Primo Levi's book, "The Reawakening"

I read a self-interview that Levi wrote, and in it he described the physical exhaustion and fear that oppressed the inmates of Auschwitz. That was a primary reason, he said, that they did not fight back, never organized a collective resistance, and never undertook the slightest aggressive measures in their own defense. There were other reasons, of course.

In my last message, I described my interpretation of what I read as the inmates' desperate grip on the camp routine -- it was their only grip on existence, on life. I think that's a valid interpretation, but I see that Levi emphasizes the more practical barrier of starvation. The slaves were just too exhausted to struggle. Those who did organize acts of resistance and rebellion, he writes, were paradoxically the better fed, the well-treated camp trustees among the prisoners. They alone were strong enough. A very few of them had hung on to some moral conscience, energy, and courage.

After finishing "Survival in Auschwitz," I couldn't wait to read Levi's followup memoir, "The Reawakening," the story of his release from the camp by the Russian army, and of the tortuous journey over many months to return to Italy. Some of the worst scenes of either book are in the interim period, when the Germans fled, leaving the eight hundred freezing, starving inmates in the infirmary, Levi among them. Hard to imagine scenes. The freezing bunks filled with dying men writhing in pain, lying in their own dysentery, begging endlessly for help until one by one they died. Levi describes them not without compassion, but with the detachment of a reporter, as if he recognizes that his most important job is to record what happened.

It's not actually a "release" from the camp -- there was still a war going on, and the Russians didn't simply permit the pitiful survivors to start walking back to their home countries.

He loves the Russians. He describes their faults -- their slovenliness, their chaos, their capricious brutality -- but he loves them. At times the Russians lose their identity, and they become a kind of beloved soulful Russian nation, a warm all-embracing, tolerant and generous thing. They are almost cartoonlike, and Levi's language becomes almost propagandistic.

I'm halfway through it now. More later.