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March 30, 2015
p127 It is well known that people from Turin transplanted to Milan do not strike root, or at least do it badly. In the fall of 1942 there were seven of us friends from Turin, boys and girls, living in Milan, having arrived for different reasons in the large city which the war had rendered inhospitable; our parents -- those of us who still had them -- had moved to the country to avoid the bombings, [The RAF started bombing Italian cities early in the war and were joined by the U.S.A.A.F. in 1942] and we were living an amply communal life. Euge was an architect, he wanted to do Milan over, and declared that the best city planner had been Frederick Barbarossa. Silvio had a law degree, but he was writing a philosophical treatise on minuscule sheets of onionskin and had a job with a shipping company. Ettore was an engineer at Olivetti’s. Lina was sleeping with Euge and had some vague involvement with art galleries. Vanda was a chemist like me but could not find a job, and was permanently irritated by this because she was a feminist. Ada was my cousin and worked at the Corbacco Publishing House; Silvio called her the bi-doctor because she had two degrees, and Euge called her cousimo, which meant cousin of Primo, which Ada rather resented. After Guilia’s marriage, I had remained alone with my rabbits; I felt a widower and an orphan and fantasized about writing the saga of an atom of carbon, to make people understand the solemn poetry, known only to chemists, of chlorophyll photosynthesis...
p128 If I am not mistaken we were all writing poetry, except for Ettore, who said it was undignified for an engineer. Writing sad, crepuscular poems, and not all that beautiful, while the world was in flames, did not seem to us either strange or shameful: we proclaimed ourselves the enemies of Fascism, but actually Fascism had had its effect on us, as on almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.
We bore with spiteful gaiety the rationing and the freezing cold in houses without coal, and we accepted with irresponsibility the nightly bombings by the English; they were not for us, they were a brutal sign of force on the part of our very distant allies, they didn’t bother us. We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins, and sometimes, in certain of my contemporaries’ families, through funereal, bureaucratic letters which spoke such words as “heroically, in the fulfillment of his duty.” The danse macabre up and down the Libyan coast [the battle between the British in Egypt and the Italians and Germans based in Libya], back and forth on the steppes of the Ukraine, would never come to an end.
Each of us did his or her work day by day, slackly, without believing in it, as happens to someone who knows he is not working for his own future. We went to the theater and concerts, which sometimes were interrupted halfway through because the air-raid siren would start shrieking: and this seemed to us a ridiculous and gratifying incident; the Allies were masters of the sky, perhaps in the end they would win and Fascism would end -- but it was their business, they were rich and powerful, they had the airplane carriers and the Liberators [the U.S. B-24 "Liberator" heavy bomber. The longest range heavy bomber of this phase of the war]. But not us, “they” had declared us “different,” and different we would be; we took sides but kept out of the stupid and cruel Aryan games, discussing the plays of O’Neill and Thornton Wilder, climbing the Grigne slopes, falling a bit in love with each other, inventing intellectual games, and singing the lovely songs Silvio had learned from some of his Waldensian friends. As to what was happening during those same months in all of Europe occupied by the Germans, in Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, in the pit of Babi Yar near Kiev, in the ghetto of Warsaw, in Salonica, Paris, and Lidice: as to this pestilence which was about to submerge us no precise information had reached us, only vague and sinister hints dropped by soldiers returning from Greece or from the rear areas of the Russian front, and which we tended to censor. Our ignorance allowed us to live, as when you are in the mountains and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.
p129 But in November came the Allied landing in North Africa, in December came the Russian resistance and finally victory at Stalingrad, and we realized that the war had drawn closer and that history had resumed its march. In the space of a few weeks each of us matured, more so than during the previous twenty years. Out of the shadows came men whom Fascism had not crushed -- lawyers, professors, and workers -- and we recognized in them our teachers, those for whom we had futilely searched until then in the Bible’s doctrine, in chemistry, and on the mountains. Fascism had reduced them to silence for twenty years, and they explained to us that Fascism was not only a clownish and improvident misrule but the negator of justice; it had not only dragged Italy into an unjust and ill-omened war, but it had arisen and consolidated itself as the custodian of a detestable legality and order, based on the coercion of those who work, on the unchecked profits of those who exploit the labor of others, on the silence imposed on those who think and do not want to be slaves, and on systemic and calculated lies. They told us that our mocking, ironic intolerance was not enough; it should turn into anger, and the anger should be channeled into a well-organized and timely revolt, but they did not teach us how to make bombs or shoot a rifle.
p130 They talked to us about unknowns: Gramsci, Salvemini, Gobetti, the Rosselli brothers -- who were they? So there actually existed a second history, a history parallel to the one which the liceo had administered to us from on high? In those few convulsed months we tried in vain to reconstruct, repopulate the historic black of the past twenty years, but those new characters remained “heroes,” like Garibaldi and Nazario Sauro, they did not have thickness or human substance. The time to consolidate our education was not granted us: in March came the strikes in Turin, indicating that the crisis was near at hand; on July 25 came the internal collapse of Fascism, the piazzas jammed with happy, fraternal crowds, the spontaneous and precarious joy of a country to which liberty had been given by a palace intrigue; and then came the eighth of September, the gray-green serpent of Nazi divisions on the streets of Milan and Turin, the brutal reawakening: the comedy was over, Italy was an occupied country, like Poland, Yugoslavia, and Norway.
In this way, after the long intoxication with words, certain of our rightness of our choice, extremely insecure about our means, our hearts filled with much more desperation than hope, and against the backdrop of a defeated, divided country, we went into battle to test our strength. We separated to follow our destinies, each in a different valley.
Levi’s tiny resistance band is quickly captured by the militia of the Republic of Salo thanks to an informer. Before Levi is turned over to the Germans and transported to the camps, he has a conversation about gold with a local arrested for contraband.
p136 “You know why it’s called the Dora?” ... “Because it’s made of gold. Not all, of course, but it carries gold, and when it freezes over you can no longer take it out.”
“Is there gold on the bottom?”
“Yes, in the sand: not everywhere, but in many stretches... Our particular bend, which we have passed down from father to son, is the richest of all: it is well hidden, very much out-of-the-way...”
...
“...You see, it’s not that there is so much gold: there is in fact very little, you wash it for a whole night and you manage to get two or three grams out of it: but it never ends. You can go back when you wish: the next night or a month later, whenever you feel like it, and the gold has grown back, and it’s that way forever and ever, like grass comes back in the fields. And so there are no people who are freer than us: that’s why I feel I’m going crazy, staying inside here.
...
p 137 “Not all days are good: it goes better when the weather is good and the moon in its last quarter. I couldn’t say why, but that’s how it is, in case it ever should occur to you to try.”
I appreciated the good omen in silence. Of course I would try it: What wouldn’t I try? During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly, and I felt time running through my fingers, escaping from my body minute by minute, like a hemorrhage that can no longer be stanched. Of course I would search for gold: not to get rich but to try out a new skill, to see again the earth, air, and water from which I was separated by a gulf that grew larger every day; and to find again my chemical trade in its essential and primordial form, the Scheidekunst, precisely, the art of separating metal from gangue.
“I don’t sell it all,” the man continued. “I am too fond of it. I keep a little on the side and melt it down, twice a year, and work it: I am not an artist but I like to have it in my hands, hit it with the hammer, score it, scratch it, I’m not interested in getting rich; what counts for me is to live free, not to have a collar like a dog, to work like this, when I wish, and nobody who can come and say, ‘Come on, get moving.’ That’s why I hate staying in here; besides, on top of everything else, you lose a day’s work.”
...
p138 [Back] In the cell I was welcomed by the solitude, the freezing, pure breath of the mountains which came through the small window, and the anguish of tomorrow. I listened -- in the silence of curfew one could hear the murmur of the Dora, lost friend, and all friends were lost, and youth and joy, and perhaps life: it flowed close by but indifferent, dragging along the gold in its womb of melted ice. I felt gripped by a painful envy of my ambiguous companion, who would soon return to his precarious but monstrously free life, to his inexhaustible trickle of gold, and an endless series of days.
What I like about this is that the subject here is literally gold but also value -- what we value. Gold is an inherently interesting substance: a soft, easy to work metal that doesn't tarnish. But it's real value, as shown here, is what it can buy -- in this case freedom but for other people it might be something else. And for Levi, about to go into the camps, nothing could be more precious than freedom, and I'm sure this conversation continued to resonate in him over the months that followed.
It's worth mentioning here that, had Levi not been Jewish, he would most likely have been shot at this point instead of going into the camps.
Gold (Au 79)
“In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly reddish yellow, dense, soft, malleable and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements, and is solid under standard conditions. The metal therefore occurs often in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum) and also naturally alloyed with copper and palladium. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).
Gold's atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally in the universe. It is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed. Because the Earth was molten when it was just formed, almost all of the gold present in the early Earth probably sank into the planetary core. Therefore most of the gold that is present today in the Earth's crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by asteroid impacts during the late heavy bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.”
...
“A total of 174,100 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, according to GFMS as of 2012.[4] This is roughly equivalent to 5.6 billion troy ounces or, in terms of volume, about 9020 m3, or a cube 21 m on a side. The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry.[5]”
...
“Gold leaf can be beaten thin enough to become transparent. The transmitted light appears greenish blue, because gold strongly reflects yellow and red.[11] Such semi-transparent sheets also strongly reflect infrared light, making them useful as infrared (radiant heat) shields in visors of heat-resistant suits, and in sun-visors for spacesuits.[12]”
...
“...since metallic gold is inert to all body chemistry, it has no taste, it provides no nutrition, and it leaves the body unaltered.[52]” -Wiki
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