15
Walking into Whiteness
5 January 2004, Krakow
Patchy sleep. Breakfast in the hotel. J. seems to have recovered and we talk through the plan for today. To our surprise there are no direct trains to Auschwitz this morning but I spot one going to Trzebinia, halfway to our destination. I have an idea, and we board this train. The snow has got thicker, the train creaks along slowly, and after half an hour or so stops altogether at a small station – this must be Trzebinia. We sit on a bench, swaddled in scarves and hats, and I start to read to J. Fifty-nine years ago Primo Levi was here – in fact just over those tracks, there by the station building. Some weeks after the liberation of the camp, in February 1945, travelling from Krakow to Katowice, he tries to transmit to other people what had happened to him, he tries to find the words:
I climbed down on the platform to stretch my legs, rigid from the cold. Perhaps I was among the first dressed in ‘zebra’ clothes to appear in that place called Trzebinia; I immediately found myself the centre of a dense group of curious people, who interrogated me volubly in Polish.1 I replied as best as I could in German; and in the middle of the group of workers and peasants a bourgeois appeared, with a felt hat, glasses and a leather briefcase in his hand – a lawyer.
He was Polish, he spoke French and German well, he was an extremely courteous and benevolent person; in short he possessed all the requisites enabling me, finally, after the long year of slavery and silence, to recognise in him the messenger, the spokesman of the civilised world, the first that I had met. I had a torrent of urgent things to tell the civilised world: my things, but everyone’s, things of blood, things which (it seemed to me) ought to shake every conscience to its very foundations … he questioned me, and I spoke at dizzy speed of those so recent experiences of mine, of Auschwitz nearby (yet, it seemed, unknown to all), of the hecatomb from which I alone had escaped, of everything. The lawyer translated into Polish for the public. Now I do not know Polish, but I know how one says ‘Jew’ and how one says ‘political’; and I soon realised that the translation of my account, although sympathetic, was not faithful to it. The lawyer described me to the public not as an Italian Jew, but as an Italian political prisoner. I asked him why, amazed and almost offended. He replied, embarrassed:
‘C’est mieux pour vous. La guerre n’est pas finie.’ …
I felt my sense of freedom, my sense of being a man among men, of being alive, like a warm tide ebb from me. I found myself suddenly old, lifeless, tired beyond human measure … My listeners began to steal away; they must have understood. I had dreamed, we had always dreamed, of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz: of speaking and not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone. After a while I remained alone with the lawyer; a few minutes later he also left me, urbanely excusing himself. He warned me against speaking German; when I asked for an explanation, he replied vaguely: ‘Poland is a sad country’. He wished me good luck, he offered me money which I refused; he seemed to me deeply moved.
We stare across the tracks at the builders repairing the waiting room opposite. Levi alone on that platform. And an aloneness only accentuated by the crowd around him. And all the voices in his head, all the faces of dead friends. What part of the human spirit, at such a moment, would want to go on? The catastrophe of Auschwitz. Coming through, somehow surviving. Slowly regaining strength and the will to go on. And then this second annihilation. What does ‘survival’ mean if your words cannot be heard? Then Levi returns to Italy and writes If This Is a Man. From summer 1945 to early 1946 he is possessed by the necessity to communicate his experience. He writes in an urgency of pain and finishes the book in a matter of months. Only by writing does he feel he can start to live again.
But I’m baffled by our society’s inability to hear Levi for fourteen years. This book, of immense power and awesome restraint, sinks virtually without trace on its appearance in Italy. Rejected by all the major publishers, it comes out under the imprint of a small Turin publishing house, Francesco de Silva, in October 1947. No more than 1,500 copies are sold. And then – in a remarkable historical echo of the fate of Melville’s Moby-Dick (also almost totally ignored on publication, the surviving books later incinerated in a warehouse fire), the remaining 1,000 books are subsequently destroyed by a flood in a warehouse. It receives only modest reviews, and Levi returns to his work as an industrial chemist on the outskirts of Turin. What was it in 1947 that meant the world could not hear Levi? A societal inability to hear, which shifts imperceptibly over the years?
Eleven years later, in 1958, the respected Italian publishers Einaudi finally agree to bring out a new edition of If This Is a Man; in 1959 Orion publish the first English translation, but even these editions do not make a dramatic impact at first. It is only with the publication of the German edition in February 1961, which sells 20,000 copies immediately, that the book finally gains the acclaim it deserves – fourteen years after it came into the world.fn1 Jorge Semprún, another survivor, and writer of exceptional insight, reflects on the eighteen-year delay between his writing about the experience of deportation and suffering at Buchenwald (Le Grand Voyage), and its publication – similar to Levi’s own experience of the delay between his ignored first writing and the global audience he’d gained on the publication of his second book, La Tregua (The Truce). It was
as though an ability to listen had developed on its own, beyond all the petty circumstances of our own lives, within the almost unfathomable progress of history. A development all the more remarkable and fascinating in that it coincides with the first accounts of the Soviet Gulag that managed to surmount the West’s traditional barrier of distrust and misunderstanding: Alexsander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in that same spring of 1963.
What are the voices today that we as a society cannot hear?
*
There are no trains to Oświęcim for an hour and a half. And the buses are going everywhere except there. So in the end we get a taxi the last twenty kilometres. We enter a nondescript town. Light industrial buildings on the outskirts. A gleaming new BP garage. Having read and thought so much over the last twenty years about Auschwitz, this arrival is something of an anticlimax. We leave our rucksacks in the left luggage at the station, conscious of the irony of such a place in this town, and then buy a map of the town at a kiosk opposite. We have a very clear plan of what we want to do today – we will try to link the original Auschwitz camp (known as Auschwitz I) with the Buna-Monowitz complex (referred to as Auschwitz III). We walk south for a few minutes, parallel to the train tracks, past some ugly, three-storey brick houses, then turn left down S. Leszczyńskiej, a long, straight road with cherry trees on each side. On our right, ruined factories. I immediately wonder when these were built. Of every building in this town, like every elderly person here, the question will be – before or after? And imagine being a child growing up here – the albatross of history round your neck. How would you reply when people asked you where you came from?
After fifteen minutes or so we reach the museum complex where the main camp was, on our left. Most of the snow in the expansive car park is undisturbed today, just a single coach with a bored-looking driver smoking his cigarette and waiting. Perhaps a dozen other cars. Off season. We head towards the entrance to the museum, though we are not going to go in. We have another map in our heads, an entirely different focus and set of questions. Instead, we enter the bookshop outside the museum. A middle-aged woman with glasses stands up and puts down her reading as we come in. In my halting Polish I ask if she speaks English: