Primo Levi - Wikipedia

Primo Levi - Wikipedia

Views on Nazism, Soviet Union and antisemitism[edit]

Levi wrote If This Is a Man to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and others. In turn, he read many accounts by witnesses and survivors, and attended meetings of survivors, becoming a prominent symbolic figure for anti-fascists in Italy.

Levi visited over 130 schools to talk about his experiences in Auschwitz. He was shocked by revisionist attitudes that tried to rewrite the history of the camps as less horrific, what is now referred to as Holocaust denial. His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews was a horror unique in history because the goal was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior. He noted that it was highly organized and mechanized; it entailed the degradation of Jews to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths.^[34]

With the publication of the works of Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, above all the Gulag Archipelago (1974), the world at last acknowledged that the Soviet regime had used camps (gulags) from the early 1920s onward to imprison both criminals and politicals, viz. those convicted of "counter-revolutionary" crimes.^[35] Similarities with the Lager included hard physical work and poor rations.^[36] In this the camps set up in Nazi Germany after 1933 to isolate the political opponents of the Third Reich, religious dissenters, homosexuals and other targeted groups^[37] were comparable to those in the Soviet Union. The principal differences were that the wartime Nazi extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) existed primarily to engage in mass killing of individuals of all ages. They also existed for a very short but murderous three years (1941-1944).^[38]

Levi rejected the idea that the system depicted in The Gulag Archipelago and that of the Nazi Lager (German: konzentrationslager; see Nazi concentration camps) were equivalent. The death rate in Stalin's GULag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) was 30% at worst, he wrote, while in the extermination camps he estimated it to be 90–98%.^[39] Levi gave no source for these figures, but today Soviet classified documents are available, showing that the rate of mortality varied considerably by region (e.g. the Far North and Magadan) and year (the war years from 1941-1945, for instance).

The distinct purpose of the extermination camps[edit]

The purpose of the Nazi camps was not the same as that of Stalin's gulags, Levi wrote in an appendix to If This Is a Man, though it is a "lugubrious comparison between two models of hell."^[40] The goal of the Lager was the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe. No one was excluded. No one could renounce Judaism; the Nazis treated Jews as a racial group rather than as a religious one. Levi, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, had not been religiously observant before World War II, but the Fascist race laws and the Nazi camps impressed on him his identity as a Jew. Of the many children deported to the camps, almost all died.^[41]

Levi wrote in clear, dispassionate style about his experiences in Auschwitz, with an embrace of whatever humanity he found, showing no lasting hatred of the Germans. Some commentators suggested that he had forgiven the Germans, but Levi denied this.