Primo Levi, a suicide wrapped in shadows

The Italian essayist Ferdinando Camon salvages in a book his last discussions with the writer of 'Assuming this is a man' and guards the postulation that his demise was accidental, against the official version

Every once in a while you need to pay attention to George Tabori and take the Holocaust with humor. The Hungarian writer used to allude to the respect his father showed to a singular dozing cover before the Auschwitz gas chamber: "After you, Mr. Mandelbaum." Tabori, who worked in Hollywood, would comprehend in the event that we tracked down a sensible likeness between Tarantino's movies and Primo Levi's.

 In films like Inglourious Basterds or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has taken to the uchronia to rewrite the stories of Nazi Germany and the Manson family with a happy ending. There is nothing uchronic fiction there of psyche of Primo Levi, yet it shows up so: Auschwitz, the cutting edge destruction camp for people, not at all didn't kill him yet individuals, not in the least didn't kill him yet saved his life on two events and, with his endurance, the Nazis left escape the best of his foes, a Jew who was a splendid essayist who might fabricate a landmark against obscurity.

The first time was in the Aosta Valley. Levi had joined the sectarians without knowing how to stack a rifle. The extremist local armies, subsequent to catching him in a correctional activity, condemned him to death. He confessed to being a Jew and was put on a cattle train to Auschwitz. He had the number 174517 tattooed on his forearm and survived 11 months as slave labor in the Monowitz satellite camp. The second time was at the end of the war, when the Red Army was approaching and the SS evacuated the lager in the dead of winter. 

He got rid of the death marches because he was lucky, he was sick with scarlet fever, evicted in his barracks. His biographers even point to a third: Levi suffered episodes of clinical depression, the condition of witness to Nazi barbarism was a vital stimulus that saved him until the end.