But Buchenwald was hellish too, despite Semprún’s comment that Levi’s ‘experience had been so much more terrible than mine’. Between its opening in July 1937 and its liberation by American forces in April 1945, over 55,000 people lost their lives there – political prisoners, homosexuals and the disabled, Jews, Slavs, Poles, Roma, Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many others of no creed or faith. Buchenwald and Auschwitz shared something else: in both places the crematorium ovens burned twenty-four hours a day, manufactured by the same company, Topf & Söhne (from the town of Erfurt, close to Weimar) – who were very helpful in all their dealings with the SS and their requirements for more efficient ovens for burning human beings.
What moves me most in Semprún’s writing, and comes across so powerfully, is the sense that in Buchnenwald a spirit of solidarity among many of the prisoners somehow survived, even in phenomenally difficult circumstances – a fraternal tenderness certainly in Semprún’s case, emerging from shared political commitment and philosophical values which even Nazism, at its most extreme, could not totally extinguish.
The book opens with Semprún’s account of the liberation of the camp in April 1945, and how he comes across three Allied officers (two British, one French) who, looking at him, seem to be in shock. Semprún explains that the woods are so quiet because the smoke from the crematorium drove the birds away, ‘the smell of burned flesh, that’s what did it’. The officers wince in evident repulsion. Semprún then reflects on how difficult it will be to communicate the experience he’s managed to survive. He’s very impatient with the idea of the ‘ineffable’, so fashionable among the literati in the post-war years:
In short, you can always say everything. The ‘ineffable’ you hear so much about is only an alibi. Or a sign of laziness … language contains everything. You can speak of evil, its poisonous pleasures, its poppy flavour. You can speak of God, and that’s saying a lot. You can speak of the rose, the dewdrop, the span of a morning. You can speak of tenderness, and the infinite succour of goodness. You can speak of the future, where poets venture with closed eyes and wagging tongues …
But can people hear everything, imagine everything? Will they be able to understand? … I begin to doubt it, in that first moment, that first meeting with men from before, from the outside, emissaries from life – when I see the stunned, almost hostile, and certainly suspicious look in the eyes of the three officers. They’re speechless, unable to face me.
Reading this passage again, think about the parallels with Primo Levi – the embarrassed gaze of the young Russian soldiers on horseback who liberate Monowitz; the experience on the station platform at Trezbinia. The knowledge that you have survived an unspeakable experience, but people from the ‘living world’ will not be able to hear what you’ve gone through. Although Semprún doesn’t mention Levi’s experience at Trezbinia, there is, towards the end of Literature or Life, an extended reflection on what is shared between their experiences, sparked by Semprún’s shock at hearing on the radio of Primo Levi’s suicide in 1987:
On April 11th 1987 death had caught up with Primo Levi. In October 1945, though, after the long odyssey of his return from Auschwitz subsequently described in La Tregua (The Truce) he had begun writing his first book, Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man). He’d written it in haste, feverishly, with a kind of happiness. ‘The things I had suffered, lived through, were searing my insides,’ he wrote later. ‘I felt closer to the dead than to the living, I felt guilty for being a man, because men had built Auschwitz and Auschwitz had swallowed up millions of human beings, many of my friends, and a woman close to my heart. I felt as though I was cleansing myself by telling my story. I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.’
Indeed, a quotation from Coleridge’s poem serves as an epigraph to Levi’s last book, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) …
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
The agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.
‘I wrote,’ continued Levi, ‘concise poems tinged with blood, I told my story with a kind of dizzying compulsion, aloud or in writing, so often and so thoroughly that a book gradually came of this: through writing I recovered scraps of peace and became a man again.’ …
Primo Levi spoke on several occasions about his feelings during this period, about the austere joys of writing. It was through writing that he felt himself returning, literally, to life.
Yet when it was finished – a masterpiece of restraint, an account of incredible honesty, lucidity and compassion – this incomparable book found no takers. Every major publishing house turned it down. It was finally brought out by a small press and passed completely unnoticed. Primo Levi then abandoned all literary aspirations and concentrated on his career as a chemical engineer.
And so a dream he had described, a deportee’s nightmare, seemed to come true: you go home and tell everyone in your family, passionately and in great detail, about what you have gone through. But no one believes you. In the end, your stories create a kind of uneasiness, provoking a deepening silence. Those around you – even the woman you love, in the most agonising variations of the nightmare – finally rise and turn their backs on you, leaving the room.
History, therefore, appeared to be proving him right: his dream had become reality. It was only long years later that his book, Se questo è un uomo, abruptly obtained an audience, won a huge public, began to be translated throughout the world …
The time span between Levi’s first book – a masterful piece of writing; a complete flop in reaching its audience – and his second, La tregua, is in fact the same as that separating the failure in 1945 of my attempts to write and Le grand voyage. These last two books were written in the same period, published almost simultaneously: Levi’s in April 1963, mine in May.
Semprún returns again and again to the inability of the deportee and the survivor to communicate their experiences. And the way then that this leads to a sense of unreality, that perhaps your real experiences are dreams – or dreams within dreams, as he puts it. And the way these ‘dreams’, or rather nightmares, can invade the rest of life, and cut you off from those closest to you. Again he returns to Levi:
A dream that can awaken you anywhere: in the serenity of a green countryside, at a table with friends … sometimes with a lover, at the very moment of love. Anywhere, in short, with anyone: a diffuse and deep despair, the anguished certainty of the end of the world – of its unreality, at any rate … Nothing can stop the course of this dream says Levi: nothing can relieve the secret agony it causes. Even if you turn to a loved one, even if a friendly – or a loving – hand is held out to you … Even if they guess what’s happening to you, overwhelming you, annihilating you. Nothing will ever deflect the course of that dream …
‘Tutto è ora volto in caos: sono solo al centro di una nulla grigio e torbido, ed ecco, io so che cosa questo significa, ed anche di averlo sempre saputo: sono di nuovo in Lager, e nulla era vero all’infuori del Lager. Il resto era breve vacanza, o inganno dei sensi, sogno: la famiglia, la natura in fiore, la casa.’fn2