Primo Levi was a prophet who resisted the moral nihilism that is the particular mark of the 20th century. Deported in 1944 to Auschwitz, to which he always referred as the Lager, its German name, he survived and then spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of what he had been through. “Someone who has experienced the Lager,” he summed up, “feels that he is the repository of a fundamental experience, inserted into the history of the world, a witness by right and by duty.”
Other survivors have written in anger, recrimination, and self-pity. At times Levi gives way to these natural reactions, but a unique spirit of inquiry informs his books, especially If This Is a Man (1947) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986). How had it come about that mass murder was now a modern industrial process? On one memorable occasion in the Lager, the extreme brutality of one of the SS guards prompted Levi to dare to ask him, “Warum?” — that is to say, Why? “Hier ist kein Warum,” this SS guard answered: Here there is no Why.
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