The End of the Holocaust

7 Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim

Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim 185 Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim After Auschwitz everything returns us to Auschwitz. —Elie Wiesel The suicide of Jean Améry, like that of numerous other Holocaust writers, raises troubling questions about the possible links between the lingering effects of Holocaust trauma and a self-inflicted death. Literary scholars, social scientists, psychiatrists, and writers themselves have made serious inquiries into the roots of suicide among those who survived the camps, wrote about their experiences, and later took their own lives. Their analyses differ significantly and offer no definitive answers. Given the range of motives behind such deaths, this absence of consensus is no surprise . In some cases, suicide seems impulsive—a rash and sudden act; in others, it may have a more rational, premeditated character . Acute depression is often a contributing factor, as are the pains that accompany old age, illness, and bodily decrepitude. Apart from rare instances where suicide is deliberately chosen as a form of political protest—the death of Shmuel Zygielbojm is a prominent example—in the majority of cases, it is unlikely that the etiology of such death can be traced to a single cause. As Primo Levi noted in his late reflections on Améry, included in The Drowned and the Saved, “Jean Améry’s suicide, which took seven 186 the end of the holocaust place in Salzburg in 1978, like other suicides, admits of a cloud of explanations.”1 But while these may have been Levi’s last words on Améry’s death, they were not his only ones. Writing in La Stampa, on December 7, 1978, soon after learning of Améry’s death, Levi was more expansive and also more self-assured in his comments: It is particularly difficult to understand why a person kills himself [but] . . . the suicide of Jean Améry [is] . . . absolutely comprehensible. . . . No, the death of Jean Améry is not a surprise. . . . It is unbearable to think that while the torture that Améry suffered weighed down on him right to his death, indeed was for him an interminable death, it is more than likely that his torturers are sitting down in an office or enjoying their retirement. And if they were interrogated (but who is there to interrogate them?), they would give the same old answer with a clear conscience: they were only following orders.2 Levi’s comments on Améry’s death are striking for several reasons . One is that they are not in the least tentative: while Levi acknowledges that, in general, the motives for a self-inflicted death are typically difficult to decipher, he is certain why Améry killed himself. He offers a brief history of the Austrian writer’s anguished wartime experiences and then quotes the following lines from Améry’s writings, which, he says, read “like an epitaph”: “The man who has been tortured remains tortured. . . . Whoever has suffered torment will no longer be able to find his way clearly in the world, the abomination of annihilation will never be extinguished. Trust in humanity . . . can never be regained.”3 Levi was sure that the accumulation of inner pain that Améry carried with him from his time in the Nazi camps ultimately killed him. Especially in the absence of any cathartic sense of Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim 187 justice, which Améry long sought among the Germans but never found, memory of the sufferings inflicted on him as a Jewish victim of Nazi cruelty led “inevitably to [his] death.”4 Whether or not Levi’s analysis of Améry’s violent ending is correct, his words seem ominously self-referential and are hard to put out of mind when considering the author’s own unexpected end. News of the death of Primo Levi in April 1987 brought with it a sense of loss and dismay that has not entirely receded to this day. Levi’s death was reported to be self-inflicted, reason enough to feel more than just saddened by the passing of an exceptionally fine writer. Inevitably, the names of others came to mind: Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, Piotr Rawicz, Jean Améry. As a writer who reflected continually on the crimes of the Third Reich, Levi belonged in the company of these writers, but one was reluctant to place him among them as a fellow suicide. How could he, whose books were...