher. It was turned down by five Italian firms including the fashionable Einaudi. If This was eventually issued in 1947 by the failing publishing house Francesco de Silva. It received moderate reviews and sold 1,500 copies, whereupon Levi abandoned writing and settled down to the life of an industrial chemist. Observers have suggested that the post-war years – an era of rebuilding and hope – were untimely for a book of this kind. On the other hand, when is a good time to read about the horrors of Auschwitz? Even Philip Roth’s comment on the cover – ‘One of the century’s truly necessary books’ – has a conditional tone. Reading If This engenders a feeling of hopelessness. However the book’s initial lukewarm reception was temporary. After a decade in limbo, If This took off. It was reissued by Einaudi in 1958, sold out and was reprinted. An English translation by Stuart Woolf appeared in the US and the UK. There was even a German edition which found favour with young readers. In the late ’60s the book was selling between 20,000 and 30,000 copies a year in Italy and Levi became a literary legend there. It was a different story in Britain where he was still virtually unknown. His reputation gained some ground when he visited London in 1986. Still, when I bought If This Is a Man and The Truce from a London market stall the following year, Levi’s name was new to me. Of the two accounts, I found The Truce the more absorbing. Levi had begun this ‘follow-up’ in 1961. It describes what happened in the period between its author leaving Auschwitz and arriving back in Turin – nine extraordinary months spent in camps and on random train journeys, all under Russian auspices. The mood is very different from the icy bleakness of its predecessor. The Truce is a fast-paced narrative in the past tense. It introduces a cast of characters who are able to behave like human beings rather than automatons. The laissez- faire approach of the Russians and the rapid changes of scene have an uplifting effect after the claustrophobia of Auschwitz. Moreover an irreverent humour breaks out in the most surprising places, and the surreal details often have an element of farce. There is another difference. Levi’s introduction to If This ends with the observation, ‘It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.’ Biographies of the author suggest that these words do not apply to The Truce: that Levi embroidered the facts or in some cases invented them. The Truce opens where If This left off. The Russians arrived and dispatched the surviving Auschwitz prisoners by rail to an assembly camp near Katowice. Levi absconded from the train with a colourful character he calls ‘the Greek’ – a supreme wheeler-dealer in all kinds of commodities, who taught Levi how to forage for food (always a topic of obsessive concern) in the changed European landscape. They were separated in Katowice but months later Levi ran across the man in a field, surrounded by ‘twenty huge sleepy girls’ stretched out in the sun, the Greek’s latest ‘commodity’. Inmates of the Katowice camp could come and go as they pleased and there were periodic surprises – theatricals staged to celebrate the Russian victory, and a football game between the Italians and the Poles (though the Poles cheated by importing a goalie from Warsaw). In June 1945, 800 Italians and Romanians were put on another train bound for Odessa, whence they were allegedly to be shipped home. But the journey ended 200 miles short – nobody knew why – and they were loaded on to cattle trucks travelling north, away from Odessa, ‘in the hands of the inscrutable Soviet bureaucracy’. They stopped at another assembly camp near Mirsk, temporary home to 10,000 refugees of every conceivable nationality. Here food was plentiful, and the Russians entrusted the canteen to a different group each week. During Levi’s short stay the Hungarians were in charge; they made fiery goulashes and instituted a gypsy orchestra of six peasant musicians in embroidered leather doublets. Ten days later the Italians were on the move once more, marching 45 miles to a camp further north, past rusting tanks and other relics of the war. Levi’s group conceived an insatiable passion for roast chicken and bartered some crockery for a hen en route. Levi had fond memories of their last camp at Starye Dorogi, near Minsk – a single large building on the edge of a forest, where 1,400 Italians and Romanians spent two sleepy summer months. Thousands of demobbed Soviet soldiers passed by the camp on their way home, some on moribund horses that were commandeered and eaten by the Italians. There was more organized entertainment – from a Soviet military film unit, then from a revue organized by the Romanians, the acts including a tap dancer, Neapolitan songs, and finally a bloated Michelin-man character who dragged an enormously heavy dumb-bell on stage, then removed dozens of garments until, a skinny figure in underpants, he picked up the weight (made of cardboard) and scampered off with it. Release from the camp was presaged by an early-morning order for the Italians to rise and form a queue. Dire rumours circulated – shades of Auschwitz – until it transpired that the Russians were handing out money. Soon afterwards all 1,400 inmates were loaded on to – yes, another train, allegedly bound for Italy. Their initial euphoria dissipated as they meandered for a month through Russia, Romania, Hungary and Austria. Pressed as to where they were headed, the train driver – the only person remotely ‘in charge’ – replied, ‘Wherever there are tracks’. Near Linz they passed out of Russian hands and into the American sphere. The unthinkable then occurred as the train picked up an extra truck crammed with young Zionists on their way to Israel. At length Levi arrived in Turin, ‘swollen, bearded and in rags’, barely recognizable to his family. Uneasily he reflected on whether the returning Italians could ever pick up their former lives:

We felt emptied and defenceless. The months just past, although hard, of wandering on the margins of civilization now seemed to us like a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.

Levi was to live for a further forty-two years. He married, worked for three decades as a chemist, and wrote more books, but his last years were marred by depression. In 1987 he committed suicide by throwing himself down the marble staircase of his apartment block. Nobody could know how far Auschwitz had contributed to this outcome, but the simple gravestone inscription in Turin cemetery – ‘1919–1987 Primo Levi’ – was augmented by the concentration camp number that had been indelibly imprinted on Levi’s wrist: 174517.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 43 © David Spiller 2014