Primo Levi, "shema"

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Primo Levi, Se Isto é um Homem

"27 de Janeiro. Madrugada. No chão, a infame confusão de membros ressequidos, a coisa Sómogyi.
Há trabalhos mais urgentes; não podemos lavar-nos, por isso, só podemos mexer nele depois de termos cozinhado e comido. E, além disso «rien de si degoûtant que les débordements», diz justamente Charles; é preciso esvaziar o balde. Os vivos são mais exigentes; os mortos podem esperar. Começamos a trabalhar como todos os dias.
Os russos chegaram enquanto Charles e eu levávamos Sómogyi para um lugar um pouco afastado. Estava muito leve. Virámos a maca na neve cinzenta.
Charles tirou o boné. Tive pena de não ter boné.
Dos onze da Infektionsabteilung, apenas Sómogyi morreu durante os dez dias. Sertelet, Cagnolati, Tomarowski, Lakmaker e Dorget (...) morreram algums semanas mais tarde na enfermaria russa provisória de Auschwitz. Encontrei em Katowice, em Abril, Schenk e Alcalai de boa saúde. Arthur regressou felizmente à sua família, e Charles retomou a sua profissão de professor primário: trocámos longas cartas e espero poder reencontrá-lo um dia."

            Últimos parágrafos do livro de Primo Levi, Se Isto é um Homem, Público, 2002, p.190           

Claude Lanzmann on Shoah

Gustave Doré, Satan descends upon Earth

 

Por sugestão de Jorge Calado, Haja Luz.

Lester Young - You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me

charlie haden & the liberation music orchestra - spiritual

Oscar Petiford: Cello

Hans Koller: Tenor Sax

Jimmy Pratt: Drums

Attila Zoller: Bass

Clarence H. White, Landscape - winter

Jorge Semprún y los campos de concentración nazis

Yehuda Bauer - Standing Up Against Genocide. Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

jenny saville 'Propped'

Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus

Sonny Rollins — tenor saxophone

Tommy Flanagan — piano

Doug Watkins — bass

Max Roach — drums

Ahmad Jamal - At the Pershing: But Not for Me

Man Ray - Le Retour A La Raison

Heinrich Himmler's Speech at Poznan (Posen)

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Until the great massacres during the Crusades, they constituted a middle class of merchants, physicians, and other profissionals

"Germany was neither a geographic nor even a clear-cut linguistic entity. There were large, cohesive German-speaking communities in distant Russia, on the banks of the Volga and on the shores of the Black Sea in what are today Ukraine, Moldavia, and Romania. There was as yet no hint of a national consciousness anywhere to unite the speakers of more than a dozen dialects (...)

Jews were by no means newcomers to these regions. No one knows exactly when they first arrived. They seem to have reached the Rhineland and the Danube valley in the wake of Roman legions, long before the establishment of Christianity. In some parts they may have settled earlier than the (later Germanized) Celts, Balts, and Slavs. Long before there were Saxons, Bavarians, or Prussians, Jews lived in what was later known as the Germans lands. A literate community of ancient renown, in the early Middle Ages they constituted an early urban middle class of traders, surgeons, apothecaries, and crafsmen in gold, silver, and precious stones. The earliest written record testifying to their presence in the Rhineland is the text of a decree of A.D. 321 by the emperor Constantine (...). It instructs the Roman magistrate of Cologne on relations with the local rabbi.

During the Christianization of Western Europe, they were the only people who retained their religious faith, sometimes at a high price. The first centuries of Christian rule were, by and large, relatively tolerant. For long periods Jews and Germans coexisted peacefully. Prior to the Crusades, Jews were free to own property and practice all trades and professions. Later, their lives were made miserable by the brutality and superstition of the mob, the greed of princes, and the growing intolerance of the Church. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they had become mostly rag dealers, pawnbrokers, money changers, peddlers, and vagrants. The remarkable thing about them was that the poorest men (and some of the women) were often literate, though in Hebrew only."

                           Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 20-21                                          

'I learnt it in Auschwitz.'

"The first days were terrible - for everyone. There is a 'shock', a trauma connected with entrance into a concentration camp which can last five, ten, twenty days. Nearly all the people who died, died during this first phase. Our way of life had changed totally in the space of a few days, especially in the case of us western Jews. Polish and Russian Jews had done some hard training for the auschwitz experience in the ghettos beforehand, and the shock for them was less severe. For us, the Italian, French and Dutch Jews, it was as if we had been plucked straight from our houses to a concentration camp.

But I could feel, along with fear and hunger and exhaustion, an extremely intense need to understand the world around me. To begin with, the language. I know a little German, but I felt I had to know a lot more. I went so far as to take private lessons, paid for with part of my bread ration. I didn´t know that I was learning a really vulgar kind of German. I found that out on a business trip to a chemical factory in Leverküsen. The people I was dealing with, very polite German types, said 'How strange. Italians don't usually know any German, and those who do know a different kind of German. Where did you learn it?' So I told them. 'I learnt it in Auschwitz.' They were upset, for lots of reasons. We were being friendly together and at least some of them, perhaps all of them, had been Nazis."

 Germaine Greer Talks to Primo Levi (1985) in, Belpoliti & Gordon (ed.) Primo Levi: The Voice of Memory - Interviews 1961-1987, (tr.)The New Press, 2001, p.4.                                                 

Peggy Lee - Black Coffee

Ahmad Jamal Trio - Darn That Dream

the idea of symbiosis was always suspect.

"Before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied, and ridiculed Germans; only Jews seemed actually to have loved them. The links - and tensions - between Jews and Germans were sometimes described as stemming from an alleged family resemblance. Heine was one of the first to emphasize the similarities. He hailed Jews and Germans as Europe's two "ethical peoples"; together they would yet give birth to a new messianic age. Heine went so far as to claim that ancient Hebrews had been "the Germans of the Orient"! Goethe expressed a wish that Germans be dispersed throughout  the world as the Jews had been and strive like them for the improvement of mankind. (...) Walter Benjamin said in 1917: "The German and the Jew are like two related extremes that confront each other". Kafka maintained that Jews and Germans "have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thouroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs"

(...) Less positively, Jews and Germans stand accused of a similar combination of arrogance and self-loathing, tactlessness and hypersensivity. Even when such generalizations contain a grain of truth, they do ot explain the one-sided love or the one-sided hatred or what happened in the end.

At various times there has also been speculation - much of it rather tedious - as to whether there ever was a real "dialogue" between the two peoples or even, as some put it, a "symbiosis" - borrowed from, of all things biology - is even more dubious. In a symbiosis, one life-form is unable to exist without the other! Not surprisingly, symbiosis between humans was first preached by the Romantics as part of their organic notions of friendship, "race", biohistory, and civilization. Before the Holocaust, it was mostly Jews who spoke, hopefully, of symbiosis. Martin Buber rhapsodized about a German-Jewish symbiosis as late as 1939: it had been abruptly interrupted by the Nazis, he claimed, but it might be resumed again it the future. After the Holocaust, only penitent Germans evoked it, guilt-stricken and rueful over "their" loss. Altogether, the idea of symbiosis was always suspect. Why does nobody ever speak of an American-Jewish, french-Jewish, or Dutch-Jewish symbiosis?"

                            Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp.10-11