After his “liberation” from the death camp at Auschwitz, Italian scientist Primo Levi wrote extensively about his experiences there.  From an essay on the central problems writing Holocaust memoir, “Primo Levi and the Language of Witness“, by Michael Tager:

Like many Holocaust survivors writing about their experiences, Primo Levi expresses both the urge to bear witness, and doubt about whether he can use language to communicate his experience adequately.(1) To enhance his memory, he began making notes while still in Auschwitz, even though he could not keep them because any writing by a prisoner was considered espionage. Recalling his life just after his return to Italy, Levi compares himself to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner who waylaid guests on the way to the wedding feast to tell them of his misfortunes, because Levi behaved similarly, telling his story to everyone and anyone who would listen. Indeed, his last two books about Auschwitz, published thirty-five and forty years after his release, take the same verse from The Ancient Mariner as their epigraph:

Since then, at a uncertain hour, That agony returns, And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

Near the end of his life, his memory of his year in Auschwitz remained “much sharper and more detailed than anything before or since,”(2) and he could not bear to let remembered details fade away. Part of his compulsion to write about Auschwitz reflected an attempt to cope psychologically with the injury done to him, to somehow “become a man again … neither a martyr, nor debased, nor a saint.”(3) V

But upon his release in 1945 he sensed that “nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain with us forever,”(4) and his repeated return to this subject matter supports his later conclusion that his injury “cannot be healed”(5) by the passage of time. Levi’s own suicide in 1987 more than forty years after his liberation perhaps shows the ongoing nature of the psychic wound inflicted upon him.(6) Surveying videotaped interviews of concentration camp survivors, Lawrence Langer argues that using words like “liberation” in connection with the Holocaust can be misleading because they “entice us into a kind of verbal enchantment that too easily dispels the miasma of the death camp ordeal and its residual malodors.”(7)

Misgivings accompany Levi’s continuing drive to remember and discuss: could he convincingly recount what happened? In Auschwitz, he had dreams in which he would tell his story and people would turn away, refusing to listen of believe him. He admits that words like “hunger,” “fear,” “pain,” “cold,” fail to convey the intensity of those feelings at Auschwitz, and that only a “new, harsh language” could describe them.8 Words developed in normal life did not seem applicable to Auschwitz; Langer describes how one survivor, who when first trying to tell others what had happened to her family in the camp, “remembers thinking that |My family were killed’ was totally inadequate, because |killed,’ she says, was a word used for |ordinary’ forms of dying.”(9) Neither did the word “gassed” seem satisfactory to communicate the enormity of the event, and she was driven toward silence despite her desire to speak. So much of what happened was incredible, and not comparable to anything Levi previously experienced or imagined, that he states simply in one passage, “no one can boast of understanding the Germans”(10) (SA 126). Entry into the death camp began with a journey of many days in a sealed boxcar that deposited him in an unknown location, leaving him spatially disoriented. His shock deepened upon arrival as he was further stripped of control over his destiny and even his basic bodily functions. Intense and unpredictable violence undermined his sense of connection between the present and the past and future. The problem of intelligibly describing such a profoundly disorienting experience, and finding language to bear witness to events he found incredible, and that many people did want to listen to, informs much of Levi’s work. In his survey of Holocaust literature, Alvin Rosenfeld finds this a common dilemma. He notes that camp inmates witnessed cruelty, deprivation, and terror on a scale that “so far surpassed anything previously known as to make writing about it a next-to-impossible task,” and that “all memoirists have known this sense of radical self-estrangement, which handicaps any thinking and writing about the Holocaust, but which their books themselves are written to break.”(11)

Because the overwhelming majority of Jews sent to Auschwitz perished, Levi also questions whether his exceptional status as a survivor qualifies him to discuss the true nature of the concentration camp. In his first memoir he uses the metaphor of “the drowned and the saved” to describe the prisoners, of whom the drowned “form the backbone of the camp … continually renewed and always identical” (SA, 82), whereas the paths to salvation were very few, difficult and improbable. In Levi’s own case an unlikely combination of factors helped him survive: he arrived relatively late in January of 1944, his knowledge of chemistry and German secured him a job inside a laboratory for several months, and a prisoner in another labor camp for non-Jewish Italian workers befriended him and smuggled him an extra ration of food every day for six months.

Do read the rest here

via wood s lot

Collected Poems of Primo Levi

The Survivor

Once more he sees his companions’ faces
Livid in the first faint light,
Gray with cement dust,
Nebulous in the mist,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a non-existant turnip.
‘Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone,
Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
It’s not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.’

America’s Black Holocaust Museum, the popular but financially struggling institution on Milwaukee’s north side, is closing Thursday because it can’t afford to keep its remaining staff.

The museum’s directors appealed to the public Tuesday for money and volunteer support to help the museum reopen. The museum also is negotiating with its creditors and city officials for assistance.

“We are working with our lenders to make sure that we don’t lose the building,” said Reggie Jackson, the museum’s board chairman. “We are in a position we hoped we’d never have to be in, but we believe this temporary closing will help us to get our financial house in order and get into a better position when we do reopen.”

Andrea Rowe Richards, speaking for the city’s Department of City Development, said:

“We’re hopeful that the community will step forward to work with all of us to retain this nationally significant museum.”

The 20-year-old museum was started in the basement of James Cameron, who survived a lynching in 1930 in Indiana. Cameron made it a lifelong mission to teach others about the historical struggles of blacks in America, from slavery to the present.

His museum is the first to commemorate and memorialize victims of lynching.