Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve is a story collection based on his one-year stay in Auschwitz. The stories follow his other writings about the experience, and for those those who don’t know, Levi was an Italian Jew and trained chemist. In 1943 he joined a group of partisans in the Italian mountains and was captured and sent to Auschwitz to work at a factory camp. He used his bread rations to pay another prisoner for German lessons, and with his knowledge of the language and his background as a chemist he was assigned to a factory producing synthetic rubber for Hitler’s armies. He survived by avoiding hard labor and trading stolen materials from the factory for extra food. Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians in 1945 while Levi lay in the camp hospital with scarlet fever. The SS evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march. Levi’s illness spared him this fate.
It would be another ten months in refugee camps before Levi returned to Italy. In later writings he noted the millions of displaced people on the roads and trains throughout Europe in that period. After his experience he wrote several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known work is Survival in Auschwitz, an account of his year in the death camp and rightfully called a work of genius.
Moments of Reprieve is a collection of stories, vignettes, and character sketches, a tribute to moments when man’s better angels confront living hell. Levi’s characters are based on real people, some appearing in his other works, and some fictionalized from memory. He published the stories in 1981 after thinking he was finished writing about his experience, but the memories of people and their survival strategies – not always successful – compelled him to honor their lives. The characters whose stories demanded to be told were eventually given what Levi called “the ambiguous perennial existence of literary characters.”
With the logic of a scientist and the inspiration of an artist Levi sets his stories and characters against a background of horror. Hunger, beatings, and death are part of daily life. In these tales of survival a man sings few lines of opera to lighten a situation, the gift of a turnip is monumental, a half-slice of bread can be leveraged for favors. In one story Levi risks his life by writing a letter for another prisoner, his payment a ration of bread and a small pocket knife – itself worth five rations of bread. In another, a barracks chief saves the soup ration for a prisoner who asks permission to observe the Yom Kippur fast since eating is forbidden on the day of atonement. The barracks chief, a German ex-communist now cooperating with the Nazis, calls him meshuge, crazy. He is astounded that anyone would refuse a daily ration of watery soup. Later, perhaps from his own sense of guilt, the chief asks why anyone would make such a sacrifice. The prisoner, named Ezra, a Cantor from a small Lithuanian village, tries to explain atonement as a general concept, and when the chief asks about forgiveness for his own sins Ezra tactfully refers him to the Bible. The chief agrees to save the soup for Ezra’s next-day ration.
At the rubber factory Levi worked in a lab alongside non-prisoners with whom he was forbidden to speak words unrelated to work. One day a young German technician who appeared to like him asked – in whispers – if he could fix a flat on her bicycle. Levi considered this invitation to break the rules “potentially useful.” Having fixed the flat after a risky process of finding the tools, he was rewarded with a hard-boiled egg and four sugar cubes, a treasure trove for any prisoner. In telling the story Levi remarks, “One human German does not whitewash the innumerable or indifferent ones, but it does have the merit of breaking a stereotype.”
My own reaction to a visit to Auschwitz years ago was numbing. This was an industrialized death camp where over a million people were murdered, some shot, but most gassed and cremated. I passed under the infamous entry sign that said in German, Work Sets You Free. With other tourists I walked the cleanly swept streets in silence: how difficult to imagine or even speak about what happened here. What people, what sounds, who filled these streets at daily roll call, who sat behind desks in the broom-clean buildings, who gave the beatings and did the shooting at the Execution Wall? It’s all there, but it isn’t.
I entered the gas chamber and stared up at the nozzles which sprayed the Zyclon-B gas over those who thought they were getting a shower. I exited to the ovens and rail cars once packed with bodies. In an evidence building I stood in silence before glass fronted rooms containing belongings taken from the condemned: one room packed with pots and pans, another with boots and shoes, another with luggage, the leather dried and discolored with time, another filled with crutches, wooden limbs and assorted prosthetics, another with a mountain of hair shorn from the victims.
After the visit I rarely spoke about what I’d seen. I wrote almost nothing in my journals. On the few occasions when I mentioned that I’d been to Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau, I felt as if I was bragging, or revealing a terrible secret because to express what I’d seen would somehow profane the dead. What right did I have?
Our present circumstance frees me from this constraint. Does one so easily jump from death camps in Poland to our own conflicted country with its nearly 200 immigration/detention facilities usually located far from major cities where they attract minimal attention? The answer must be yes. Think of our prison system, one of the fastest growing industries. Think of how we maintain the largest immigration/detention infrastructure in the world, detaining hundreds of thousands per year. These include legal permanent residents with longstanding family and community ties, asylum-seekers, and victims of human trafficking – detained for weeks, months, and sometimes years in county jails and for-profit prisons.
So there is a parallel, and while those detained may may not be gassed or burned to ashes, other transgressions abound as their lives are taken away. Shortly after his arrival in Auschwitz, after his hair was shorn and his clothing surrendered, Levi stood naked in the snow clutching a bundle of rags and a pair of ill-fitting boots. This was the uniform he and others would wear. He wrote, “Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man.”
Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but some have suggested the fall was accidental. He leaves one answer to our current state in this epitaph to Survival in Auschwitz:
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
Primo Levi's Moments of Reprieve ni mkusanyiko wa hadithi kulingana na kukaa kwake mwaka mmoja huko Auschwitz. "Hii ni kwa sababu ya hadithi zake za ""Mwanamke wa Levi"" na ""Mwanamke wa Levi"" ambao ni Wayahudi wa Italia na wanasayansi wa kemikali." Mwaka 1943 alijiunga na kundi la wapiganaji wa kupigana katika milima ya Italia na kukamatwa na kupelekwa Auschwitz kufanya kazi katika kambi ya viwanda. Alitumia chakula alichokuwa amepata kulipia mfungwa mwingine masomo ya Kijerumani, na kwa sababu ya ujuzi wake wa lugha na uzoefu wake wa kuwa mtaalamu wa kemia, alipewa kazi katika kiwanda cha kutengeneza mpira wa synthetic kwa ajili ya majeshi ya Hitler. Aliokoka kwa kuepuka kazi ngumu na kubadilishana vifaa vilivyodukuliwa kutoka kiwanda kwa chakula cha ziada. Auschwitz ilifunguliwa na Warusi mwaka 1945 wakati Levi alikuwa amelazwa katika hospitali ya kambi akiwa na homa ya rangi nyekundu. Jeshi la SS liliondoka kambini wakati Jeshi Nyekundu lilipokaribia, likilazimisha wote isipokuwa wale waliokuwa wagonjwa sana waende kwenye maandamano marefu ya kifo. Ugonjwa wa Lawi ulimzuia asipatwe na hali hiyo. Angekuwa miezi mingine kumi katika kambi za wakimbizi kabla ya Levi kurudi Italia. Katika maandishi yake ya baadaye alitaja mamilioni ya watu waliohamishwa barabarani na kwenye magari-moshi kotekote Ulaya katika kipindi hicho. Baada ya uzoefu wake aliandika vitabu kadhaa, riwaya, makusanyo ya hadithi fupi, insha, na mashairi. "Kazi yake maarufu zaidi ni ""Uhai katika Auschwitz,"" akaunti ya mwaka wake katika kambi ya kifo na haki kuitwa kazi ya kipaji." "Moments of Reprieve" ni mkusanyiko wa hadithi, vichekesho, na picha za wahusika, heshima kwa wakati ambapo malaika bora wa mwanadamu wanakabiliwa na kuzimu ya kuishi." Wahusika wa Levi wanategemea watu halisi, baadhi yao wanaonekana katika kazi zake nyingine, na wengine ni wa uwongo kutoka kumbukumbu. Alichapisha hadithi hizo mwaka 1981 baada ya kufikiri alikuwa amemaliza kuandika juu ya uzoefu wake, lakini kumbukumbu za watu na mikakati yao ya kuishi - sio mafanikio kila wakati - ilimlazimisha kuheshimu maisha yao. "Watu ambao hadithi zao zilitaka kuelezwa, hatimaye walipewa kile ambacho Levi aliita ""kuwepo kwa kudumu kwa wahusika wa fasihi"" na ""kwa mantiki ya mwanasayansi na msukumo wa msanii,"" Levi anaweka hadithi zake na wahusika dhidi ya mandhari ya kutisha." Njaa, mapigo, na kifo ni sehemu ya maisha ya kila siku. Katika hadithi hizi za kuishi, mtu anaimba mistari michache ya opera ili kupunguza hali, zawadi ya turnip ni ya kihistoria, nusu ya kipande cha mkate inaweza kutumika kwa neema. Katika hadithi moja, Lawi anadharau uhai wake kwa kuandika barua kwa ajili ya mfungwa mwingine, akilipwa kipimo cha mkate na kisu kidogo cha mfukoni - ambacho kina thamani ya vipimo vitano vya mkate. Katika picha nyingine, mkuu wa kambi anaweka akiba ya supu kwa ajili ya mfungwa anayeomba ruhusa ya kufunga siku ya Yom Kippur kwa kuwa ni marufuku kula siku ya upatanisho. Mkuu wa kambi, aliyekuwa Kamuni wa Ujerumani ambaye sasa anafanya kazi pamoja na Wanazi, anamwita meshuge, mpumbavu. Anashangaa kwamba mtu yeyote angekataa kipimo cha kila siku cha mchuzi wenye maji. Baadaye, labda kwa sababu ya hisia zake mwenyewe za hatia, mkuu huyo anauliza kwa nini mtu yeyote angefanya dhabihu kama hiyo. Mfungwa huyo, Ezra, ambaye ni Mtawala wa Kanisa kutoka kijiji kidogo cha Lithuania, anajaribu kumweleza kuhusu upatanisho kama wazo la jumla, na wakati mkuu anapomwuliza kuhusu msamaha wa dhambi zake mwenyewe, Ezra kwa busara anamweleza Biblia. Kiongozi huyo anakubali kuhifadhi supu hiyo kwa ajili ya chakula cha siku inayofuata cha Ezra. Alipokuwa katika kiwanda cha mpira, Levi alifanya kazi katika maabara pamoja na watu wasio wafungwa ambao alikatazwa kuzungumza nao maneno yasiyo na uhusiano na kazi. Siku moja fundi mmoja kijana Mjerumani ambaye alionekana kumpenda aliuliza <unk> kwa sauti ya chini <unk> kama angeweza kurekebisha baiskeli yake iliyokuwa imepasuka. Levi aliona mwaliko huo wa kuvunja sheria kuwa wenye manufaa, na baada ya kurekebisha nyumba hiyo baada ya kutafuta vifaa vya kuifanya iwe salama, alipewa yai lililokaushwa na sukari nne, hazina kubwa kwa mfungwa yeyote. "Kama Levi anavyosema, ""Mtu mmoja wa Ujerumani haangalizi watu wengi au wasio na hisia, lakini ana sifa ya kuvunja maoni ya kawaida."" - Alizungumza kuhusu maisha yake katika kambi ya Auschwitz." Huko kulikuwa na kambi ya mauaji ya viwanda ambapo watu zaidi ya milioni moja waliuawa, baadhi walipigwa risasi, lakini wengi waliuawa kwa kutumia gesi na kuchomwa moto. "Kutoka kwenye ishara ya kuingia kwenye nyumba hiyo, niliona maneno haya kwa Kijerumani: ""Kazi Inakuweka Huru.""" Pamoja na watalii wengine nilitembea katika barabara zilizosafishwa kwa usafi kwa ukimya: ni vigumu sana kuwazia au hata kusema juu ya yale yaliyotokea hapa. Ni watu gani, ni sauti gani, waliojaa katika barabara hizi kila siku, walioketi nyuma ya dawati katika majengo yaliyotiwa safi, waliopiga na kupiga risasi kwenye ukuta wa mauaji? Yote yapo, lakini hayapo. "Niliingia ndani ya chumba cha gesi na kutazama juu kwenye nozzles ambayo kunyunyizia gesi Zyklon-B juu ya wale ambao walidhani walikuwa kupata kuoga. """ Nilikwenda kwenye tanuri na magari-moshi yaliyokuwa yamejaa maiti. """Nilisimama kimya mbele ya vyumba vyenye vioo vyenye vitu vilivyotwaliwa kutoka kwa waliohukumiwa: chumba kimoja kilichojaa sufuria na sufuria, kingine chenye viatu na viatu, kingine chenye mizigo, ngozi iliyokauka na kufifia kwa muda, kingine kilichojaa mikongojo, viungo vya mbao na vipande mbalimbali vya nywele, kingine chenye mlima wa nywele zilizokatwa kutoka kwa waathiriwa." Baada ya ziara hiyo, ni mara chache sana nilizungumza juu ya yale niliyoona. Sikuandika karibu chochote katika majarida yangu. Katika pindi chache nilizotaja kwamba nilikuwa Auschwitz na karibu Birkenau, nilihisi kama mimi alikuwa boasting, au kufunua siri ya kutisha kwa sababu kueleza kile nilikuwa na kuona ingekuwa kwa njia fulani kuchafua wafu. Nilikuwa na haki gani ya kufanya hivyo? Hali yetu ya sasa inaniweka huru kutoka kwa kizuizi hiki. Je, mtu anaweza kuruka kwa urahisi kutoka kambi za kifo nchini Poland kwenda nchi yetu yenye migogoro na karibu vituo vyake vya uhamiaji 200 vya kizuizini ambavyo kwa kawaida viko mbali na miji mikubwa ambapo huvutia umakini mdogo? Jibu lazima liwe ndiyo. Fikiria mfumo wetu wa magereza, mojawapo ya viwanda vinavyoendelea kwa kasi zaidi. "Tunaendelea na kazi yetu ya kuimarisha mfumo wa uhamiaji na wa kuhifadhi watu duniani, na tunaweka mamia ya maelfu ya watu kizuizini kila mwaka.""" Hizi ni pamoja na wakazi wa kudumu wa kisheria na uhusiano wa muda mrefu wa familia na jamii, wanaotafuta hifadhi, na waathirika wa biashara ya binadamu - waliokamatwa kwa wiki, miezi, na wakati mwingine miaka katika magereza ya kaunti na magereza ya faida. Kwa hiyo kuna ulinganifu, na ingawa wale waliokamatwa huenda wasiangamizwe au kuchomwa moto, makosa mengine yanapatikana kwa wingi wakati maisha yao yanapoondolewa. Muda mfupi baada ya kuwasili Auschwitz, baada ya nywele zake kukatwa na nguo zake kuachwa, Levi alisimama uchi kwenye theluji akishikilia mfuko wa vitambaa na jozi ya viatu visivyofaa. Huo ndio mavazi ambayo yeye na wengine wangevaa. "Aliandika, ""Kisha kwa mara ya kwanza tuligundua kwamba lugha yetu haina maneno ya kuelezea kosa hili, uharibifu wa mtu."" - Levi alikufa mwaka 1987 kutokana na majeraha aliyoyapata katika kuanguka kutoka ghorofa ya tatu ya ghorofa ya ghorofa." Kifo chake kilitangazwa rasmi kuwa ni kujiua, lakini wengine wamedokeza kwamba kuanguka kwake kulikuwa kwa aksidenti. "Mtu mmoja aliandika hivi: ""Ninyi mnaoishi salama katika nyumba zenu zenye joto, ninyi mnaopata chakula cha moto na nyuso za kirafiki wakati wa jioni, fikiria kama huyu ni mtu anayefanya kazi katika matope, ambaye hajui amani, anayepigana kwa ajili ya kipande cha mkate, ambaye anakufa kwa sababu ya ndiyo au hapana.""" Fikiria kama huyu ni mwanamke, bila nywele na bila jina, bila nguvu ya kukumbuka, macho yake tupu na tumbo lake baridi kama chura wakati wa majira ya baridi. Fikiria kwamba hili lilitokea: Ninakupendekeza maneno haya. "Weka katika mioyo yako, nyumbani, barabarani, unapokwenda kulala, unapoinuka; warudi kwa watoto wako; au nyumba yako iwe imeharibika, ugonjwa uwe kikwazo chako, watoto wako wakuondoe uso wao."""