Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub

Author:Michel Laub [Laub, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-652-2
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

12.

My grandfather never talked about Auschwitz, and so my father had no option but to plunge into Primo Levi’s description of it: the men who steal soup from each other in Auschwitz, the men who pee as they run because they don’t have permission to go to the toilet during the working day in Auschwitz, the men who share their bed with other men and sleep with their face next to the feet of those other men and just hope that the latter haven’t trodden on the same floor as the men suffering from dysentery, and Primo Levi’s ability to bring home to us what it felt like to wake up and get dressed and look out at the snow on the first day of a winter that would last seven months and during which you would work fifteen-hour days with the water up to your knees, carrying sacks of chemical material, all of which helped my father to explain my grandfather’s final years. It’s easier to blame Auschwitz than to accept what happened to my grandfather. It’s easier to blame Auschwitz than to submit oneself to a painful exercise, which is what any child in my father’s position would do: seeing my grandfather not as victim, not as a grain of sand crushed by history, which would automatically make my father another grain of sand at the mercy of that same history, and there is nothing easier than to feel almost proud to be that grain of sand, the one that survived the inferno and is here among us to tell the tale, as if my father were my grandfather and my grandfather were Primo Levi and the testimony of my father and my grandfather were the same as Primo Levi’s testimony — seeing my grandfather not as a victim, but as a man and a husband and a father, who should be judged just like any other man or husband or father.

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