And then the lesson that Steinlauf, the former sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army, gives Levi a week after his arrival at Buna-Monowitz. His anger that Levi thinks it’s a waste of energy to try to wash and keep clean. We’re all about to die, what is the point? The ex-army man replies:
Precisely because the Lager [camp] was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts … to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilisation. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.
If This Is a Man must be one of the most brutally sensory books ever written. Today, in the warmth of the hotel, I’m repeatedly assaulted by Levi’s merciless detail of the impact of the changing temperature, and how this means life or death for the prisoners. The coming of the Polish winter, in October,
means that in the course of these months, from October till April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they become unstitched … Wounds will open on everyone’s hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one’s feet in the snow and wind.
Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who live in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born: and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.
In the same way in which one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We realised it when we left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark cold air had the smell of snow. In roll-call square, in the grey of dawn, when we assembled for work, no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we thought that if at the same time last year they had told us that we would have seen another winter in the Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric wire fence …
Something else that strikes me today is the way that for much of the book Levi locks us into an unbearable present tense (‘I feel’, ‘he lifts’, ‘I try’, ‘they watch’, ‘we fall’). The cumulative effect of reading this is that we experience the time in the book as almost endless, which is terrifying. Such a simple technique, yet devastating – for example, see how he uses it in the short chapter ‘The Work’. By keeping in this tense relentlessly, Levi makes us walk the ground with him, lift the steel, feel it cut into his shoulder, fall into the mud. He wants us to be with him in that place. He will not let us go. He wants us to understand that human beings are responsible for this. And that such behaviour continues as we read his words from our positions of comfort. The numerous places of suffering that are still in our world, and that, by averting our eyes, we allow to continue.
I put aside the book. It is afternoon now and J. is still out in the mountains. How necessary, having this space, as if suspended in time, in some place of recovery or sanitorium. The Magic Mountain indeed. I reflect on our shared project – the twenty years of Platform. I sense we’re now moving into new territory when both of us will need more space, to write, to explore our own creativity away from the collective pressures of management and the headspace that administration colonises. This excites me greatly, the idea of evolving a new shape for the organisation, allowing new forms of creativity to blossom. But I see J.’s nervousness about this, doubts about his role. I pick up two letters that he sent before Christmas and reread them, accompanied by the gentle ticking of the radiator and the white hillside beyond. The heat of the room is gently soporific, and as dusk approaches I doze, waking as J. returns from his explorations. And then we swap positions, as I venture outside for a short walk, and J. does some writing. Lower energy today, but that’s fine. In the evening we eat in the hotel, and end up playing pool in the bar with some local Polish guys who, rather to our surprise, are even worse than us.
3 January 2004, Hotel Gorski
Feeling a lot better today, yesterday’s rest seems to have headed off my oncoming cold. Between breakfast and lunch J. and I do a very curious, yet very necessary, thing. I sit in our room and finish a letter to him, which I’d started writing on his fortieth birthday, eight months before. And J. finds another room, on the other side of the hotel, and writes to me. Sometimes it is not because of lack of importance that things do not get finished. In fact, quite the opposite. In this whited-out landscape I reread my unfinished pages, written on a spring day, in my garden in east London last year – thoughts about how we’ve been able to work together so powerfully, how much our intense friendship has been the foundation on which Platform has flourished.
I try to pick up the threads of the letter and start writing again. I reflect on the manic pace of our work over the previous couple of years, the challenges of this but also its exhilarations. I wonder if this journey may be too much for both of us, too disturbing. I write another dozen pages or so – some of which are about men, vulnerability and intimacy: how although there has been a great shift in our lifetimes, I still feel there are challenges in what we express to each other, limits which sometimes frustrate me. And sometimes I wonder if we will ever get back the totality of trust we shared in the early days. I think back to the year or so when we shared the house in Brixton – when our bedrooms and even our journals and diaries were open to the other. But how much of this is simply nostalgia? For surely there can be no return. I sense we’re on the threshold of something amazing – that after years of labouring, a harvest is coming. And perhaps part of this process is trusting our own voices more. Allowing these to have greater freedom, not always having to filter everything through the lens of collectivity. And this prospect shouldn’t seem threatening, but actually liberating.
I write the last sentences as a further flurry of snow whitens the window.
‘So, my friend, I come to the end of this, my longest letter to you. I hope we can talk more about all these things in the next days, as we walk through snow and mountains, through cities and camps and killing grounds. There is much I cannot express here – to do with optimism and endurance, to do with ageing, to do with feeling blocked and having breakthroughs. But I hope, through walking with you, to find the words. Thank you for a remarkable twenty years. Our journey is only just beginning …’
We deliver our letters to each other, smiling and acknowledging the odd, Victorian formality of such an exchange, sending it up by bowing to each other, and then we return to our rooms to read them. Just the hum of the radiators. And the rustling of the paper being turned over. What is it in our society that means we can talk of war, of sexuality, of climate change, of pornography, of crime, of violence, yet the difficulty that exists is in trying to find words for the love between men?