'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.