Word: levi
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...insular world of these fathers ended with World War II. In 1943 Levi joined a band of partisans to fight Italy's Fascists and the Germans. He was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist kept him alive. He worked as a slave at a privately owned I.G. Farben laboratory, which was part of the death-camp complex...
That free enterprise can be free of all restraint is only one of the facts of life thrown out for consideration in The Drowned and the Saved. Levi's last writings about the unspeakable quietly fill in the blanks of a subject that is in danger of becoming an abstraction. "For the young people of the 1950s and 1960s," he observes, "these were events connected with their fathers: they were spoken about in the family; memories of them still preserved the freshness of things seen. For the young people of the 1980s, they are matters associated with their grandfathers: distant...
This is probably the reason that Levi seldom uses the word Holocaust, a term that has come to invite an automatic and generalized response at the expense of the particular. Levi provides the wire, barking guards, sadistic Kapos and the ovens, which, we learn with devastating offhandedness, were manufactured by Topf of Wiesbaden, a company that went on to produce crematoria until 1975. There are also the moral zombies who planned and managed the Lagers (camps), and the scientists who acted in the name of higher learning. Of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian physician and chief doctor of the Birkenau...
Most of what passed for life in the Lagers took place in what Levi calls the "gray zone," an area of collaboration with the persecutors that, adds the author, "contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge." Some jobs brought a prisoner an added ration of soup, perhaps the difference between starvation and survival. Levi absolves the sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, lice checkers and bed smoothers, those "who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square." Mercy is more strained for the Kapos, who were in charge of barracks...
...Levi is obsessed with the structure of complicity that made the Lagers run. The camps were literally concentrated worlds where pain, humiliation, fear and base human nature were intensified. To the familiar images of families tumbling out of boxcars to be greeted officially by insults and clubbings, Levi adds the reception that older prisoners gave to new arrivals. "Rarely was a newcomer received, I won't say as a friend but at least as a companion- in-misfortune; in the majority of cases, those with seniority . . . showed irritation or even hostility...