"Exposed or isolated, deprived of our culture or locked into it, our powerlessness to define ourselves culminates in the camps: take Primo Levi, a chemist, deported from Italy to Auschwitz in 1943, one of millions: "Levi's number-174517-was tattooed on his left arm in a swift and slightly painful operation.... Only by showing the number could 174517 get bread and soup. Levi speaks: Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken/away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we/speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen,/they will not understand. They will even take away/our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to/find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage/somehow so that behind the name something of us/of us as we were, still remains."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, "Some Notes on Jewish Lesbian Identity" (Summer 1980-Winter 1981), in Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Primo_Levi
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Primo Levi
1919 – 1987
italienischer Chemiker, Autor und Antifaschist
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