THE REAWAKENING (La tregua)

Memoir by Primo Levi, 1963

First published in 1963 as La tregua (The Truce, 1965), The Reawakening is the second of Primo Levi's books. In it Levi continues the largely narrative mode, with analysis and comment interwoven, that he had established in his first work of witness, Survival in Auschwitz. The book treats the issues that arose out of his experiences from January 1945, when the Russians liberated the camp, to his arrival home in Torino on 19 October 1946. As in his earlier book, he is (to use his own phrase) "author-protagonist."

The title of the book was a shift on the eve of publication; he had initially proposed "High Wind" as the title. The present form has a threefold valence. The first of these indicates the special nature of this period in his life: a sort of lull, marked by the stirrings of new life, between the terrible pressures of the camp and the complex process of reintegration into the life of home and the everyday from which he had been absent so long. To that home context he returned altered, inhabited by memories of an experience that others often did not wish to hear and about which it was almost impossible to communicate in any case. The second valence is more general. The war and the camps constituted precisely open war. The ending of the armed conflict and the liberation of the camps marked the entry, as he saw it, not into permanent peace and the cessation of the sort of hatreds and prejudices that anti-Semitism represents but into a period of uneasy and difficult truce, with the danger of the resumption of open conflict at any time. That is, in part, the significance of the following lines from the poem he wrote as an epigraph to this book; wstawac (get up) was the command in Polish used in Auschwitz.

Now we have found home again,
Our stomach is full,
We have stopped recounting the experience.
It is time. Soon we will hear again
The command in a foreign tongue:
"Wstawac."

The third, and most general, valence, Levi himself commented, is the fact that death is already implicit in life: that all of us will hear the summons into death at some moment. Until then we live in a period of truce.

As with Survival in Auschwitz the book in its present form is divided into 17 chapters. Though they follow the chronology of the journey, they are given titles that indicate persons or events thematically significant, or even the direction of the journey, or the stage on the way home reached at any point. The narrative and its interwoven analysis and commentary are at times somber, while at other times lightened by Levi's characteristic wit and self-deprecating irony.

A single image can often focus a whole issue and remain fixed in the mind and sensibilities. For example, he reports that as he left Auschwitz, ill, taken out on a horse cart, he saw for the last time "the roll-call square where the gallows and the gigantic Christmas tree still towered side by side." In an especially moving instance, he sets the case of three children side by side. He intends his testimony, as with his mention of all figures from Auschwitz, to give evidence that they lived. But more, these three show with great force and precision the impact of Auschwitz on human communication. Hurbinek, a child of Auschwitz, dies at perhaps three years of age, without ever being taught language, without ever being able therefore "to enter the world of men." Peter Pavel, about five years old, trusting no adult, lives furtively, speaking only among other children languages that Levi reports he could not understand. The third, Kleine Kiepura, about 13 years old and kept as a sexual plaything by one of the kapos, speaks a stream of vituperation against Jews—and therefore against himself—having absorbed the prejudices of his protector. A Greek, whose vision of life, all life, is as a sort of war, is contrasted with Cesare, a Roman who can find game anywhere.

Levi introduces in this book a theme he will develop elsewhere, notably in The Monkey's Wrench: the humanizing function of significant work and of the marketplace. He reports that in fact he was first reconciled again to life by the bargaining he observed after liberation—and in which he participated—in a Polish marketplace. What is represented in that bargaining is for him free communication. Human transactions about value are determined through the agreement of both parties, with the communication itself having something of the nature of a game. The working of the market among the slaves in Auschwitz, and of the discourse of command there, Levi intends to be still in the readers' minds as, by contrast, the discourse of the world of the lords of death.

Reference to the way in which one image system works will illustrate something of the narratorial and analytic power evident in this work. In Survival in Auschwitz Levi reports on the shower and the shaving off of all hair forced on those who were to be enrolled in camp rather than being sent immediately to the gas. A second description of a bath—marked by reference to that first one—is given at the beginning of The Reawakening, a bath given by the Russian liberators of the camp. Finally, just as he is nearing Italy, he and the others with him are given a third bath—and delousing with DDT—by Americans. These accounts of the three baths in their concise detail constitute acute analysis of the national cultures of those administering them and help to tie together the large narrative of his experience.

Reference to one more image or episode from the work will illustrate Levi's profound probing of the challenges to communication, to sharing one another's experiences. As his train neared Italy, Levi observed outside the window a vehicle he had never before seen—a jeep. A black American was driving it; inside were other soldiers. One of them shouted in Neapolitan dialect, "You're going home, you bums." Levi's point is clear on reflection: The American soldiers, in their vehicle strange to him but familiar to them, had no notion of what those on the train had suffered. But how much could those on the train hearing those words know too of the experience of those soldiers, who had made their way up from southern Italy (the Neapolitan dialect), on a continent whose languages, land, and ways were unknown to them? And what did they know of the life of an American black man, the descendant of slaves, and of his experience in the war? The experiences of those on the train and in the jeep are not equivalent, but they are not unrelated, and the challenge to mutual understanding one knows Levi is surely suggesting is vast.

—Ralph G. Williams