For good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress toward justice and peace.
But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.
Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.
An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the “I don’t know” and “I do not remember” that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.
All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is natural that they should take care that the gold does not leave the camp.
He understood before any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself no indulgences, he lost no time complaining or commiserating with himself and with others, but entered the battle from the beginning.
He fights for his life but still remains everybody’s friend. He “knows” whom to corrupt, whom to avoid, whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist.
Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?
She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to “free a little black boy.
Fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away.
I will tell just one more story... and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.
Get up”: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A.
For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.
We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.
The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing.
From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him, but an instrument in his hands.
Pensavo molte cose insensate, e non pensavo alcune cose tristemente sensate.
Dat maakt me woedend, hoewel ik toch allang weet dat het in de orde der dingen ligt dat de bevoorrechten de niet-bevoorrechten onderdrukken: op die mensenwet berust de sociale structuur van het kamp.
Nessuno ebbe animo di venire a vedere che cosa fanno gli uomini quando sanno di dover morire.
What do you take me for? Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you think I have never dealt in eggs?