PRIMO LEVI'S UNKNOWN TEXT

Primo Levi’s Unknown Text (Contentions)
Local media outlets have been curiously silent about a story reported by Haaretz involving last month’s discovery in a Yad Vashem archive of a previously unknown 1960 text by Primo Levi (1919–1987), the Turin-born chemist and author of Holocaust memoirs. This article-length deposition of around 850 words, printed in L’espresso in September, apparently was solicited when the Israeli government was gathering testimonies for the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann. Only weeks before Levi’s testimony was taken on June 14, 1960, Israeli security agents nabbed Eichmann in a Buenos Aires suburb.

The Haaretz article points out that “it is known that Primo Levi was not called to the witness stand facing Eichmann’s glass booth,” a fact that stirs the imagination. Marco Belpoliti, who edited a definitive two-volume edition of Levi’s works, calls the newly discovered essay “tranquil, precise and elegant.”

Punctuated with repeated exclamation points for dramatic emphasis, the text echoes the author’s greatest works, like The Periodic Table, whose pellucid style answers the much-debated question of whether art can exist after Auschwitz. Perhaps even more impressively, Levi’s books testify that rational thought can survive the concentration camp experience. In the newly found testimony, Levi describes how he and his friends were denounced as partisans and arrested in 1943, and later transferred to a fascist militia camp. There, Levi notes, a guard treated them decently “after learning that we were Jews and not ‘true partisans.’” Levi adds: “He was later killed by partisans in 1945.” In 1944 the friends were transferred to another camp, where they worked as kitchen servants: “We also put together a cafeteria, in truth a rather poor one!!” Arriving at Auschwitz after further deportation, such productive labors were exchanged for daily agonies.

In the deposition Levi describes the barracks kapo, a “Dutch Jew, Josef Lessing, an orchestral musician by trade, who oversaw between twenty and 60 men, and as the 98th barrack’s supervisor, proved to be not only unyielding, but also evil.” Levi also mentions the camp’s Jewish doctors, some admirable and some not: “I recall Dr. Coenka of Athens, Dr. Weiss of Strasbourg, and Dr. Orensztejn, a Pole who behaved fairly correctly; I cannot say the same of Dr. Samuelidis of Thessaloniki, who did not listen to patients who consulted him and denounced the diseased ones to the German SS!!!”

Why the New York media silence about this real find? The account is only 850 words long, but every word matters in Levi’s chiseled prose. Could it be a question of the “Holocaust glut” that has affected the media and publishing industries ever since 1945? Levi himself was unable to find a publisher for his works in Israel until 1979 because, as he recounted, when he presented his books earlier to Israeli publishers, their response was: “Holocaust? We are up to our ears in it. No one will buy it.” Holocaust fatigue or not, this newly revealed text by a great writer demands attention.