Primo Levi and the importance of never forgetting

Norton has published a three-volume collection of the work of Primo Levi, whose Holocaust memoir begins:

“It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labor, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination.”

As the number of survivors dwindle, it is important to keep their stories alive. It is also important to show the story behind the numbers, to a world increasingly inured to smaller-scale, more regular, genocide.

One way to do this is to highlight the utter randomness that marked the Nazi evil: they wanted to kill all the Jews. They needed more workers than they could muster. So they kept Jews alive until they were worked to death. Witness this recent story of euphemism in a book on German porcelain:

On my voyage into porcelain, I come across a reference to one of my favourite designers from the Bauhaus and his work for the Allach porcelain factory. As I don’t know it – there is a plenitude of German factories – I’m intrigued and buy a book on this Allach Porzellan. It arrives a week later, a small black hardback with a photo of a porcelain statue of Athena on the front. It is in English, published by Tony L Oliver, from a suburban street in Egham, Surrey, in 1970. 

“The unique circumstances that prevailed in Germany … made it possible for the very best artists, designers, potters, and all persons associated with the manufacture of fine porcelain, to be taken from the many world-famous factories that existed in Germany at that time, such as Dresden, Berlin, Rosenthal etc, and employed at the previously unknown factory at Allach. It was this unique concentration of talent made available for its production that enabled Allach porcelain to be of such a high quality, and consequently highly desirable …” 

The back flap lists books and colour postcards of uniforms of the SS.I open it up and illustration No 1 is a photograph of Hitler and Reichsführer-SS H Himmler “examining, with apparent approval, a selection of Allach porcelain figures” in 1943. The figures look like 18th-century Meissen. Hitler is smiling, avid. 

Concentration of talent is a hard phrase. They were made in the camp at Dachau.