Surviving the Holocaust: ‘I didn’t allow any hatred to grow. But I don’t blame those who did'
Among the horrors that Primo Levi quietly and even matter-of-factly documents in If This Is A Man – that greatest of all accounts of incarceration in a Nazi death camp – is a dream of invisibility. Not invisibility in the here-and-now of camp life, which might have been welcomed, but invisibility in the longed-for future, back home “among friendly people”. It is an as-though invisibility, not an actual one. Yes, they see him, but they cannot hear him. When he speaks of where he’s been, his listeners don’t follow. Don’t or won’t? This distinction is not made and perhaps cannot be made. Quite simply, his words don’t reach them. “They are completely indifferent; they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away without a word.”
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