Thinking with your hands

When I started to reflect on the hands in concentration camps, I immediately came up with a number of hints. This was something that confirmed how inexhaustible the thought of Levi was. Likewise, many men and many women had insisted on the calm tone of his story telling and on the power of reason that runs through orients it.  However, we should also remember other aspects of this topic.

In the first place, what makes Primo Levi’s story telling so fertile is his relationship with the body, and, in the body, his relationship with hands.  Many cultured middle-class prisoners, many intellectuals, and political leaders looked upon the body as opaque matter, a site where a person could be wounded and subjected to brute force. They distrusted the body and they were right about this in the concentration camp. The concentration camp system used as leverage the prisoners’ reduction to the condition of an animal, or a Stück – i.e. thing – to get total control over their behavior and discourage any potential impulses of solidarity towards fellow prisoners.

However, they distrusted the body because the depersonalized body of the concentration camp was the antithesis of the model of individual protagonism and intellectual control that is rooted in patriarchal society. This protagonism puts the spirit in the promised land of freedom and resistance to coercion.  Also, they distrusted the body of the western tradition, which was by definition a finiteness that had to give way to an over-personal or transcendent dimension.  Therefore it happened that the body is narrated about in many memoirs in terms of a struggle for not giving in to its commands. Furthermore, the dialogues or fantasies about food were written about in terms of annoyance, or even scorn.³And yet talk like this is not necessarily an obsessive automatic reaction. It can be a means of communication among different groups and a tool that helps people foresee a future: the food that was talked about was food from their home; the set table was the setting for their return and the bond between bread and freedom has lived on for centuries in popular culture.

It was not like this for Primo Levi. He was a chemist and knew how much the gestures of his profession passed through the body and through the hands in the body. These were the hands that measured, poured, weighed, divided, and mixed. He was and was to be an Alpinist and the mountains taught him that if you listen to the body and if you not demand to dominate it, the body does not betray you.  This was what enabled him to appreciate and narrate with sovereign tranquility what other young intellectuals would have looked on as humiliating.⁴Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits (New York: Schocken, 1986) recalled the extraordinary spiritual euphoria, the emotion and desire for spirituality that assailed him the moment he devoured a plate of sweet semolina that a guard gave him. However, there was a tricky exaltation in his eyes, a real state of drunkenness that left a “desolate feeling of emptiness and same” behind it.  For example, there was the effect of the first spoonful of soup swallowed down after hours spent barefoot and nude in the cold of the Polish winter: “the bliss (positive, this time, and visceral) of relaxation and warmth in the stomach.”⁵Primo Levi, If This is a Man, The Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright, 2015). The Work. [Footnotes refer to the chapters in If This is a Man.]

In the second place, what counted was Levi’s radical narrative choice to show by story-telling instead of by explaining. This was a way to open credit with his readers, to whom he assigned the task of reflecting on the ways in which legions of human beings like us had sunken so low and how this happened so miserably and so fiercely. Perhaps there were also the remains of some skepticism about the model of the lesson, which, in its rightful need, to be exhaustive could have provoked the feeling that everything had already been thought through and written beforehand.

In the third place, there was the foregrounding of the gestures, movements, the body, and to its members – the body that was stripped of its flesh and swollen, the feet with sores, the wounded and dirty hands – and the corresponding backgrounding of the description/exposition of feelings.

In the fourth place, but, most of all, Primo Levi was a great writer.

We have to recall what we all experience in our daily relationships: how essential our hands are. They convey an emotion, a sentiment, an argument more forcefully. They make contact with people whose languages we do not know. They make up for a meaning that had been mangled. Millions of disabled people know that the hands come on to help in places where language does not get them. Hands enable the blind to intuit a shape by touch. Hands help the deaf to follow a talk. Hands help the dumb to make themselves understand.  This is the communicative role of the hands, which we take for granted.

In order to treat the functions of the hands as a topic, it may be useful to refer to our own experience. However, we must not forget that our own experience cannot be compared to how crucial non-verbal communication was in concentration camps.

The concentration camp was a Babel, a mishmash of peoples and languages – German, French, Yiddish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Polish – that crisscross, clash and combat without managing to understand each other. In the impossibility of understanding, languages transform sounds into threatening noise, into barriers between a person and another person, between a group and another group. The order without rights of the concentration camp had its  hierarchical stratifications along ethnic and national lines. This order aimed precisely to transform solidarity into connivance and groups into rival clans in a struggle to undermine each other.

Levi helps us imagine the alienation, the sensorial and mental impoverishment, and sense of impotence of people who see themselves deprived of the first faculty of being human at a moment when understanding and communicating can make the difference between life and death. Not being able to grasp a single word of German is a condemnation. Meeting someone who speaks your language is a beam of light in the dark, the equivalent of a reunion and it is sometimes decisive for survival. However, where the tongue fails, the hand can make up for it.  For example, Schlome, a young Jew and Polish partisan. He asks him how long he has been in the concentration camp:

Naturally, the hand that communicates can also be the same hand that makes, works, adjusts a bunk trying to make allowances for the maniacal passion of the torturers for order, and cuts bread into exactly equal parts. It can also be the hand that never lets go of the meager possessions of the deportee, from the mess tin to the spoon, hands that have to come to terms with the constant scarcity of objects and tools, including those that could be used for taking care of yourself. Pencils, cutlery, paper, needles, threads, handkerchiefs, combs, and soap either could not be found or were forbidden.

The experiences of men and women, a topic much talked about, differ in relation to this “maintenance.” Women are used to thousands of daily chores and so are more familiar with many skills of the hands. Somebody who makes a needle from a splinter must have had a needle in her hands. Somebody who transforms a rag into a scarf must have worked with cloth. Somebody who creates a rouge for her cheeks out of a little powder from bricks must have used a rouge and then invented one to give herself a healthier look.

For men, who are used to being taken care of, practicing the “women’s work” – mending, sewing a button, washing, hanging up laundry, and cleaning – is grueling work, is venturing into a strange land, and is finding yourself with two proverbial left hands. Some men have commented on this.

You can try to distinguish between the enemy hand and the friendly hand. Hostile actions are the norm in the concentration camp and for the most part the hand is the hand of the Kapo that grasps a stick, that throws a punch in cold blood that could kill and that tugs, drags, and takes away, a hand that humiliates, mocks, and offends. When a Kapo performs a threatening gesture that was in style in Germany, he rubs his stomach in ostentatious disgust, letting a deportee know beforehand about his selection [for death]. In this he finishes his job of annihilating the human being that the concentration camp system is dedicated to, the job that he was assigned to do. Some Kapos do their job with relish.

 Primo Levi is in the infirmary:

Then Levi becomes a candidate for entering the Chemical Kommando and meets the Kapo,  Alex. He is a man who was short and looked weak, and who hates and envies the Intelligenten. They had to cross an open space cluttered with metal beams and trellises.

For some, and not just a few men and women deportees, the enemy hand was the hand that came out of the sleeve of a white coat. Drunken with the unlimited availability of bodies as guinea pigs, the “experimentalist” doctors applied practices that were unthinkable elsewhere, practices where medical interests crossed over with military and pharmaceutical interests as well as personal curiosities and fixations.⁹On experimentation, see Chapter 9 of Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985).  The hand cuts, castrates, inoculates with germs, cuts off a limb,  forces “patients” to swallow new drugs, and measures how much it would take to freeze to death, to die of fatigue or x-ray exposure.

Right after the war, the Nuremberg Code was to originate out of the horror about these practices. The Code set up ethical and legal criteria for any kind of medical procedure.

Miraculously, you can also find a friendly hand in the concentration camp. And it strikes you more when you least expect to run into it. Here comes Resnyck, a 30-year-old Pole who was strongly built and solid.  At the work site they are ordered to work at, they have to unload an enormous cast iron cylinder from the railroad car: “Our hearts sank.”¹⁰The Work  They have to carry 80-kilo railroad ties to build a track in the soft mud on which the cylinder could be pushed with levers all the way inside the factory. Levi wants to team up with Resnyk, but:

The hand of Charles sticks out among the friendly hands, a 32-year-old schoolteacher. These are “ten days outside of the world and time”¹²The Story of Ten Days  that follow the flight of the SS from the camp. Levi and the others organize soup for everybody. “Lakmaker… was a poor human wreck.” He was ill with all the ills of the camp,

He ate two helpings of soup and at midnight he was struck by a really violent attack of dysentery, dirtied his bed, the floor and spread an intolerable stink.

Charles performs an apparently useless gesture. Lakmaker would die in any case, but he would not spend what was perhaps his last night on the floor “in that muck, groaning and shivering with cold.”¹⁵The Story of Ten Days  More than a good Samaritan, Charles is one of the just, who  risks himself – contagion and the SS who periodically came back to the camp and killed again – to alleviate an evil that he knows he cannot beat, but that he does not give up fighting against.

Primo Levi shelters the good, it seems to me, so that nobody can overlay it with pietistic tendencies, so that nobody can use it for consolatory acts of pity. He moves us, certainly, but he does it in a way that emotion does not become pacification, the antechamber of oblivion, or that emotion does not become confusion between what we suffer and what they suffered in the concentration camp.

Here we can gather the imprint of his narrative (and ethical) choice to keep to gestures, avoiding excursions into the psyches of others, leaving us the job and the burden of imagining and drawing the consequences.

One of the highest examples is the story of the mothers at Fossoli on the night before the deportation.

What did the mothers think, what did they feel? There is no need to see this written down. What spoke was only those considerate and hard-working hands, defenseless and unyielding, that do not let us forget them.