Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism after the Fall

Chapter 5: After Auschwitz: What Is a Good Death?

c h a p t e r 5 After Auschwitz: What Is a Good Death? Timothy Pytell Suicide brings on many changes. A life ends abruptly and the suicide is interpreted differently depending on circumstances and opinion. Sometimes it is seen as profoundly irrational, absurd and tragic, other times, as a heroic last act of an individual taking action to determine their fate. Often we aestheticize another’s suicide with heroism or capitulations. But no matter how we view suicide, a person’s death necessarily becomes the capstone that ‘‘backshadows’’ the entire existence of the deceased. It comes as no surprise that suicide among Holocaust survivors is high. A few of the most recognizable figures are Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Célan, Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, and apparently Primo Levi. Since so many survivors choose suicide, it is almost considered a truism that their camp experience led them to make the choice. However, a closer look at the ‘‘deaths’’ of Primo Levi and Jean Améry unveils a great deal of ambiguity.1 Although a consensus seems to have emerged that Levi committed suicide , the uncertainty surrounding his death has left the issue open to doubt. For example, Diego Gambetta has investigated Levi’s death and provides us with a very clear picture of Levi’s ‘‘Last Moments’’: Sometime after 10:00 a.m., Saturday, April 11, 1987, on the third floor of a late-nineteenth-century building in Turin, the concierge rang the 67 68 Timothy Pytell doorbell of Primo Levi’s apartment. Levi . . . opened the door and collected his mail from the concierge like every other day. He was wearing a shortsleeve shirt. He smiled, thanked her as usual, and closed the door. The concierge descended on foot the ample spiral staircase occupied in the middle by a caged elevator. She had barely reached her cubicle on the ground floor . . . when she heard Levi’s body hit the bottom of the stairs by the elevator. . . . The autopsy established that he died instantaneously of a ‘‘crushed skull.’’ No signs of violence unrelated to the fall were found on his body. At 12:00, barely an hour and a half after the event, I heard the news on the radio in Rome. There was already mention of suicide. The police inquiry simply confirmed that conclusion.2 We are left with a number of questions. Why would a chemical engineer commit suicide by jumping down a narrow stairwell? Why was there no suicide note? Why was there no will? Was jumping just a spur-of-themoment decision (similar to what some have argued about the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s death in a car crash)? Or did he just become dizzy? After all, he had recently undergone a prostate operation and was on antidepressants. Gambetta concludes that the ‘‘facts known to us arguably suggest an accident more strongly than they indicate a suicide .’’ In contrast, all biographers of Levi, Myriam Anissimov, Carol Angier, and Ian Thomson believe it was a suicide, along with almost all of Levi’s relatives and friends. The one notable exception is David Mendel, a British cardiologist who befriended Levi late in life. On some level therefore, the jury is still out on Levi’s ‘‘suicide.’’ The ambiguity and subsequent anxiety remains troubling. As Gambetta describes, the admirers of Levi are left in a state of unease. Did the humanist Levi, who somehow had managed to reaffirm life and hope in the human condition even after Auschwitz, give up? Did Auschwitz reclaim him somehow? Did his suicide destroy the humanistic values his survival and writings testified to? Jonathan Druker provided one response to this unease. Druker thinks the death was likely accidental and therefore argues against the ‘‘defeatist’’ version of Levi’s death. He also asserts that there is a ‘‘danger of reading suicide into the works of Levi’’ because we cannot even know if it was suicide, much less the role of Auschwitz in his death. Key to Druker’s concern is the fear that if we view the death as suicide, Levi’s writings all become interpreted through his survival of Auschwitz, and therefore, ‘‘reading suicide into Levi’s texts with undue insistence tends to reduce their possible range of meanings.’’3 It appears then, that the act and significance of Levi’s ‘‘suicide’’ will remain ambiguous. In trying to solve the riddle numerous commentators 69 After...