Primo Levi

And so I was able to give more of a breadth of what the women were doing.

In your book, you mentioned several famous anti-fascists that I think people, our listeners will probably have heard of Primo Levi, potentially Olivetti, who helped produce typewriters that were exported around the world.

And also Natalia Ginzburg, who wrote a very famous book, Family Sayings, amongst others.

They obviously have travelled outside of Italy.

And one of my mom's friends... you know, call the police.

While I was away, far away, I was doing this Primo Levi film in the Ukraine, The Truce.

And it was very hard.

you know, to navigate all this.

extremely and truly horrifying by a number of the population of Naples in one of the, you know, novels that he wrote, one of the wartime novels that are also in part memoirs that he wrote entitled The Skin, while at the same time being perceived as, you know, exactly the opposite by another set of people that are in exactly the same setting.

In that chapter, I also talk about the figure of Primo Levi.

Primo Levi was someone who you know, was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II.

And there he has this really, in one of his texts about that time of his life, he is very careful in distinguishing how, you know, the laggers, the concentration camps experience of the inmates was extremely different from the one of the guards, of the German guards that are there.

So the idea that there is something profoundly subjective and context dependent about horror is an idea that I unpack all throughout the book.

He survived because he was a chemist.

He was named Primo Levi, and he would become one of the most important writers of the 20th century.

you Primo Levi was born in Turin, northern Italy, on the 31st of July 1919 to Jewish parents, Esther and Cesare.

Primo inherited from Cesare a love for reading, for science, for exploring the whys of life.

But as he entered puberty, the studious and introverted Primo found himself in conflict with his more outgoing father.

Another controversial claim is that the ordeal at Monowitz did not worsen Primo's depression.

On the contrary, it honed his survival skills and intellect.

Primo Levi confirmed this to American writer Philip Roth.

And this is why I think this would be disgrace, this would be laughable, if it was because it makes me think of how much importance is given to the freedom of expression in theory, and recognizing the trauma of the other in theory, And how tragic is the reality? So I have to take the side of the victim and I, because they're left alone.

And again, Gabor was saying, was talking to the Jewish community, but I'm not the only one who, I mean, I have a vivid memory of Primo Levi's recollection of what was, what it meant for, for him to talk about the Holocaust and the concentration camps and whatever he had seen within it soon after the Holocaust.

When he returned to his civilized life, people wouldn't believe him.

And even in Germany, people were rejecting it, saying that he was exaggerating.

He has now told the full story in his own words in a new book, Mosul Eye, A Scholar's Clandestine War Against ISIS, published by Skyhorse Press.

It is, in my opinion, a work of literature about the human spirit to stand on the shelf with Primo Levi and Cheslam Milos, a witness to the extremes of human cruelty, oppression, and endurance.

Omar Mohammed, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

David, thank you for having me, and I'm humbled by the words you said about me and about the book.

My colleague at the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, a great scholar of the Stalinist and communist oppression in Eastern Europe, wrote in the preface, I'm going to now forget which of her books she wrote this, I think it was maybe her book on the gulag, the Soviet gulag.

She said, I write this book I'm quoting from memory, not so that it will never happen again, but because it will happen again.

And I think one of the things I am reminded of by you and by the other, as I say, the other people I imagine you standing beside on the shelf, Primo Levi and Shaslam Yilash, are just these horrors occur again and again and again.

And the only remedy against them, not the remedy, the way of beginning a remedy is through unceasing remembrance.

Over the next year and a half, this team under Wolff oversaw the arrest of a substantial proportion of Italy's Jewish people and their deportation to Auschwitz, where many died.

One of those who survived was Primo Levi.

The Jewish-Italian chemist and writer, whose books, particularly If This is a Man, later described the situation for Italy's Jews after Wolf became head of the security forces in the country.

In all, about 20% of Italy's Jewish people died in the Holocaust, most as a direct result of Wolf's activities.