Resistance moon: The strange command

Since it is Pesach in this Month of Resistance, even though I gave you some Jewish poetry just a few days ago, let’s have a couple from one of my favorite writers, Primo Levi.

Levi did not start out to be a writer—he studied chemistry. And in fact, following a little re-accommodation by the Germans during World War II, he worked as a chemist in a paint factory for 30 years. But that involuntary hiatus shaped him indelibly, and his is one of the most powerful voices for both resistance and resilience to come out of the Holocaust. Viz.:

“Reveille”

In the brutal nights we used to dream

Dense violent dreams,

Dreamed with soul and body:

To return; to eat; to tell the story.

Until the dawn command

Sounded brief, low

'Wstawać '

And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our homes again,

Our bellies are full,

We're through telling the story.

It's time. Soon we'll hear again

The strange command:

'Wstawać

“Wstawać” is Polish for “get up”—either to rise from a bed or stand up from a seated position.

In all the works I’ve read by Levi that deal with his relationship with the Nazis, he breaks from Italian and refers to the camps only by their German term: “lager”. It’s as though the very concept of Bergen-Belsen, Maidanek, Mauthausen and Auschwitz is so repulsive that he refuses to use an Italian word for these places. (Note to future press secretaries of this or any other administration: they were extermination camps, not “Holocaust centers”. You’re welcome.) I’m guessing that the order to get out of bed or stand to attention at Auschwitz, where Levi was a prisoner for eleven months, would have been given in Polish, so that’s the word he chose, and his translators retained it.

I wonder if Levi imagines that Death will also speak in Polish, when the summons comes? 

The second poem today is not strictly to do with resistance, but rather with solidarity, with comradeship, with the kind of connections that shape and strengthen us for the better as human beings. That encourage our decency and give us reasons to resist. As Levi well knew—we survive and build not just for ourselves, but for those who follow behind us.

“To My Friends”

Dear friends, and here I say friends

the broad sense of the word:

Wife, sister, associates, relatives,

Schoolmates of both sexes,

People seen only once

Or frequented all my life;

Provided that between us, for at least a moment,

A line has been stretched,

A well-defined bond.

I speak for you, companions of a crowded

Road, not without its difficulties,

And for you too, who have lost

Soul, courage, the desire to live;

Or no one, or someone, or perhaps only one person, or you

Who are reading me: remember the time

Before the wax hardened,

When everyone was like a seal.

Each of us bears the imprint

Of a friend met along the way;

In each the trace of each.

For good or evil

In wisdom or in folly

Everyone stamped by everyone.

Now that the time crowds in

And the undertakings are finished,

To all of you the humble wish

That autumn will be long and mild.