A Final Reckoning: A Hannover Family's Life and Death in the Shoah

Afterword: Primo Levi’s Last Book

Afterword Primo Levi’s Last Book Before discussing separately the motives that impelled some prisoners to collaborate to some extent with the Lager authorities . . . it is necessary to declare the imprudence of issuing hasty moral judgment on such human cases. Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators (never likable, never transparent!) is always difficult to evaluate. It is a judgment that we would like to entrust only to those who found themselves in similar circumstances and had the opportunity to test for themselves what it means to act in a state of coercion. Alessandro Manzoni, the nineteenth-century novelist and poet knew this quite well: “Provocateurs, oppressors, all those who in some way injure others, are guilty, not only of the evil they commit, but also of the perversion in to which they lead the spirit of the offended.” The condition of the offended does not exclude culpability, which is often objectively serious, but I know of no human tribunal to which one could delegate the judgment. –Primo Levy, “The Gray Zone” Primo Levi warns us in the words of a much-revered writer of the nineteenth century not to judge others hastily, but it is a warning he himself finds difficult to follow. He also believes that: “To polemicize with a dead man is embarrass- 176 Afterword ing and not very loyal, all the more so when the absent one is a potential friend and a most valuable interlocutor: but it can be an obligatory step.”1 Primo Levi addresses his “potential friend” Jean Amery, survivor of Auschwitz and a writer like himself. Amery, whose name was Hans Maier, was born to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. After the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated , he fled to Belgium and joined the anti-Fascist resistance. He was caught, tortured, and sent to Auschwitz. His 1966 book about his experiences was one of the first to describe Auschwitz. Only a few years earlier, before Primo Levi “engaged” Amery, Amery ended his own tortured life. Shortly after the appearance of the Italian edition of The Drowned and the Saved, Levi, too, committed suicide. When corresponding with Amery, he had argued against such an act. Interestingly, he had used the title for this collection of essays as his working title for his first book, If This Is a Man—his autobiographical report about Auschwitz. Eventually it became, in slightly modified form, the heading for one of the most important chapters of that first book. In that chapter, Levi critically scrutinizes the behavior of his fellow prisoners. One who catches his eye is the young man he calls Henri, about whom he is still thinking years later. Many years have passed since I read Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved for the first time. I have reread it many times, and as I am still finding it a painful task, I have given it a good deal of thought. Levi has long since become an icon. The precision with which he, a young man, recorded his experiences in Auschwitz and the ability with which he spoke for all survivors has earned him, together with his later writings, well-deserved recognition and influence. Levi never hesitated to describe even his worst experiences calmly and with scientific clarity. Despite his palpable despair, this holds equally true for the chapter “The Gray Zone.” Here his main subject is that special group of prisoners, the prisoner-functionaries (Funktionshäftlinge), kapos, among them. These prisonerfunctionaries were mostly longtime prisoners who were coerced by the SS guards to help run and administer the Lagers. There were not only many different Lagers , but many different prisoner-functionaries. According to Primo Levi, regardless of the circumstances, all shared two attributes: power and privilege. While both terms have their problems, and they are difficult to separate, “privilege ” is even more difficult to define in the Lager situation. One should not forget that not all prisoner-functionaries used their privileges for their own ends. In “The Gray Zone,” Primo Levi repeatedly crosses the Auschwitz boundaries when he points out that undeserved privilege is by no means confined to the Lager; it exists everywhere in the outside world as well. Levi actually crosses Afterword 177 eleven times into the outside world in this essay. To my knowledge, this has not...