The Work of Genocide

Abstract

Primo Levi had a remarkable work ethic: between 1946 and 1976, when he was a full-time, industrial chemist, eventually becoming his company’s director, he also wrote five books, as well as essays, short stories, and poems. Aside from his personal need and love for work, the centrality of it in his moral universe may be attributed to several factors. He was reared and lived almost his entire life in Turin, a city with a long tradition of industry and prosperity. His family was firmly lodged in the bourgeoisie, as were the majority of the Jewish families in Turin. As an engineer, his father was a successful professional, and so were most of Levi’s male relatives. In short, he was reared in a social class which had internalized Enlightenment ideals that defined work as a positive force for re-shaping the world while solidifying one’s identity. This may explain the impetus behind some of his occasional journalism, like the essay he wrote after spending a day observing the work on a cable-laying ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. In his fulsome praise of the skilled crew—he compares them to Ulysses— Levi implies that work is an appropriate subject for the highest forms of literature:

In this unusual and colossal undertaking [the sailors] have again discovered the ancient virtues of competence put to the test and of work well done. I hope that they will not be surprised nor shocked if their accounts seemed poetic to me.

Still marked so much by the concentration camps of labor and death, this post-Holocaust world deserves an entry sign. Let it read Arbeit Macht Frei. Shall those words provoke the good work that justly sets people free, or will they merely mock us all?

—Richard Rubenstein and John Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz¹