Quiet city

'Auschwitz, Quiet City' is a book of short stories and two poems published by Altamarea. A compilation of texts written over thirty-five years by Primo Levi , a survivor of the Nazi death camps , Jewish of course, and one of their most clairvoyant exponents, without diminishing others who suffered the extreme rigors of a perpetual survival etched in their memory and soul with more force and pain than a burning stylus.

The work is composed of fantastic stories, to a lesser extent, and autobiographical ones, set in a space and time where there are no dividing lines between genres, since everything corresponds to hell . What Levi does in this book is ask himself, like the other objectified prisoners, the reason for his internment, since no one understood, nor does anyone understand, the reason for such an atrocity, beyond the pure personification of evil that represented the era that denies everything it means to be human.

In the stories, the humiliation, desperation and atrocious hunger of the inmates who have sinned by being born Jewish are repeated, constantly and inevitably, yes, like the undersigned, Jews persecuted throughout history for their beliefs, Jews annihilated for the fact of being different without being the so-called chosen people that was, for the Nazis , the German people, Hitler's voluntary executioners.

It's curious, in the first story, that Vidal's character is an exact copy of another who appears in " If This Is a Man ." The prisoner is short, very strong, and dim-witted, someone destined to live. But, despite his ability to overcome the fire, he dies, like the vast majority of Jews imprisoned in the concentration camp universe. Hardly anyone is capable of enduring the most repressive, industrialized system devised by the harbingers of evil.

To pause over each story and each of the two poems represents a glimpse into several questions that often go unanswered. Therein lies the powerful foundation of evil. No matter how well one formulates and masters the art of questioning , one will often encounter false answers constructed in an eternal torture session.