The Oscar award on March 21st 1999 will be unforgettable for the Italian cinema. With “La vita è bella”, Roberto Benigni won the Oscar for the better foreign movie, the Oscar for the Best Actor and the Oscar for the Nicola Piovani's soundtrack. The eve has been disturbed by polemics. “La vita è bella” concerns the dramatic topic of the Shoah, the Hebrews' extermination in the death camps of the nazis Lagers, and in some Italian and American environments it has been criticized that a comic actor as Benigni had measured his strength against a topic as that of the Shoah. During the days Benigni and his picture were talked about, my memories kept on in reintroducing continuously the figure of a writer I have loved a lot and for whom I have an unchanged deep devotion, Primo Levi (1919-1987), the author of the highest and most upsetting witness about lagers, of the book having being translated into all the main world languages, “ If this is a man “. I interviewed Levi during a morning on October 1984, in his house at Re Umberto Street at Turin. It was to come out his poems book, “At an uncertain hour “. Hanging on the room wall I saw a photo showing posts of cement and barbed wire. A caption stated: “Tragic vestiges of the camp of Auschwitz”. That photo gave me the idea for the first question. - A part of the poems of your new book were written between 1945 and 1946, just after you return from the death camp. And yet Adorno said that after Auschwitz it was not possible to make poetry anymore... “My experience was opposite. By then it seemed to me poetry suite more than prose to express what I felt as a burden inside me. Saying poetry I don't think about anything lyric. In these years, if ever, I would have reformulated the words of Adorno: after Auschwitz it's not possible to make poetry anymore but speaking about Auschwitz”. Do you deem these verses are still topical? “Yes. You know my history and you know that it is not possible to erase the Lager experience. It can be overcame, turned to be painless, even turned to be useful, but it cannot be erased. I spend part of my free time insisting on the question at that time: just if this is a man. The question does not refer only to the war and the nazism world, but also to the nowadays world, to terrorists, to who takes a bribe and who bribes, to the bad politicians, to the exploiter. - You were deported on February 1944. How do you look at theses days? “ I have stopped to dream them. But I still think about them. Sometimes I want to say: pay attention, it can happen also that, and not only in Germany”. - Have you been at Auschwitz again? “Twice, in 1965 and 1982. The wording on the gravestone at the Italians 'memorial' entry is not undersigned, but it's mine. I can dictate you the words, I learnt them by heart: 'Visitor, look the vestiges of this camp and think: whenever you come from, you are not a stranger. Let your travel not be useless, not useless our death. For you and your sons, would the ashes of Auschwitz be a warning: don't let the fruit of this horrible hate, whose traces you are seeing here, give new seeds, neither tomorrow nor ever.” - How was the return to the lager as a visitor? “In 1965 less dramatic than it could be expected. I went for a Polish commemorative celebration. Too much noise, few concentration, all well arranged, cleaned outside, so much official speeches“. - And in 1982? “We were few, the emotion was deep. I saw the monument of Birkenau, that was one of the thirty-nine camps of Auschwitz, that of the gas chambers. It has been kept the railway. A rusty track enters the camp and ends at the edge of a sort of void. Ahead there's a symbolic train made of blocks of granite. Each block carries the name of a nation. The monument is that: the tracks and the blocks “ - Were it presented in these moments names, faces of victims, faces of executioners? “No, I found again sensations. By sensations. For example the smell of the place. A harmless smell. It believe it's that of the coal “. Primo Levi committed suicide Saturday morning on April 11th 1987, falling from the third floor landing through the well. They said he was depressed for the illness of his mother, more than ninety years old, for the consequences of an operation she had undergone and overcome and for since over some time he found very hard to write while he has ever written with the utmost ease. But another conjecture was made, probably the most real: of the death camps he kept terrible memories and a secret wound he bore always with extreme force but nevertheless that was awful. It useless now to wonder if Primo Levi would have liked or not a picture as the winning one of Roberto Benigni, taking into account the Jewish communities are divided in evaluating “La vita è bella”. It seems to me that what matters is another unquestionable reality: when boarding the terrible topic of Lagers, it's impossible to set apart what Primo Levi wrote, throughout those pages that day by day, affliction by affliction, pain by pain, help us to understand and to judge.

 

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