'If This Is a Man'

by Primo Levi

My father, who survived the Holocaust, couldn't sleep. He also didn't want to. And with dreams where he saw his lost mother's face appear in the middle of a frying egg, fringed by bubbles of boiling fat, who could blame him?

He didn't talk about his family - it was too painful. More than that, words couldn't be trusted to convey the reality of what had happened.

Words are dangerous things, especially when you write as beguilingly as Primo Levi. He loves language, revels in linguistic oddities, and, assuming that the translator is faithful to the original, couldn't admit a badly chosen word into his work even if he wanted to.

Yet while you lose yourself in his writing, lulled by his prose into a luxurious state of relaxation, divorced from the real world, his jewel-like words are describing the very essence of evil.

‘If This Is a Man,' is Levi's account of surviving the Holocaust. An Italian Jew, he spent the last months of the war in Auschwitz, one of a handful in his transport of 650 to live. A cynic might describe it as the ultimate self-help book - a guide to surviving against the odds. But it's also a record book, a literal account of what you gain, and what you lose in the process.

Concentration camps existed to destroy lives on an industrial scale. Primo Levi shows how, in the process, their other real wickedness was to strip the inmates of everything that made them human. The struggle for life was so all-encompassing that there was space for no other emotion - no compassion for the weak nor even grief for yourself; as Levi describes it, being unhappy ‘in the manner of free men.'

While selection for the gas chambers was an ever-present threat, it was obscured by the daily battle with death from starvation, cold and illness. Avoiding these, by any means possible, was all that mattered and to fail was to die.

Many religions approve of suffering, as a means of purification. Levi's account gives the lie to this. When there is nothing but suffering, it corrupts. When it is removed, humanity returns.

Levi trusted in words. Commentators have said that he wanted his story to bear witness. And in a way it does, but so beautifully that his words, whether you want them to or not, redeem the ugliness of the story. I may remember the Haftling (prisoner) whose constant questioning marks him out as a dead man as soon as he arrives; I can't forget Levi reciting Dante from memory to a friend.

‘If This Is a Man' is a descent into darkness. Primo Levi's next book, ‘The Truce' details the journey back up again, where Levi returns to his native Italy through countries ravaged by war, and he and his companions regain their humanity.

On April 1^st 1987 Levi fell to his death. The debate as to whether or not it was suicide has continued ever since. What you believe rather depends on whether you agree that his prose, for all its warmth and elegance, contains a terrible truth about mankind - that our lives rest on a fragile layer of convention, thinner than a sheet of ice and capable of rupture at any time.

And if Levi, humane and intelligent as he was, looked into the future for mankind and saw only an abyss, what hope is there for the rest of us?

P.S. Richard Swinburne, who is apparently ‘a distinguished theologian and philosopher' once argued that ‘the Holocaust had a positive element because it gave Jews an opportunity to be noble and courageous'. And yet, do you know, I think that, presented with such an opportunity for myself, it's one I might just decline, though I'd be more than happy to accept on Mr Swinburne's behalf.