When Primo Levi Met Lucia Morpurgo and Fell in Love
Joseph Mills
Transported to Auschwitz
with 650 Italian Jews,
he was one of 20 still alive
when the camp was liberated.
He made his way home,
malnourished, whittled,
“almost unrecognizable,”
and began writing,
trying to make sense,
to document, to remember,
to witness what happened
and ask what it meant
to survive, to describe
the indescribable,
to ask what is a man,
what are our elements.
And a year after his return,
at a Jewish New Year party,
she approached and offered
to teach him how to dance,
an offer commonplace and
extraordinary, an offer
audacious in its insistence
of how life might go on.
Joseph Mills
Transported to Auschwitz
with 650 Italian Jews,
he was one of 20 still alive
when the camp was liberated.
He made his way home,
malnourished, whittled,
“almost unrecognizable,”
and began writing,
trying to make sense,
to document, to remember,
to witness what happened
and ask what it meant
to survive, to describe
the indescribable,
to ask what is a man,
what are our elements.
And a year after his return,
at a Jewish New Year party,
she approached and offered
to teach him how to dance,
an offer commonplace and
extraordinary, an offer
audacious in its insistence
of how life might go on.
Photo by Toufic Mubarak