Great Throughts Treasury

"He fights for his life but still remains everybody's friend. He knows whom to corrupt, whom to avoid, whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist."

"He never asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward."

"He reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving."

"He understood before any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself no indulgences, he lost no time complaining or commiserating with himself and with others, but entered the battle from the beginning."

"He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?"

"How important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once..."

"I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man."

"He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come."

"Here in the camp infirmary, the weather was ours: Places of pomegranate, legal visits and talking, talking ... wooden shack crammed with suffering humanity was filled with words of memories and a grief that German called Heimweh, a nice word that means grief at home. We knew where we come from - memories of the outside world inhabited our dreams and our vigils; We are establishing surprised that nothing we have not forgotten anyone called memory comes to us with painful clarity. But where we were going - we did not know. Whether we would survive the diseases and avoid the gas chambers, if we endure labor and hunger that test us? After that? Here temporarily spared insults and beating could be absorbed in themselves and reflect, and we made ??it clear that he will return. So far we traveled with sealed wagons; we are seen to lead to death our women and children; enslaved hundreds of times we went and came back marched to their humble work of burned people before us had occurred anonymous death. We would not go back. Nobody had to come here and bring the world together with a mark branded on our flesh, the bad news is what one dares to do to people here at Auschwitz."

"Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?"

"How can one hit a man without anger?"

"I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself."

"Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features."

"I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I?m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual."

"I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy."

"I read somewhere ? and the person who wrote this was not a mountaineer but a sailor ? that the sea?s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don?t know much about the sea, but I do know that that?s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head."

"I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth saving. The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offense received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave H„ftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation. But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man."

"I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first."

"I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day."

"I do not know what I will think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion."

"I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine."

"I felt a silent appreciation for lust. Of course, I'd tried, as you would not have tried ... In those days, in which quite fearlessly expecting death, fed my soul a breaking desire for everything to all kinds of human experiences cursed his previous life that I felt that I utilized the bad and insufficient, and I felt the time is poured between my fingers ran from my body minute by minute as bleeding that will not stop. I became a prospector and yet how, not to get rich, but to try this new skill to get back to land, air and water, of which I shared a wider every day abyss and to rediscover their profession a chemist in its proper, primary form, namely Scheidekunst, the art of ripping metal from rock ..."

"I will tell just one more story... and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail."

"I thought a lot of foolish things, and some things I did not think sadly sensible."

"I, however, drew another lesson, more simple and more specific, and I think that every supporter of our science could confirm it: not to have faith almost the same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but sodium nothing like this would happen), practical uniform, the estimated on various top-down and or possibly of substitutes and patches. Although insignificant, disparities could lead to dramatically different results - as railway switches - and much of the profession of chemist lies precisely in preventing such disparity in their knowledge closely in anticipation of their consequences. Indeed something that applies not only to chemists."

"If he believes time has run its course, a man is a sad thing too."

"If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one's desk, is a source of profound satisfaction."

"If it is impossible to understand, you need to know, because what happened, can return, the conscience may again be deceived and darkened: ours too."

"If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer."

"If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?"

"Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term extermination camp, and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: to lie on the bottom."

"If we could draw two conflicting philosophical consequences: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of the impurity, which gives rise to the changes, that is, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, I was more congenial. Because the wheel rotates, so that the living life, we want to impurities: even in the soil, as is known, if it has to be fertile. It takes the different, the different, grain of salt and mustard: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not fascist; He wants all the same and you're not the same. But even the spotless virtue exists, or if there is a detestable thing."

"I'm a libertine, but it's not my specialty."

"If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again."

"If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live."

"In countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. The well-known example of this is the crazy genetics preached in the USSR by Lysenko, which in the absence of discussion (his opponents were exiled to Siberia) compromised the harvests for twenty years. Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break."

"In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away."

"In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians. They think, more or less explicitly?with all the nuances lying between contempt and commiseration?that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises; they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair, without honor and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged and starving, and mistaking the effect for the cause, they judge us worthy of our abasement."

"In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt."

"In our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What"

"In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable."

"Interviewer: Is it possible to abolish man's humanity? Levi: Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, yes; and that is really the characteristic of the Nazi lager [concentration camp]. About the others, I don't know, because I don't know them; perhaps in Russia the same thing happens. It's to abolish man's personality, inside and outside: not only of the prisoner, but also of the jailer. He too lost his personality in the lager. These are two different itineraries, but with the same result, and I would say that only a few had the good fortune of remaining aware during their imprisonment; some regained their awareness of the experience later, but during it, they had lost it; many forgot everything. They did not record their experiences in their mind. They didn't impress on their memory track. Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; the memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue... all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; we were like work animals."

"In the space of a few minutes the sky turned black and it began to rain."

"In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing."

"In this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose."

"Is anything sadder than a train? That leaves when it's supposed to.That has only one voice, only one route? There's nothing sadder. Except perhaps a cart horse, shut between two shafts and unable even to look sideways."

"It is a pretty structure isn?t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that ?beautiful? edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges."

"It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist."

"It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining."

"It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all."