'Ulcer of Memory'

...Levi joined the anti-German resistance in 1943 at age 24...

...It was, in part, because Italian authorities protected Jews that some 40,000 of them survived in that country...

...on the fact that the Holocaust demonstrated techniques of destruction that make future genocides more possible...

...But whereas Wiesel's Night was passionate, piercing, moving, and transforming, Levi's Survival in Auschwitz was analytical, descriptive, precise, even clinical— and, for generations of readers, no less transforming...

...Italy was a home for Jews for over 2,000 years...

...Levi himself survived, in part because, with a doctorate in chemistry, he was able to work, during his last months at Buna, in a laboratory in the I.G...

...Levi's family, and many other Jewish families in Turin and other Pied-montese cities in northern Italy, traced their origins to Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492, as well as to Jews from France...

...In addition to memoirs and works of fiction, which earned him recognition as one of the great humanists and writers of the last century, Levi, a working chemist for 30 years, published short writings—essays, newspaper columns, introductions to books, including new versions of his own—that were marked Walter Reich, the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior at George Washington University, and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, was director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998...

...Of these, some 7,600 were murdered...

...on Jewish resistance in the concentration camps and ghettos despite impossible odds and no hope...

...by Walter Reich Before he died in 1987 at age 67, almost surely as a suicide, Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, was, alongside Elie Wiesel, one of the great witnesses of Auschwitz...

...Arrested by Italian Fascists, he admitted being a Jew, was handed over to the Germans, and sent to Auschwitz...

...on the importance of educating the public about the Holocaust...

...Collected together, the short pieces in this small and excellent volume reveal an immensely humane man who rose above rancor, but whose memory burned with a fire that continues to illuminate our dark and bereft planet...

...He writes on his need to record his experiences and bear witness...

...Even in this small collection, Levi's range is astonishing...

...Farben factory rather than in the mud and snow...

...and on the uniqueness, among all the world's evils, of the "black hole of Auschwitz...

...on the importance of understanding exactly how Auschwitz worked...

...Of his convoy of 650, 525 were murdered upon arrival at the camp, 29 women were kept alive for labor, and 96 men, including Levi, were sent to Auschwitz III, also known as Buna or Monowitz, which the Germans had established some three miles from the Auschwitz I camp in order to provide slave labor for the Buna synthetic rubber works...

...by elegance, originality, and startling insights...

...Still, the Germans were able to send about 8,000 Italian Jews, as well as 2,000 from Rhodes (then part of Italy), to Auschwitz and other camps...

...on the "ulcer of memory" that many survivors have needed to repress...

...on the dangers of Holocaust denial and neoNazism...

...After Mussolini was deposed in 1943, Germany occupied the northern and central parts of the country and began rounding up Jews for extermination...

...on his identification with his fellow Jews from Eastern Europe, whose unique Yiddish voice had been extinguished by the Germans, "the voice of a people weeping for itself...

...By 1933, 50,000 of them lived there, most of them highly assimilated but deeply aware of their Jewish identities, customs, and roots...

...on the penchant of human beings, including Nazis, to believe their own propaganda and to lie to themselves...

...Together, they bracketed the experience of Jews in that German extermination camp, helped the world begin to penetrate it, and spoke to the heart as well as the mind...

...The Black Hole of Auschwitz by Primo Levi Edited by Marco Belpoliti Translated by Sharon Wood Polity Press, 240 pp., $23.95...

...In 1938, Fascist Italy passed anti-Semitic laws, and in 1940, it entered the Second World War alongside Nazi Germany...

...on the irony that victims and perpetrators belonged, after all, to the same human family...

...Neither memoir could tell the whole story...

...on the suicide of other survivors...

...In the end, only about 20 of Levi's convoy survived to return to Italy...

...The Black Hole of Auschwitz is a collection, well edited by Marco Belpoliti and gracefully translated by Sharon Wood, of some of these short writings...

...on the unique and unsurpassed enormity of Germany's crimes...