The meaning of suffering

Years ago, I do not remember how many, I first read Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man, and then of his tortuous return home to Italy, The Truce. These books made a huge impact on me at the time, but I recently wanted to look up a particularly memorable passage of prose about rain, which occurs in the first of those two books. It is such an astonishing piece of writing about suffering that I felt compelled to re-read these two books, which I have in my ‘library’. Then I bought his Collected Poems, and various collections of his short fiction; also, The Drowned and The Saved, Levi’s work of non-fiction, which attempts to understand, rationalise, the Third Reich’s death camps, a book I am currently in the process of reading, and that was completed shortly before Levi’s death in 1987. The quoted remarks or endorsements one sees on most books are to my mind utterly appropriate on these books of Primo Levi. Of The Drowned and The Saved: ‘One of the most devastating masterworks of our era.’ (Observer). Of If This Is A Man/The Truce: ‘One of the century’s truly necessary books.’ (Philip Roth)

And so to the subject of my poem, below. Being a poet myself, I obviously wanted to read Levi’s poetry. Again, the impact of their reading was devastating. I took the draft of my poem to the Stanza (Poetry Society) group to which I belong, in order to get some feedback. Part of the response was to suggest that in my poem I was ‘invalidating’ my own suffering (I have Parkinson’s Disease, and it should be added here that some people with this condition dislike the term ‘Parkinson’s sufferer’). I responded that I was trying to compare two types of suffering (if types of suffering can be said to exist), and that by comparison mine was as nothing. Or is it a matter of degrees of suffering? Again, mine is as nothing! Is suffering a relative thing at all? In other words, if one feels one is suffering, is the suffering just as severe as anybody else’s, for each particular person at their particular time? We all suffer at some times in our lives, perhaps during severe illness,war, loss of one’s home or at the loss of a loved one: child, parent, sibling, partner, friend. I did make some adjustments to my poem, but I maintain that one can believe at times that one is suffering hugely, but it may be very little compared to another person’s. I often say, ‘There’s always someone worse off than yourself.’ And when I feel that I am suffering, I think back to what Primo Levi and his fellow death-camp prisoners endured, and still feel that I have so little to complain of. If you happen to have a copy of the book, If This Is A Man, or can get your hands on one, read Levi’s description of the rain at the beginning of the chapter called ‘Kraus’ on page 137 of the edition illustrated here. You will never complain of rainy weather again! It makes me cry every time I read it.

If I were writing a review of importance in a national newspaper, say, or some other popular publication, I would say of each of Levi’s death-camp books, ‘READ THIS BOOK, as if your life depended on it.’ It is tempting to say that everyone should read them. His prose is for me quite astonishing. I am not clever enough nor intellectual enough to explain why this is so.

By the by, it just so happens that I myself visited Auschwitz in 1971 as a sixteen year-old. I can still see in my mind’s eye the vast glass cases full of human hair, of spectacles, of other personal belongings removed from prisoners when they arrived at the death-camps. Two of my own of four photographs I took then are shown here. The whole place had an awful eeriness I was very conscious of even at that early age, and when I knew almost nothing of what had occurred in Europe just a few decades earlier. Hard to remember now, but I don’t recall there being many other visitors besides the small group of eight that we were; certainly not lots of school groups, as I imagine there are these days. I doubt, however, that I would now feel able to photograph the ovens!

Also, by the by, my father as a soldier who had been part of the D-Day landings in 1944, and whose regiment travelled up through Belgium and Holland into Germany, was later deployed at the Bergen-Belsen camp, sometime after its liberation.

On reading the poems of Primo Levi

In the eastern sky of grey, massed cloud

is a hole of blue, edged with gold.

I lean against the backdoor glass

for the early morning light

and read for the first time

The Collected Poems of Primo Levi.

Every poem of the first twenty-one

makes me sob.

Yes, I cry easily;

yes, I am tired;

yes, I come from a broken night

of discomfort, of pain,

but what do I know

of suffering?

Never have I read twenty-one consecutive poems

whose words have bled such anguish,

such sadness into my curious soul,

that even I hesitate to read further,

must carefully consider the time, the place,

my emotional strength.

In a way, I think my sensitivity,

this empathy

a good thing, and yet

how many there are who can dream up a Holocaust,

plan its execution, carry it out day by day,

collude with those who brutalize;

or simply turn away,

pretend it does not happen,

did not happen,

will not happen,

is not happening somewhere right now

in a similar form, or on a lesser scale;

that such ideas and acts are still right here,

right now in the hearts of men,

mothers and fathers of men,

of little children growing up

in homes, schools, playgrounds…

And for every one person who has

love, care, empathy,

is there not another who has

hatred, cruelty, or mere indifference?

And if this is not so, then

how do such things happen:

the concentration camps, the gas chambers,

the mass graves, the bombed hospitals,

the missiles fired into apartment blocks,

the raped, the execution of the innocent,

the chambers of unspeakable torture,

the slavery, the murdered children…?

In the sky of grey, massed cloud

is a hole of blue, edged with gold.

© David Urwin 2023

The Collected Poems of Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, Faber and Faber, 1992.

If This is a Man & The Truce, Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf, Penguin Books, 1979/ Abacus 1987.  Documents Levi’s experiences in Auschwitz and his return home to Italy.

The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Sphere Books Ltd/Abacus, 1989.