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Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz begins with a poem, which requests
that his readers take up a question. He writes,
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
The Italian title of Survival in Auschwitz is If This Is A Man, and in this paper I explore
what that question means.
For a person with cursory knowledge of the events of the Shoah and a loosely
democratic political sensibility the question – “if this is a person” – is perhaps only
partially compelling. Levi’s words are vibrant and insistent so that the sensitive reader is
likely to be jarred and, at a minimum, understand that this question is of the highest
import for Levi. We might even formulate a provisional answer to his question,
hypothesizing “yes, of course these are people” or “no, of course these are not people”
and in both cases believe that we are on Levi’s side, that we understand his point and that
Convention