{"id":2753,"date":"2016-05-06T21:52:20","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T21:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/?p=2753"},"modified":"2016-05-06T21:53:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T21:53:43","slug":"2753-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/2753-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Primo Levi at the United Nations: Roger Cohen."},"content":{"rendered":"
\nRoger Cohen<\/a>\r\n\t \t\t
Roger Cohen joined The New York Times<\/i> in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming foreign editor. Since 2004, he has written a column for The International New York Times<\/i>, formerly known as The International Herald Tribune<\/i>. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times<\/i>. His columns appear every Tuesday and Friday. Mr. Cohen has written Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo<\/i>, an account of the wars of Yugoslavia\u2019s destruction, and Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis\u2019 Final Gamble<\/i>. He has co-written a biography of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, In the Eye of the Storm<\/i>. His family memoir, The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family<\/i>, was published in 2015.\u00a0<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Primo Levi survived Auschwitz through a double act of profound humanity: his ability even in the darkest days to see in fellow prisoners \u201cmen and not things\u201d and so, as he put it, avoid \u201cthat total humiliation and demoralization that led many to spiritual shipwreck\u201d; and his unceasing determination to bear witness so that nobody could ever say the unthinkable, including the murder at Auschwitz of hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, had not happened. Luck also played a part \u2013 everyone needs at least the absence of bad luck in war \u2013 but these were the inner resources Levi tapped to live.<\/p>\n

All humanity owes him a debt for this singular moral tenacity. His chronicle of a year in a Nazi death camp, If This is a Man, <\/i>is written with a severe and unsparing sobriety. Great art is less about accumulation than a stripping-away in pursuit of truth. Levi writes only of what he has seen. The crematoria are there, turning human beings into ashes; their acrid-sweet smoke hovers over the prisoners, ever present. But Levi does not describe or dwell on them because he has not seen them. His is the \u201cview from the ground,\u201d as Martha Gellhorn said of her work as a war correspondent.<\/p>\n

The core responsibility of the journalist, unchanging through all the rapid transformations of my profession, is to bear witness. If This is a Man <\/i>is, among other things, journalism raised through observation and distillation to the level of literature. For any journalist it is as good a holy grail as any.<\/p>\n

This, then, is how it was day after day: the thirst, the hunger, the cold, the pain, the drudgery, the violence, the scavenging, the stealing, the filth, the lice, the selections, the executions, the hopelessness, the dreaming, the fear, the glimmerings and the humiliations. \u201cHier ist kein warum,\u201d \u2013 <\/i>\u201cThere is no why here\u201d \u2013 Levi learns early on from a guard, who snatches from him, with gratuitous sadism, an icicle he has grabbed to quench his thirst. On page after page, with a chemist\u2019s precision, Levi assembles detail by detail his account of the Nazi exercise in barbarism, a program of senseless mass murder embraced by the nation whose civilization produced Beethoven. He wants historians to know, he wants the whole world to know, lest anyone forget. But who will believe him or care?<\/p>\n

In the passage you have just listened to, Levi\u2019s subliminal fears about humanity find expression in a dream. He has returned. \u201cIt is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people\u201d in Turin. But as he recounts the horror, nobody cares. Listeners do not follow him. His sister leaves without a word. Indifference \u2013 the word now engraved on a wall at the entrance to the Holocaust Memorial in Milan \u2013 reigns. It produces in the dreaming Levi \u201ca desolating grief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indifference to the fate of the Jews of Europe was, of course, one reason they ended up in Nazi death camps whose commanders directed murder on an industrial scale for years. Throughout history, it has proved a widespread human response to terror. When action, resistance, may result in death, the averted gaze is the easier course. But indifference is the midwife to iniquity. Sit on the fence and people get killed behind it. I remember how, returning from the killing fields of Bosnia to Paris, I would try to explain at dinner parties the genocide against the Muslims of Bosnia that I was witnessing and writing about. Soon eyes would glaze over. Somebody would say, \u201cPass the Camembert.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many prisoners, it transpires, are having Levi\u2019s dream. \u201cWhy,\u201d he asks, \u201cis the pain of every day so constantly translated, in our dreams, into the ever repeated scene of the story told and not listened to?\u201d<\/p>\n

Because humanity, unless jolted, will turn from painful truths: History, the establishment of truth against the work of the fabricators of myth and the amnesiacs, may take decades to establish. If This is a Man<\/i> was published in 1947 to a deafening silence. Nobody was much interested. Only after many years did it receive due recognition. Levi\u2019s testament was in the end implacable. He had borne witness, as he vowed to. He had given immortal expression to the facts he lived. He had embedded an arrow in the cold heart of indifference. His story was listened to at last.<\/p>\n

Memory and history are not the same. As Pierre Nora, the French historian, has observed, they can be opposites. Memory, he wrote, \u201cis in permanent evolution\u2026subject to the dialectics of remembrance and amnesia\u2026and liable to all kinds of uses and manipulations. Memory becomes latent for a long time and then suddenly revives.\u201d In other words, it can be dangerous, as Hitler proved, using the German humiliations of World War I as his incendiary raw material.<\/p>\n

Levi, by writing what he saw in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, anchored history against the buffeting of manipulative memory and convenient indifference.<\/p>\n

The battle must be endlessly renewed, as this political season in America has reminded us. Trumpism is dangerous because we know from history what great power and the temperament of a bully can produce. I will leave you with Levi\u2019s prescient words in an appendix to If This is a Man<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must therefore be distrustful of those who try to convince us using tools other than reason, or of charismatic leaders: we must be wary of delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it\u2019s difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it\u2019s best to be suspicious of all prophets; it\u2019s better to give up revealed truths, even if they thrill us by their simplicity and their splendor, even if we find them convenient because they can be acquired for nothing. It\u2019s better to content ourselves with other, more modest and less exciting truths, those which are gained laboriously, little by little and without shortcuts, through study, discussion and reasoning, and which can be verified and proved.\u201d<\/p>\n

E quindi niente <\/i>goes a telling Italian phrase\u2026And so nothing\u2026E quindi niente<\/i>\u2026Life can seem meaningless, arbitrary and cruel. But no! Little by little, and without shortcuts, Levi instructed us in what it is to be human and stand vigilant against the wolves.<\/p>\n

Obstinate facts and revelatory restraint are the building blocks of his outrage, and so, slowly, his outrage becomes all of ours. This institution, grounded on the principles of shared humanity, has no meaning if Levi\u2019s words were ever to lose their meaning and resonance. It is as simple, in the end, as that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Primo Levi survived Auschwitz through a double act of profound humanity: his ability even in the darkest days to see in fellow prisoners \u201cmen and not things\u201d and so, as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2754,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPrimo Levi at the United Nations: Roger Cohen. - Printed_Matter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/2753-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Primo Levi at the United Nations: Roger Cohen. - 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