Word: levying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...Nazis aimed at the complete moral collapse of their victims, because a degraded people would do the dirty work of their tormentors, and because those deprived of their humanity could be tortured and killed without unduly disturbing the sensibilities of their murderers. Levi's logic leads him to burdensome conclusions, not the least of which is that the saved were not the best but the worst, "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone.' " Levi's troubled honesty is not what usually gets hailed as a triumph of the human spirit. His work dispels such cliches...
...late Primo Levi' s last work calmly but eloquently preserves the memory of Nazi evil. -- A Len Deighton novel without suspense...