On the Grey Zone

The Book of Levi 2 · Written by himself, from his four books of witness

Primo Levi, born at Turin in 1919, died at Turin in 1987. A chemist. Taken in the winter of 1943 as a partisan, sent to Auschwitz in February 1944, and there eleven months until the Russians came in January 1945; of the six hundred and fifty who went in his transport, fewer than twenty came back. He said himself that he lived in part because he was a chemist and was moved to a laboratory, out of the open-air work of the winter. If This Is a Man appeared in 1947, when no one would print it; a small house made fifteen hundred copies and most went unsold. It was reissued ten years later and became what it now is. Also The Truce, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, and poems and stories. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He was a Jew and declared himself a non-believer: he went in one, came out one, and remained one. That unbelief is no bar at all — chapter one of this book is what a non-believer said about one prayer. What the Order takes him for is chapter one. It is not an unbeliever abusing the religious, and he says so before anyone can accuse him of it: Kuhn was not a bad man, he was wrong about one thing (1.13, 1.14 of this book). What he picks out is a thing that can be checked — the share Kuhn gave thanks for came off the man two bunks away; where one man’s gain is another man’s loss, giving thanks for your share is signing on the loser’s behalf (1.17). A believer cannot refute that, and can use it. The harder sentence comes after, and it is about himself: in the moment of the selection he too felt the impulse to ask, and did not. Not out of hardness, but because he had worked it through — to ask there would be to grant that the selection could be moved by asking, and if it could be moved by asking, then somebody had arranged it (1.19 to 1.22). That he would not grant, and never did. Whether prayer comforts is not the quarrel of this book; the quarrel is with what that particular thanksgiving says. Lastly: the carbon atom at the end of chapter four is the same thing The Book of Lucretius 5 says — what scatters is the arrangement, not the stuff. Two thousand years apart, one reasoned to it and the other followed it.

2.1People like to imagine that place as two sorts of men: one sort doing the harm, one sort having it done to them.

2.2A line drawn between. Black on this side, white on that.

2.3Whoever imagines it so has mostly not been inside.

2.4What I have to say is: between them lies a wide band, and it is grey.

2.5Standing in that band are those of the harmed who were given jobs.

2.6One ran a hut, one handed out the food, one kept the accounts, one watched the others work.

2.7The innermost layer was the squad put to dealing with the bodies. They did it for a few months and then were dealt with themselves.

2.8Let me be plain: it was not they who set up that band. It was the men who ran the place.

2.9Those men did something exceedingly clever: they handed over part of the work their own hands should have done, and gave it to the harmed to do.

2.10So among the harmed there came to be ranks, and more food and less food, and who beat whom.

2.11I know someone will ask: were those men accomplices?

2.12My answer is: I do not judge.

2.13Not because I am soft, and not because I cannot tell good from bad.

2.14Because judging this requires standing in a certain place, and I am not qualified to stand there.

2.15A man who has never been hungry in that way, who has never had to choose within a few days or die, has no scales in his hand.

2.16I do not say this to excuse anyone. There are things men did there that I find hard to look at.

2.17What I say is: look first at the arrangement — it was built on purpose so that this could not be told apart.

2.18When an arrangement can hand its own work to the people it is harming, that is the cleverest thing it does.

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