Leonardo De Benedetti (1898–1983)

It's impossible to "rate" or "review" a work like this, but Primo Levi's cool, calm, and dispassionate reporting on the procedures and medical "care" provided at the Monowitz work camp of Auschwitz - with recurring patients eventually transferred to Birkenau and murdered in the gas chambers there - stands as essential reading.

Levi and his companion, Dr. Leonardo de Benedetti, not only survived the camp but later chronicled the experience in this clinical work. The emotional remove of the authors sets this work apart as one of the most clear-eyed accountings of the horrors perpetrated by industrial-era mass murder.

The emotion that comes into play is only in two separately appended documents, both remembrances Levi wrote to commemorate his lifelong friend Benedetti after his death in 1983. But it provides a spark of humanity that the two managed to keep alive both in the camp and for the rest of their lives.… (mehr)

Primo Levi en Leonardo De Benedetti schreven in opdracht van de Russische bevrijders een rapport over de medische- en leefomstandigheden van het kamp Buna-Monowitz dat behoorde tot het zeven kilometer verder gelegen vernietigingskamp Auswitz. Voorzien van een lange inleiding door J. Vogelaar is het thans in druk verschenen waarbij de eerlijkheid gebiedt om te zeggen dat het geschrevene niet of nauwelijks bijdraagt aan reeds aanwezige informatie over dit onderwerp.

Na lezing, het vergt een paar uur, blijf ik toch met een onbehaaglijk gevoel achter. Natuurlijk, het is authentiek, het is van de hand van een wereldberoemd schrijver die de verschrikkingen aan den lijve heeft ondervonden en krijgt daardoor dus iets sacraals. Ik beschouw het dan ook maar als zodanig en laat achterwege dat mij de reden om het boekje –althans in deze vorm- uit te geven volledig ontgaat. ( het commercieel uitbaten van heiligdommen is niet verboden maar wel beschamend)

Ontroerend mooi is overigens het in-memoriam dat door Levi is geschreven bij het overlijden van Benedetti en dat aan deze uitgave is toegevoegd.… (mehr)

Auschwitz Report was, in fact, co-authored by Levi and his friend Leonardo de Benedetti. It was commissioned by Soviet authorities as a description of life in the camp, and it is the first thing that Levi wrote about his experience in Auschwitz. The Report describes the transport, by train for four days, from Italy, general life in the camp, and perhaps because Benedetti was a medical doctor, much of the short piece focuses on medical conditions and illnesses. One can clearly see information and incidents that Levi expanded upon in his later books about the camp and life afterwards. Levi and Benedetti survived the camp together, made their way back to Italy through a long and tortuous route, and remained life-long friends.

It is amazing is how much serendipity dictated who would live or die in the camp: four times Benedetti was put on the list of those to be gassed, but each time sympathetic doctors removed his name; survival through a winter could depend on being one of the few who received a light gabardine raincoat or a pullover in the distribution of winter clothing; a good-fitting pair of shoes or boots could be difference between health and crippling infections. In the face of the advancing Red Army, the Germans emptied the camp and force-marched 11,000 prisoners away; very few survived; Benedetti and Levi were left behind; the former was detailed to assist with patients left in the hospital and Levi was convalescing; all were supposed to be murdered by the SS, but for some unknown reason nothing was done and the SS simply deserted the camp. Even after liberation, before the Soviets organized distribution of food, patients survived only because they discovered a cache of potatoes buried in a field to protect them from frost.

The fact that there was even a "hospital" in the camp seems to beg incredulity. Especially as it was not set up until February, 1944 and was plagued by an almost complete lack of even elementary sanitation, drugs and equipment. Prisoners would be nursed back to health, or at least some approximation of it, operations were even performed, and prisoners were then sent back to the work battalions designed to work them to death. This hospital was not used for medical experiments such as those under the infamous Mengele; it was staffed by prisoner doctors and nurses and it was an attempt, poor though it was, to offer treatment for the myriad diseases and infections that afflicted everyone (though anyone with TB, malaria or syphilis was sent immediately to the gas chambers). And this for people whose only destiny was to die in a work battalion or be gassed. Maybe it was all part of the facade of "normality" that the Germans constructed to hide the reality of the camps from the outside and from themselves to a certain extent.

A moving description of the depths of man's inhumanity to man.… (mehr)