Primo Levi - Auschwitz Testimonies: 1945-1986

First published in Italian as Cos fu Auschwitz. Testimonianze 19451986 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin, 2015

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS

S egretariato E uropeo per le P ubblicazioni S cientifiche

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Chapter 1, Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews, first published in English in Auschwitz Report (Verso, 2006). Reprinted with permission from Verso Books.

English translation of Chapter 1 Judith Woolf, 2006

This English edition (excluding Chapter 1) Polity Press, 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1336-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1337-6 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levi, Primo, author. | Benedetti, Leonardo De, author.

Title: Auschwitz testimonies, 19451986 / Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti.

Other titles: Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz Alta Slesia). English

Description: Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017010122 (print) | LCCN 2017010642 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509513369 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509513376 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509513390 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509513406 (Epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Auschwitz (Concentration camp)Sanitation. | Monowitz (Concentration camp)Medical Services. | Concentration camp inmatesHealth and hygienePolandOwicim.

Classification: LCC D805.5.A96 L4713 2017 (print) | LCC D805.5.A96 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1853862dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010122

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Testimonial given to Primo Levi at Kattowitz, 30 June 1945, by the Head of Medical Service 125.

Unpublished typescript of first page of the Report.

Title page of Minerva Medica, 24 November 1946.

First page of the Report in Minerva Medica.

Primo Levi, Statement for the Hss Trial.

Primo Levi, Questionnaire for the Bosshammer Trial, 2 September 1970, first page.

La Stampa, 9 February 1975, first page.

Map of Nazi concentration camps.

Primo Levi. List of fellow deportees who entered Monowitz with Levi.

Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti. Copy by Levi of list in figure 9 (1971).

Judith Woolf

Given the status of many of these documents as an unmediated part of the historical record, I have followed the criteria already adopted by Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa in the Italian text by preserving irregularities of spelling and errors in the dating of events or in recalling the number or the names of fellow prisoners. On the basis of the same criteria, I have not standardized the various forms in which the German word Lager (camp) appears. I have translated the Italian word crematorio as crematory rather than crematorium, to make the distinction between a mass incineration plant and a civilized funeral facility. Documents recorded and transcribed by Colonel Massimo Adolfo Vitale, the founder of the Comitato Ricerche Deportati Ebrei (Search Committee for Jewish Deportees), bear the unmistakable signs of his indignation in the capitalizing of key words and the addition of multiple exclamation marks to the otherwise sober prose in which both Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti offer their testimony.

The first document in the book, the Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews, was originally published in Italy in a medical journal whose readers would have known, for instance, that famine oedema is a form of dropsy caused by malnutrition; that phlegmons are inflammations of the subcutaneous connective tissue, leading to ulceration and the formation of invasive abscesses; and that Panflavin, grotesquely employed to treat diphtheria in the camp infirmary, was a brand of throat lozenge. Such details matter because they reveal the stark facts of a time and place in which human beings were condemned to die from diarrhoea and diphtheria and invasive ulcers as deliberately as they were condemned to die by gas. For a complete glossary of the medical and pharmaceutical terms used in the Report, see Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti, Auschwitz Report, trans. Judith Woolf, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 7988.

Robert S. C. Gordon

Primo Levi's work has become something of a touchstone of Holocaust writing and of the moral authority of the survivor to give voice to the very worst sufferings of the twentieth century. In 19445, Levi spent almost a year battling against the humiliations and deprivations of a prisoner's half-life in Auschwitz specifically Auschwitz-III, the concentration and labour camp near Monowitz [Monowice] and nearly another year, following his miraculous survival and liberation, on a tortuous, stopstart journey home from Poland to Turin. His writings first emerged, locally, almost invisibly, in Turin in 1947, starting with the small-scale publication of If This is a Man, a pellucid exploration of the human body and the human mind as it adapted to life, or rather non-life, at Auschwitz. His profile and authority grew a little in the 1950s and 1960s, including glimmerings of an international presence, following the republication of that first book and the appearance of its sister volume, The Truce (1963), the story of his meandering return across the wastelands of post-war central Europe. He continued to write, publish, speak, and all the while work at his daytime profession as an industrial chemist. In a quite unique and unclassifiable book, The Periodic Table (1975), he brought to the page a fizzing chronicle of his life in/through chemistry, overshadowed only occasionally by memories of Fascism, anti-Semitism and genocide. The 1980s brought a step-change in his international reputation, with bestselling translations and lionization in the English-speaking world, crowned by the publication of his final book of essays on the Holocaust and its moral and historical legacy forty years on,