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Oct 15, 2015
The New Yorker editor David Remnick reads from Chapter 1 of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, his memoir about the Holocaust and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp, translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf.
"It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of a bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, or a conscious resignation, for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.
The doors had been closed at once, but the train did not move until evening. We had learned of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it implied some place on earth.
The train traveled slowly, with long, unnerving halts. Through a slit we saw the tall pale cliffs of the Adige valley pass by, and the names of the last Italian cities. We passed the Brenner at noon of the second day and we all stood up, but no one said a word. The thought of the return stayed in my heart, and I cruelly pictured to myself the inhuman joy of that other journey, with doors open, no one wanting to flee, and the first Italian names ... and I looked around and wondered how many, amid that poor human dust, would be struck by fate."
Part of an evening with Ann Goldstein, David Remnick, John Turturro, Robert Weil and Primo Levi's son, Renzo Levi. Watch the full program.
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