Primo Levi's Resistance

Nonfiction
Monsters and partisans

PRIMO LEVI’S RESISTANCE:
Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy
By Sergio Luzzatto
284 pp. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D.

Primo Levi was a noted writer, chemist and Auschwitz survivor. In the summer of 1943, after a bloody campaign in Russia and defeat at El Alamein, Mussolini was suddenly ousted. A civil war broke out with resistance toward the Germany Army and the current Italian government. Speaking of Levi, the author said, “This was his brief and unfortunate season as a partisan, or something like a partisan. Three months in the mountains of the Valle d’Aosta in northwest Italy as a twenty-four-year-old, linked to a little band that had come together at the Col de Joux—a mountain pass high above the town of Saint Vincent—in the autumn of 1943.” It is this brief period that is the subject of this book.

Many of the exploits in this book take place, as mentioned above, in the mountainous region between Switzerland and France. I backpacked through this beautiful region going from Switzerland to Italy, and I remember it as very open terrain with precious little cover for hiding guerillas with their supplies and weapons. What the author calls the geographical nature of partisan existence was totally lacking there. With a simple pair of binoculars everything was visible.

As the resistance stagnated, the towns became battlegrounds. Each had a robust German garrison, and raids were always met with reprisals. The rebels almost disappeared, but by 1944 the few remaining had become expert at attacking high value targets—power stations, bridges, trains and enemy convoys. Primo Levi had joined his small band of rebels with two friends—Vanda Maestro, a chemist, and Luciana Nissim, a doctor. “Vanda went to the gas,” Levi wrote. However, Luciana became an inmate doctor in the Birkenau infirmary and then was given the rare opportunity to leave Auschwitz and work in the forced labor camp at Hessisch, Lichtenau in Germany. In April 1945, when the American moved into Saxony, Nissim traveled east with them working as a doctor in a refugee camp. When rail service resumed she slowly and painfully made her way back to Italy.

Before leaving as a deportee Nissim wrote a letter to Primo, the man she loved, “Dear one, it is finished. Do not forget me, remember that I believed in the best and the truest, that I sought the just and the good. Remember that for a year you have been my raison d’être, and that all I saw was through your eyes, and I lived only because you were alive.”

The second half of the book is about the trial of the partisans in the Italian courts. If you have followed the murders written about in The Monster of Venice or kept track of the byzantine trial unfortunate Amanda Knox in Italy, you can appreciate the surreal nature of guilt, innocence and the arbitrary punishment in that boot-shaped republic. I found it much less interesting that the first half of the book or Levi’s other writing about Auschwitz and the evil perpetrated by the Nazis. If want to round out your knowledge of one of the original characters from World War II, this slight book is worth an evening’s read, but I found a day traipsing around Dachau more enlightening.