Discerning Fact from Fiction: Witnessing, testimony, and memory through the lens of Primo Levi

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Discerning Fact from Fiction Witnessing, testimony & memory through the lens of Primo Levi

By Muna Adil

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Table of Contents

Page Aim

……………………..……………………………………………………………….. 3

Learning Objectives

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Introduction

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Life & Work

..……………………………………………………………….………… 6

On Witnessing, Testimony, & Memory

….…………………………………. 9

Summary

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References

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Appendix

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Aim

The following report is an attempt to explore and analyse Primo Levi’s recollection of his experiences at Auschwitz, and the potential problems that arise with taking firsthand witness accounts at their word. The report will aim to come to some semblance of an understanding of Levi’s inner workings with regards to witnessing, testimony and memory, and whether it can be trusted to be wholly valid, if at all.

Learning Objectives

This report aims to:

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Give a brief overview of Primo Levi’s life and work

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Explore Levi’s testimony and his understandings of the mechanisms of being a witness to history

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Analyse the difficulties and problems with witnessing, testimony, and memory, with regards to Levi’s works

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Introduction

“Suffering is not the most terrible thing; worse is to have the reality of one’s suffering erased.”1

- Dan Pagis, Israeli poet and concentration-camp survivor (1930-1986)

The Italian Jewish chemist and writer, Primo Levi (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) is most known for his profoundly affecting accounts of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz and the lasting impressions the haunting experience made on his mental sphere.

Levi is perhaps one of the few figures in history that has truly managed to evoke the sentiment that ‘the personal is political.’ There are few writers of history that have so profoundly managed to encapsulate their political experience in such a narratively intense, vivid, and personal manner. So unequivocally vital are Levi’s accounts of his time at Auschwitz to history that they are now essential components of college and university syllabuses on the Nazi regime.

But Levi’s recollection is not easy to read by any means. The bleak nature of what he is recounting is made bearable only by the fact that Levi is an excellent writer who narrates the most excruciating of details with the utmost of softness.

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As quoted in: Wood, J. (2015), “The Art of Witness” in The New Yorker, September 28, 2015 issue.

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However painful, it is necessary that Levi’s works do not go unread and unappreciated, for in them lies not only a rich record of one of the most defining moments in history, but a deep knowledge of human behaviour, experience, and survival.

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Life & Work

“It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average lifespan of the prisoners destined for elimination…. I was captured by the Fascist Militia on 13 December 1943. I was twenty- four, with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency…to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships. I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion…. At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly.”

- Primo Levi, in ‘If This is a Man’2

Primo Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, at Corso Re Umberto 75, into a liberal Jewish family, and appears to have been a perceptive thinker from a very early age. In primary school, he was top of his class, and as a teenager his acumen

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Levi, P., translated by Woolf, S. (1987) If This is a Man & The Truce, London: Abacus

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distinguished him from the crowd at Liceo D’Azeglio, Turin’s leading classical academy. Levi also stood out for his Jewishness.3

According to Levi, his mistreatment at school was “uniquely anti-Semitic,”4 yet some, such as his English biographer Ian Thomson, note: “How far this impression was coloured by Levi’s eventual persecution is hard to tell.”4 This theme of the clarity and legitimacy of Levi’s memory is one that we will come to explore later, but what is important to note here is that Levi attributed feelings of victimisation and persecution right to the very early beginnings of his life.

As the Fascist militia spread across Europe and into Italy, Levi and his companions, then part of an increasingly active Italian resistance movement, were arrested by the Nazi regime on 13 December 1943. Levi confessed to being Jewish and was taken to the internment camp at Fossoli near Modena. He recalled that as long as the Italian Social Republic held control of Fossoli, he was not harmed.

Yet all of this changed as German strength grew, and on 21 February 1944 Levi was transported to Monowitz, one of three main camps at Auschwitz. Here, he spent eleven months before the camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 18 January 1945. The average life expectancy of a camp detainee was three months. Of the 650 Jews who were brought to Monowitz alongside Levi, only twenty left the camps alive.

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Anissimov, Myriam (1999) Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, New York: Overlook.

Thomson, I. (2003) Primo Levi, London: Vintage

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It wasn’t until two years later that Levi began his writing career. He died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. While his death was officially ruled a suicide, some evidence supports the possibility that the fall was accidental.

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On Witnessing, Testimony, and Memory

“We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion which I have gradually come to accept by reading what other survivors have written, including myself, when I re-read my writings after a lapse of years. We, the survivors, ae not only a tiny but also an anamolous minority.

We ae those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face tof the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.�5

- Primo Levi

Levi’s work is uniquely positioned to provide the reader with an authentic understanding of the atrocities he faced on account of his wholesome, yet light, manner of writing, in which he tells his story without omitting, distorting, or dramatizing. Levi places utmost importance on the absolute raw presentation of memory, no matter how gruesome or horrific the contents, in order to preserve perfectly the events of history.

Primo Levi, in addition to being a sensitive observer, was also highly aware of the perceived problems of being a witness to monstrosity, and the potential

As quoted in: Hobsbawm, E. J. (1995) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 19141991, London: Abacus.

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limitations of memory and recall. This is apparent from the very first page of his memoir:

“Mi pare superfluo aggiungere che nessuno dei fatti è inventato” (It seems needless to add that I have not made up any of these events.)6

- Primo Levi, at the start of ‘If This is a Man’

This cautious entry into his past makes it clear that Levi believes in the intactness of his memory and maintains his capability to repoduce the horrific events of the Holocaust, not just accurately, but vividly. Though Levi tells his tale in a narrative style, and the content of his words makes it appear more so, he wishes to convey to the reader the importance of discerning fact from fiction.

Antony Lerman, in ‘The Art of Holocaust Remembering’ (Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 1989), confirms this confident assertion in recalling traumatic events:

“Those who hold to the orthodox view of how to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust face the problem of deciding where precisely to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable accounts. In its ‘purest’, most extreme form, this orthodoxy has gave doubts as to whether any literary representations of the Holocaust which contain even a fraction of fictionalised or imagined content can ever be justified. If both language and the imagination are inadequate then only the survivors can speak of the

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Levi, P., translated by Woolf, S. (1987) If This is a Man & The Truce, London: Abacus

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Holocaust. What they have written is, by implication, raw memory, unmediated by the imagination, untainted by the post-Holocaust fragmentation of language. Their language is acceptable because of its authenticity. Survivors’ representation and the testimony of witnesses now dead fall outside of the sphere of literary or cultural criticism because of their documentary, histoical and factual character.”7

But not everyone agrees with the notion of infallible memory, no matter how affecting and impressionable the contents. Giacomo Debenedetti, in The Sixteenth of October 1943, claims that the account of a survivor can never be taken at its word as it can never be “raw memory, unemdiated by the imagination.”8

To even begin to doubt the truthfulness of Levi’s words may appear to some as crude and perverse, yet the essence of Dedenedetti’s poposition is that though the core of the account may be accurate, retelling a story essentially entails reshaping raw experience to compose a story-like narrative and therefore inevitably effects the information contained within the memory. Judith Woolf, in her book The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi's If this is a Man, calls this subliminal alteration “fictive shaping.”9

Levi, however, as previously mentioned, is acutely aware of this handicap, especially when considering the gravity of the story he is attempting to tell. In as

Lerman, A. (1989) “The Art of Holocaust Remembering” in Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 1989 issue.

Debenedetti, G. (1996) The Sixteenth of October 1943 and Other Wartime Essays, Leicester: Troubador Publishing.

9 Woolf, J. (2001) The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi's If this is a Man, Leicester: Troubador Publishing.

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much as language can afford him, he is burdened with enabling readers to imagine an unimaginable tale in words that they are able to study, absorb, and understand.

Levi never gave himself the permission to fail in the imperative task of bearing witness to and re-creating the horrors of the Holocaust for those who did not experience it themselves: “Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”10

Thus, Woolf argues, that ‘fictive shaping’ for Levi, far from diverging from the transparency of the truth, is a means to elucidate and illustrate the immediacy of his experience in a manner that allows readers “to suspend not their disbelief but their desire not to know, and thus to experience that imaginative identification which will enable them to enter and make sense of the world of the book.” Accordingly, Levi’s ‘fictive shaping’ and narrative style of recounting memory isn’t an unintended accident, but an effective tool to entice the audience to read content that might have otherwise shut them down completely.

Yet Levi’s consciousness of his own story-telling style is not enough for us to be satisfied with his account. There are other factors, outside of Levi’s control, and perhaps even outside of his knowledge, that may have had an impact on the accuracy of his recollection.

Memory, as we understand it today, innately possesses what is known as a ‘construction defect.’ In other words, memory does not operate in the same manner as a video recorder in the sense that it does not relay information in the exact form in which it was received. Contrary to popular opinion, memory is reconstructed from

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As quoted in: Thomson, I. (2003) Primo Levi, London: Vintage

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experience, and therefore has the potential to fool or deceive the subject, to the point where the subject’s mind can no longer differentiate between fact and fiction.

According to renowned memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, memory is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.”11

The weaknesses of eyewitness testimony are best illustrated in the psychological study by Loftus and Palmer (1974) Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction.12 In this study, the conductors asked participants to watch a short video of a car crash and then, as a witness to the incident, guess the speed with which the two cars had come into contact. Loftus & Palmer tested different participants with leading questions and suggestive visual imagery to see if these would have any effect on their response. The findings of the study (see Appendix A) show that the information particpants received after the event had a highly significant impact on their memory of the event, thus indicating that the memory of any given event is exceedingly malleable.

The study concluded that original eyewitness testimony and memory, far from being infallibale, is prone to being modified, altered, or enhanced based upon information a subject receives after the passing of the experience. Several more scientific studies have come forward with similar conclusions to support Loftus’ theory about the accuracy, or lack thereof, of witness testimony and memory.

As quoted in: Arkowitz, H. and Lilienfeld, S. O. (2010) “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts” in Scientific American Mind, January/February 2010 issue.

12 Loftus, E. F. & Palmer, J. C. (1974) “Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory” in Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5) issue.

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Summary

With regards to Levi, this implies that his memory of his experiences at Auschwitz, however moving and seemingly raw and authentic, cannot be understood as reality. In light of this knowledge we are forced, however uncomfortably, to doubt, rethink, and question Levi’s account of his experience. Uncritical acceptance of the purity of witness testimony and memory would be not just unfair to the audience, but a maltreatment of Levi’s text itself.

Levi himself never intended his works to be a replica of his experience, but rather a narrative that compels readers to study his works sans any barriers with the ultimate motive of remembering the atrocity that was the Holocaust. Levi’s intent is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten.

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References

1. Anissimov, Myriam (1999) Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, New York: Overlook.

2. Arkowitz, H. and Lilienfeld, S. O. (2010) “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts” in Scientific American Mind, January/February 2010 issue.

3. Debenedetti, G. (1996) The Sixteenth of October 1943 and Other Wartime Essays, Leicester: Troubador Publishing.

4. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1995) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London: Abacus.

5. Lerman, A. (1989) “The Art of Holocaust Remembering” in Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 1989 issue.

6. Levi, P., translated by Woolf, S. (1987) If This is a Man & The Truce, London: Abacus.

7. Loftus, E. F. & Palmer, J. C. (1974) “Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory” in Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5) issue.

8. Wood, J. (2015), “The Art of Witness” in The New Yorker, September 28, 2015 issue.

9. Woolf, J. (2001) The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi's If this is a Man, Leicester: Troubador Publishing.

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Appendix

Appendix A

Results of Loftus & Palmer’s Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction (1974) (Source: Loftus, E. F. & Palmer, J. C. (1974) “Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory” in Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5) issue.)

The estimated speed was affected by the verb used. The verb implied information about the speed, which systematically affected the participants’ memory of the accident. Participants who were asked the “smashed” question thought the cars were going faster than those who were asked the “hit” question. The participants in the “smashed” condition reported the highest speed estimate (40.8 mph), followed by “collided” (39.3 mph), “bumped” (38.1 mph), “hit” (34 mph), and “contacted” (31.8 mph) in descending order.