The work of Primo Levi is as important as it is moving and brilliantly written on the subjects of Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Nazism, particularly If This Is A Man and The Truce. There is nothing in human history that compares with the industrial genocide conducted with the ruthless efficiency and cruelty by the Nazis between 1943 and 1945, and so remains the keenest test of belief in God.
Levi as a “non-believer” and “secular” Jew does not deal with the question of belief in God. However, in The Drowned And The Saved, there is a remarkable passage with respect to his disbelief, and one that deserves to be quoted verbatim on this blog. For me, it is an astonishing testimony of what a coherent and intellectually honest disbelief in supernatural deities can mean, and also provides a rejoinder – if one were needed – to the claims often made by theists that, when faced with death, people will turn to a god, either in the proverbial saying that there are “no atheists in foxholes”, or perhaps when faced with a terminal illness.
Levi in The Drowned And The Saved writes of the only occasion when he was tempted to pray:
This happened in October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise, were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it (The Drowned and the Saved, 1989 Abacus edition: p118).
The 11th Februrary was the anniversary of Levi’s incarceration at Auschwitz.
