"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."
"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:"
The Divine Comedy combines strikingly modern touches with a poetic energy rooted in imperfectly human experience. Primo Levi, imprisoned at Auschwitz in spring 1944, recited Dante’s Ulysses passage while teaching Italian to a fellow prisoner, finding the lines unexpectedly powerful and life-affirming. Levi remembered the exhortation urging sailors to leave safety and pursue worth and knowledge, and perceived the words as a divine voice that briefly displaced his surroundings. Dante’s Ulysses shares Homeric origins but diverges significantly after the Trojan War, presenting a heroic figure whose restless pursuit of knowledge drives him beyond Homer’s Odyssey.
Read at The New Yorker
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