memoirists-from-italy

"When I hear people say, “You Catholics honour Mary too much,” I reply, 'We are never able to honour her enough."

"I have no doubt about the fact that the demon tempts the authorities of the Church especially, just as he tempts every authority, those of politics and industry."

"Prayer at distance rarely has a liberating effect. In itself, it is possible to attempt prayers at distance, but whether they take root is another matter. One of the requirements for doing exorcisms is in fact that the person is present, and that he or she is consenting. Doing exorcisms on someone who is neither present nor consenting nor Catholic presents difficulties. I have no doubt, however, that Hitler was a Satanist. From this point of view, I am not surprised that Pius XII might have attempted an exorcism at distance. [The Führer's possession emerges from his] humanly inexplicable perfidy: one cannot explain such wickedness without a higher force and outside human nature."

"Once I asked Satan: ‘But why are you more afraid when I invoke the Madonna than when I invoke Jesus Christ?’ He replied: ‘Because it humbles me more to be defeated by a human creature than to be defeated by Him.’"

"We are living in an age when faith is diminishing. If you abandon God, the Devil will take his place."

"During the exorcism the evil may emerge in slow stages or with sudden explosions. He does not want show himself. He will be angry and he is strong. During one exorcism I saw a child of 11 held down by four strong men. The child threw the men aside with ease. I was there when a boy of 10 lifted a huge, heavy table. Afterwards I felt the muscles in the boy's arms. He could not have done it on his own. He had the strength of the Devil inside him."

"I speak with the Devil every day. I talk to him in Latin. He answers in Italian. I have been wrestling with him, day in day out, for 14 years."

"Remember, when we jeer at the Devil and tell ourselves that he does not exist, that is when he is happiest."

"No two cases are the same. Some patients have to be tied down on a bed. They spit. They vomit. At first the demon will try to demoralise the exorcist, then he will try to terrify him, saying, 'Tonight I'm going to put a serpent between your sheets. Tomorrow I'm going to eat your heart'."

"Demons are wary of talking and must be forced to speak. When demons are voluntarily chatty it's a trick to distract the exorcist. We must never ask useless questions out of curiosity. We but must interrogate with care. We always begin by asking for the demon's name."

"Il brigante è come la serpe, se non la stuzzichi non ti morde."

"La Patria, la Legge, la prima è una puttana, la seconda peggio ancora. E Patria e Legge hanno diritti e non doveri, vogliono il sangue dei figli della miseria. Ma vi è forse una legge eguale per tutti? Non dirmi ciò, non parlare di questo gigante mostruoso, poiché conosco che la legge leale non è mai esistita, nè esisterà fin tanto che Iddio non ci sterminerà tutti."

"The so-called "General" Crocco, who played an important part as a brigand and Bourbonist leader in the partisan war of 1860-61, was an escaped convict, with thirty offences, ranging from petty larceny to murder, registered against him in the books of the Neapolitan tribunals. He pillaged both Bourbonists and Liberals with strict impartiality."

"Crocco had the greatest influence not only over all the brigand hordes, but over a great part of the country people, who recognised his extraordinary ability. He was known as the "General" not only by all the brigands, but also by the peasants."

"A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side."

"Senza dubbio, ho fatto del male alla società, ma io facevo per difendere la mia vita; per essa avrei dato fuoco a tutto il mondo."

"In such a crowd, so numerous and composed of such heterogeneous elements, it might have appeared almost absurd to look for discipline; but perfect discipline there was, for, whatever his other qualities might be, Crocco most undoubtedly was a "ruler of men". His word in that band was law, and the punishment of disaffection was death."

"In poco tempo era diventato il più temuto e rispettato capobanda della Lucania non soltanto per il suo coraggio, ma anche per la sua intelligenza di guerrigliero."

"From having once been a peaceful shepherd, [he] had become the terror of southern Italy. [...] The usual occupation of Crocco's band was robbery of the wealthy Italians of the vicinity, battles with the Italian troops, and the seizure and robbery of rich foreigners, for whose deliverance heavy ransoms were demanded. When a detachment of troops was sent against them, they showed considerable courage. As they knew the country well, with its hiding-places and points of vantage, it was not easy to capture them."

"Dico, che l'arte della Scultura infra tutte l'arte, che s'interviene disegno, è maggiore sette volte, perchè una statua di Scultura deve avere otto vedute, e conviene che la sieno tutte di egual bontà."

"Tutte le opera, che si veggono fatte dallo Iddio della Natura in cielo ed in terra, sono tutte di Scultura."

"La Pittura non è altro, che o albero o uomo o altra cosa, che si specchi in un fonte. La differenza, che è dalla Scultura alla Pittura è tanta, quanto è dalla ombra e la cosa, che fa l'ombra."

"Gli è ben vero che si dice Tu imparerai per un'altra volta: questo non vale perchè la vien sempre con modi diversi e non mai immaginati."

"Dissi, a quelle parole, che gli uomini che volevan fare a lor modo, bisognava che si facessino un mondo a lor modo, perché in questo non si usava cosí."

"Quando il povero dona al ricco il Diavolo se ne ride?"

"Sí che vegga il mondo, quando la fortuna vuol torre a 'ssassinare uno uomo, quante diverse vie la piglia."

"His books were important to me. I miss his presence in the world."

"The Italian Jew Primo Levi recognized his kinship with Dante, who likewise wrote of a descent into hell, but having come upon Yiddish speakers for the first time in Auschwitz, he later questioned his authority as a witness and tried to write a novel about the "real Jews" of the Holocaust, the Yiddish Jews of Eastern Europe."

"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."

"no listing of Italian Sephardic authors would be complete without Primo Levi, who, along with Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Paul Celan, and Aharon Appelfeld, is one of the most acclaimed chroniclers of the Holocaust. A chemist born into a secular, assimilated family in Turin, Levi is best known for If This Is a Man, a straightforward but at the same time heartrending chronicle of his years as a prisoner in Auschwitz, to which he was deported in 1943. When the autobiography was first published in Italian in 1947, it received almost no attention, perhaps because it was too soon after the Holocaust for readers to fully comprehend what had just occurred. But upon its reissue in 1958 under the title Survival in Auschwitz, the volume quickly became recognized as a classic of Holocaust literature."

"From the works of Primo Levi to the recipes of imagined foods found in the concentration camps of Terezin to the brave poetry of Anna Akhmatova written during the Stalinist era, we are forced to acknowledge the power of poetry to name the unspeakable-to enter and to illuminate the secret corridor of horrors."

"His death was a terrible blow for all of us. We never thought he would kill himself. He was a kind of reference point for us, a model of great serenity and balance. After he killed himself I realized that of course the memory of the camps can never be effaced in any survivor. So many of our great witnesses to that horror have committed suicide. But for every suicide there are always undoubtedly countless factors which must be appreciated. These are never simple matters. But I’m sure that the memory of the camps makes it impossible for one to completely accept life afterwards. And yet he was a person, as I remember him, who was extremely serene and ironic. In the end, though, the torment of his experience in the camps was intolerable. (PB: Would you say that in Italy he was chiefly appreciated for his writings on the holocaust?) NG: No, not only for those, but in general. He was recognized as an extremely important figure. He hated the word ‘holocaust’, though, and so do I. In Italian, at least, it has the distinct effect of ennobling something which cannot be ennobled. I feel “genocide” is a better, more accurately descriptive word. But, yes, he was recognized and respected in every imaginable sense."

"The prisoners who saved themselves were not the best, the predestined to good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and experienced showed the exact opposite. Survived the worst of preference, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray area', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were, nor are there in human affairs, certain rules), but was also a rule. I felt so innocent, but trooped among the saved, and therefore constantly looking for an excuse, before me and the others. Survived the worst, that is the most suitable; the best are all dead."

"Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can."

"There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so; if we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live."

"It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just (i giusti) among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species — we, in short — had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act."

"We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless."

"The aims of life are the best defense against death."

"In countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. The well-known example of this is the crazy genetics preached in the USSR by Lysenko, which in the absence of discussion (his opponents were exiled to Siberia) compromised the harvests for twenty years. Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break."

"La nostra casa è un mucchio di rovine dove abbiam fatto tante cose belle. Sette eravamo. Vuol la nostra fine l'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle"

"To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t."

"The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession."

"Consider that this has been: I commend these words to you. Engrave them on your hearts When you are in your house, when you walk on your way, When you go to bed, when you rise. Repeat them to your children. Or may your house crumble, Disease render you powerless, Your offspring avert their faces from you."

"The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism."

"Interviewer: Is it possible to abolish man's humanity? Levi: Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, yes; and that is really the characteristic of the Nazi lager [concentration camp]. About the others, I don't know, because I don't know them; perhaps in Russia the same thing happens. It's to abolish man's personality, inside and outside: not only of the prisoner, but also of the jailer. He too lost his personality in the lager. These are two different itineraries, but with the same result, and I would say that only a few had the good fortune of remaining aware during their imprisonment; some regained their awareness of the experience later, but during it, they had lost it; many forgot everything. They did not record their experiences in their mind. They didn't impress on their memory track. Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; the memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue... all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; we were like work animals. It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all."

"Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it."

"It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is."

"I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual."

"And we must remember that [Hitler and Mussolini's] faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."

"If he believes time has run its course, A man is a sad thing too."