THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

Where Dante guides us.

- BY CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT

During a stolen hour in the spring of 1944, when Primo Levi had been a slave laborer at Auschwitz for about three months, a French prisoner asked Levi to teach him some Italian. Levi, a young chemist from Turin, went on to become a major chronicler of life in the camps, but at the time he didn't believe that he had what it took to survive. He thought too much. He was hollow with hunger and painfully aware that his hands were covered in sores and that he smelled. Worst of all, he felt that the things he'd seen would leave him dead inside even if he survived. It would have been natural to give up. He didn't initially understand why a part of the Divine Comedy came to mind in that furtive hour of teaching—it was hardly Italian Conversation 101—but Dante's story of the Greek warrior Ulysses began to spill out of him. He forgot many lines but persevered, sometimes translating into French, determined to make his fellow-prisoner understand, especially the speech in which Ulysses urges a worn-out group of sailors, finally safe ashore, to go back out to sea:

Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
You were not made to live your lives as brutes,
But to be followers of worth and knowledge.

Levi recalled that he seemed to be hearing the lines for the first time, and that they sounded like the voice of God. For a moment, he forgot where he was.