Finding an exceptional voice

At the end of his excellent introduction to Auschwitz Report, Robert Gordon invokes W.G. Sebald’s argument in his last book, On the Natural History of Destruction: compared to ‘natural histories’, e.g. contemporary medical reports such as this one, more literary texts ‘[know] nothing’. W.G. Sebald was one of the greatest thinker-writers of the 20th century, as great in his own way as Primo Levi himself. But here, I think, he exaggerates.

The original Auschwitz Report was written by Levi and his friend Dr Leonardo De Benedetti in the spring of 1945, in the transit camp of Katowice, only months after their liberation from Buna-Monowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz. It was commissioned by the Katowice Command, as part of the Soviet investigation into Nazi crimes. Then after their return the two authors reworked it for a (slightly) larger audience, and published it in the Turin medical journal Minerva Medica.

It covers much of the same ground as Levi’s great book, If This Is a Man: the (now) notorious train journey, in which hundreds of people, from infants to octogenarians, were crammed into cattle cars and locked in; the first selection on the platform at Birkenau, after which most were murdered immediately; arrival, life and death in the slave-labour camp for the remaining few, the food and washing arrangements, diseases and their treatments, the selections and gas chambers; the end, in which almost all of the 11,000 prisoners driven towards Germany died, and only a few of the thousand or so left sick and dying in the camp infirmary ultimately survived.