Primo Levi in Konzentrationslager Auschwitz
By Morris Dean
In 2007, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) dedicated The Portable Atheist to Primo Levi (1919-1987). Levi spent a year as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where, Hitchens comments, he "had the moral fortitude to refuse consolation even while enduring the 'selection' process."
Two short selections from Levi's writings:
We're not in the Lager ourselves, and so far as I know we don't have esophageal cancer. The "commission" isn't checking our index cards and eyeing our fitness to go on living. But Nature, let's say, is. We may have or get something other than esophageal cancer. One way or another, one day we won't be fit enough to go on. Will we, too, have the courage to refuse to pray not to be "selected"?
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
By Morris Dean
Two short selections from Levi's writings:
Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.
Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that the next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer. [From If This Is a Man (1959)]
I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice...I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death...naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. [From The Drowned and the Saved (1986)]Hitchens quoted these two selections on his dedication page, and in quoting them he was presenting the first two of The Portable Atheist's "essential readings for the nonbeliever." Like Levi, Hitchens didn't pray either during the months between June 2010 and December 2011 when esophageal cancer was herding him to an early death.
We're not in the Lager ourselves, and so far as I know we don't have esophageal cancer. The "commission" isn't checking our index cards and eyeing our fitness to go on living. But Nature, let's say, is. We may have or get something other than esophageal cancer. One way or another, one day we won't be fit enough to go on. Will we, too, have the courage to refuse to pray not to be "selected"?
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
| Please comment |
Some days after I'd quit expecting the Burlington Times-News to print my letter in response to Mr. Steele's letter proclaiming that Christianity isn't a religion, lo and behold—and happily on Thor's Day—the letter appears in today's print edition:
ReplyDeleteLetters about religion don’t advance truth
In his letter published Dec. 27, "Christianity is more about relationship than religion," Dale O. Steele states that Christianity isn’t a religion. But it is. Faith-based, the whole nine yards.
And as my Dec. 18 letter was intended to suggest (before it was edited and given a misleading headline), Christianity is just a religion and its scripture no more "the Word of God" than the pronouncements of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or The Loose Canon: A Really Important Collection of Words. And since Christianity merits no special status, the newspaper would do as well to print the letters of followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as of Christians such as Mr. Steele. But it would serve truth better to print neither.
MORRIS DEAN
Mebane
Of course, as might be expected of this newspaper, the title undercuts my letter, for it is itself a "letter about religion." Mr. Steele's letter is more an expression of religious belief (faith-based) than a letter about religion....
The text of Mr. Steel's letter was included in a comment to the December 13 Thor's Day article titled "Whose word?"
Immediately after posting the comment above, I emailed the letters editor:
ReplyDeleteI'd given up expecting that you'd print my letter, but lo and behold there it is in today's print edition, under the subject headline.
I assume that you (or someone else) didn't intentionally use a headline that undercuts my letter, but did you not notice that my letter is itself a "letter about religion"? Mr. Steele's letter is more an expression of religious belief than a letter about religion. It was to such faith-based letters that my letter was objecting.
Your paper's practice of applying headlines is most disconcerting. On Moristotle & Co., I never do that. I always run headlines by the author or interviewee. Could your newspaper not do the same?
Would you prefer for me to submit a version of this email as an official "letter to the editor," as a candidate for printing?
As far as today's Thor's Day post itself goes, I just want to say that the idea of comparing being in the Lager with being alive on Earth (and therefore subject to Nature) came to me "as a gift." The idea had not come to me yet when I had written 9/10 of the article. I think the comparison was provoked by a brief email exchange I had with my sister on the question of my feeling sorry for a "poor possum" that someone many years ago had killed expressly for the purpose of giving my mother the gift of some of its meat to eat. At one point, I had written back to my sister:
ReplyDeleteI'm just not ashamed to say that I feel sorry for the sentient creatures humans think they have the right to slaughter and eat. But put yourself in the possum's place. What if humans weren't number 1 but number 2 on the food chain? How would you feel as you headed down the conveyor belt to be stunned and bled before being chopped up?
From that I think the seeds of the comparison were sewn....