the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt ten)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

“I have a ration of bread under the mattress. Divide it among the three of you. I won’t be eating anymore.”

We couldn’t find anything to say, but for the time being we didn’t touch the bread. Half his face was swollen. As long as he remained conscious, he was closed in a bitter silence.

But in the evening, and for the whole night, and for two days, without interruption, the silence was broken by his delirium. Following a last, interminable dream of submission and slavery, he began to murmur “Jawohl” with every breath, regularly and continuously like a machine, “Jawohl,” every time his poor rib cage subsided, thousands of times, so that you wanted to shake him, suffocate him, or at least make him change the word.

I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt nine)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

Once the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and then Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, with typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to the three of us who had been working. And so it was agreed.

Only a day before, such an event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said “Eat your own bread, and, if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead.

This was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment marked the start of the process by which we who had not died slowly turned from Häftlinge into men again.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt eight)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

When it rains we feel like crying. It is November, it has been raining for ten days now, and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of wood has the smell of mushrooms.

If I could take ten steps to the left, I would be sheltered by the roof; all I’d need is a sack to cover my shoulders, or the mere prospect of a fire where I could dry myself; or maybe a dry rag to put between my shirt and my back. From one swing of the shovel to the next I think about it, and I really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt seven)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves buried it, under the abuse received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and stupid SS men, the Kaps, the political, the criminals, the Prominents great and small, down to the indistinguishable Häftlinge slaves—all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans are paradoxically united in a common inner desolation.

But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world or negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt six)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

We have arrived at the Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. There he is, only his head is visible above the trench. He waves to me, he is a spirited man, I have never seen his morale low, he never talks about eating.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt five)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

… The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind. But we have no time to choose, this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is intelligent he will understand. He will understand—today I feel capable of so much.

--- Who Dante is. What the Comedy is. What a curiously novel sensation, to try to explain briefly what the Divine Comedy is. How the Inferno is divided up, what its punishments are. Virgil is Reason, Beatrice is Theology.

the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt four)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

Since that day, I have thought about Doctor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself about his inner workings as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization Department and his Indo-Germanic conscience. Above all, when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not out of a spirit of revenge but merely out of my curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two being who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.