Uncompromising ... Primo Levi. Photograph: Martin Argles
With the 20th anniversary of Primo Levi's death, and his uncollected stories recently published, it's as moving as ever to go back and read his first book, If This Is A Man, his indelible account of the year he spent at the Nazi camp in Auschwitz-Monowitz.
I'd forgotten what a strange, inimitable mix of things Levi's book is. I'd always remembered it as a surgical, objective narrative, written with "the calm, sober language of the witness", as Levi describes in his afterword.
Levi wanted his memoir to serve as a piece of historical testimony. It's why, perhaps, the book is divided into self-contained chapters, almost akin to essays, each encompassing a different aspect of the camp and exploring the "gigantic biological and social experiment" that the camp embodied.
The urgency to lay down facts was crucial to Levi, not only in writing his book, but in his experience as a prisoner. In one of his many intricate revelations of camp life, he relates how, at Auschwitz, the prisoners regularly dreamed of telling people what was happening to them, but that in the dreams they were never believed, or understood, or even heard. Suppression of its own existence was part of the extermination programme, and the prisoners knew it.
Steadily, the book dissects the gruesome, dull business of mass murder. But what I'd forgotten was how this meticulous account is punctured by moments of levity, tenderness, and novelistic brilliance. Describing a wall in a hut plastered with German "proverbs and rhymes in praise of order, discipline and hygiene", the narrator spots "two rubber truncheons, one solid and one hollow, to enforce discipline should the proverbs prove insufficient".
I know no other book so crammed with startling, unforgettable moments. The newly arrived prisoners having their shoes swept away by someone with a broom. The crippling, subtly dehumanising wooden clogs the prisoners are made to hobble around in. The unbowed prisoner who is hanged before the whole camp, who yells out defiantly, in the moment before he dies, "Kamaraden, ich bin der Letz!" (Comrades, I am the last one!). And the inhuman look given to Levi by Dr Pannwitz, who employs Levi as a chemist in his lab: "that look was not between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany."
Most of all, though, I'd forgotten how uncompromising and rightly judgmental the book is. "To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one," the narrator declares in a pit of despair: "it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded."
Levi is unflinching in his assessment of those souls who sink beneath such extreme circumstances, and those who, made of sterner stuff, somehow survive. With unstinting precision, he demonstrates the simple miracle of seeing things just as they are. "It seems to me unnecessary to add," he notes wryly in his preface, "that none of the facts are invented."
