Primo Levi
continued through forty years of writing to create book after book in which he
worked through the endless impact of Auschwitz. Those two years included deportation,
imprisonment in the Lager, illness, near death, the mass murders of fellow
beings, and repatriation that marked the remainder of his life. He writes in The Drowned and the Saved of the ongoing relevancy of Holocaust
survivors, even as he worries future generations will no longer hear them. “We
must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have
collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely
because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. . . It happened, therefore it can
happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it
can happen everywhere." Here Levi captures the historical and global
pervasiveness of genocide and its extenuating circumstances. He admits that
probably the events in the exact way they happened in the Second World War will
not occur again, but he also advises readers to be aware of oppression and the
persistence of extreme violence globally. We live in a world where violence is
the default method of addressing conflict. Levi determines that the narratives
of survivors are absolutely crucial to the cessation of violence, waking
readers to the dangers of unknowing, complacency, and fear.
Levi wrote
on the trains as he made the repatriation journey from Poland to Russia, through
Eastern Europe, Germany, and Austria to his home in Italy. Upon arrival, he
talked his story to those who would listen as he rode the tram about Torino,
the northern Italian city where he was born and lived his life. The world was
in shock after the end of the war, but Levi had experienced Auschwitz and was
determined to tell others his story of survival and release. Levi has commented
that his first of many books, If This is
a Man, “has worked for me as a sort of 'prosthesis', an external memory set
up like a barrier between my life today and my life then. Today, I relive those
events through what I have written."
Not only does he
bear his own traumatic history, he carries within him and transposes into
language the stories of those who did not leave the death camps. In this way
traumatic memory constitutes an intimate experience shared with others. Through
writing and in return to ordinary life Levi knows himself in relationship with
others. Cathy Caruth writes that trauma experience consists of more than individual
narrative in relation to past events; rather, it is the narrative of how one’s
trauma is “tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead.
. .to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of
listening to another’s wound." Levi’s narratives concern relationship with others, in the camps, on the
trip home, in the world before and after the descent into Auschwitz. He writes,
“part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us."
Life
stories of trauma and violence continue to infuse discourse of how to be in
relationship with one another so that humans, particularly those most
vulnerable to violence, can survive, perhaps even thrive, in this world.
Audience response to atrocity in the public realm participates in crucial knowledge
and sensitivity to violation of human rights and calls attention to contemporary
situations of violence in the world. As Hannah Arendt argued in The Human Condition and other of her works, when
ordinary people are active, vocal participants in the world, even the agents of
politics who, over corrupt and highly conflicted leadership, can determine the
direction of political inquiry, then they can create constructive change in
public life. Such determination takes enormous work, particularly as humans,
often in the face of corrupt leadership and failed government, continuously
find themselves in situations of violence that can dangerously escalate to war
and that potentially create conditions for genocide. The dangers of genocide
and international response to situations of potential atrocity must be actively
discoursed and thought out in the public sphere.
Levi urged historical knowledge coupled
with truth telling in everyday life. His writings call present and future
readers to listen, witness, and contemplate events of atrocity and their causes.
Levi consistently argued for reason and critical discourse over reaction and aggression.
He advocated honesty and revelation over silence and complacency. The
conclusive remarks in The Drowned and the
Saved urge humans to solve problems of violence with reason, dialogue, good
will, and persistence in seeking alternatives to war and genocide. It is this
work that we are charged with continuing.
