Performing-arts events

In this spirit, the Fondazione Villa Emma-Ragazzi ebrei salvati di Nonantola [foundation in remembrance of the Jewish children saved in Nonantola], in collaboration with the International Primo Levi Studies Center, organized a public reading from If This is a Man in ten languages – Arabic, Hebrew, French, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Slovenian. The event took place at Modena’s Teatro Storchi on January 27 2011. People who have lived in Italy for years and done a large range of jobs alternated with each other in the readings. Edith Bruck, Pupa Garribba, David Grossman and Boris Pahor also took part with video contributions.

In The Mark of the Chemist: A Dialogue with Primo Levi, Primo Levi answers the questions of the interviewer and, in an intense and unique exchange, he talks about his scientific vocation, his life as witness to the concentration camp, and his experiences as narrator and laboratory technician.

There are two accounts of the Nazi extermination made right after it happened –  The Auschwitz Report drawn up by Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti at the beginning of 1945 and the report from Treblinka written by Vasily Grossman at the end of 1944. We cannot but listen to the naked words of the two great writers, their dry realism, and the hardness of the facts in a dialogue that brings together two different ways to telling the stories of two different places in the same gigantic death machine.