Moments Of Reprieve - Primo Levi

MOMENTS OF REPRIEVE – PRIMO LEVI

Woody Allen once said that life is divided up between the horrible and the miserable. The horrible being those with, for example, a terminal illness and the miserable being everyone else. So you should be thankful if you're miserable. You're lucky to be miserable. Which kind of brings us to Primo Levi and the subject of Auschwitz.

Having survived the horrors of the Nazi death camps and the gruelling trek back to his Italian homeland after the Second World War came to an end, Primo Levi made it his mission to ensure the story of Nazi Germany and the concentration camps was made known to the world. To that end, from being a chemist he took up writing as a means to pass on his message.

In 1987 Levi was found dead at the bottom of his stairs at his house and his death was pronounced as suicide. It seemed that the experience of Auschwitz had finally caught up with him. It would make more sense, however, if his death was actually an accident and that he fell down the stairs rather than throwing himself down them. If suicide had been his intention, as a chemist he would have known far easier and far more efficient ways of killing himself through poison rather than the clumsy method of hurling himself down some stairs, potentially not dying in the process but merely ending up seriously injured.

Primo Levi wrote a number of books on the subject of the Nazi concentration camps, Moments of Reprieve being one of them. Essentially it's a collection of memories and thumbnail sketches of some of the people he encountered at Auschwitz. The thing is, very few of these people he writes about survived, which means that Levi's stories are like flowers laid at the graves of those now passed .

If it was the intention of the Nazis to dehumanize their prisoners before erasing their very presence from the earth, then by failing to remember those prisoners we are giving succour to that intention. By remembering the victims of the death camps we are keeping alight an eternal flame that in its own way helps to keep the darkness of totalitarian fascism at bay.

In one of the stories, entitled The Quiet City, Levi writes about a German Nazi collaborator who like himself was a chemist, the difference being that whilst Levi was a prisoner at Auschwitz, this particular German worked there willingly, turning a supposed blind eye to the atrocities going on around him.

Years later after the war, Levi writes a letter to him telling him that 'if Hitler had risen to power, devastated Europe and bought Germany to ruin, it was because many good German citizens behaved the way he did, trying not to see and keeping silent about what they did see.'

It's a brilliant, pertinent and very important point that stands today as a warning to mankind.

Moments Of Reprieve also contains a story entitled Rappoport's Testament that Chumbawamba once based a song of the same name on. It's an inspiring tribute to defiance whereby a fellow prisoner tells Levi that in spite of everything, he has not given up: 'If I meet Hitler in the other world, I'll spit in his face and I'll have every right to,' he says 'Because he didn't get the better of me.' 

Rappoport is one of those who didn't survive.

Auschwitz is a horrible subject but in its own very unassuming and quiet way, Moments Of Reprieve is a very good and very, very important book. 

John Serpico