The soul of Primo Levi. Repubblica’s series at the Shoah Memorial

Trucea masterpiece novel, begins with the story, sparse and therefore ferocious, of what would become Remembrance Day, that is, that 27 January 1945, when the Red Army entered the camp at Auschwitz and the horror of that absolute evil that was Nazism and of the Holocaust knowingly, barbarically and bureaucratically perpetrated by it are shown to the Russian soldiers and to the whole world. Primo Levi told the world about that evil whose possible return unfortunately continues to be debated today in light of disturbing episodes ranging from various forms of denialism to acts of vandalism against stumbling blocks and more. This is why it is necessary to read and reread the work of this great author, one of the most important of the 20th century. And this is why Republic offers it on newsstands monographic series edited by the Primo Levi International Study Center of Turin in collaboration with Einaudi which will be presented today at the Shoah Memorial in Milanone of the symbolic places of the anti-fascist city, near the Piazza Edmond Jacob Safra 1, Central Station.

From 3.30 pm the director will be there Republic Maurizio Molinarithe director of Press Andrea Malagutithe professor Fabio Levipresident of Primo Levi Study Centere Domenico Scarpa, critic and scholar of the Center. To moderate the meeting, Marco Vigevani, literary agent and director of cultural programming at the Memorial. They will tell the importance of the books that you will find attached with Republic (a 8,90 euro plus the price of the newspaper): The drowned and the saved (already on newsstands), If this is a man (from January 27) and exactly Truce (from February 3rd). Others will follow 12 volumesstarting from Natural storiesto complete a collector’s series.

Il Shoah memorial stands in the area below the platform of the Milan Central Station, al Platform 21, where the prisoners departing from the prisons of San Vittore towards the concentration and extermination camps were loaded onto cattle wagons. It is therefore a highly symbolic place to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust. Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it: this is the meaning of the initiative Republic: illustrate the deepest meaning of Primo Levi’s work, a large and complex work which, precisely for this reason, it was chosen to title “Primo Levi: a soul of great capacity”an expression that was coined by another great author, Philip Rothin the famous interview he did with Levi for the New York Review of Books.

Thus Roth captured Levi’s personality, writing of him that «there is only one soul, of enviable capacity and free of welding; I would say that not only are the survivor and the scientist inseparable, but also the writer and the scientist.”

Primo Levi was many things: a partisan determined to fight that fascism that today we hesitate to condemn, a Jew interned in Auschwitz but also a survivor of the extermination who tries to return to “normal” life, to the profession of chemist in the Siva company of Turin. But then, of course, there is also the writer and, again, the passionate and curious scholar of ethology, linguistics and cosmology. But to begin with we must start from the triptych dedicated to the experience of the concentration camp and then to the return to the world of the survivors to which, however, the experience they have gone through will no longer allow them to belong. Learning history precisely. To never repeat it again.