A witness to the Holocaust comes vividly back to life

‘Primo’

(Kultur video)

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ANTONY SHER has said that when he set out to retell the experiences of concentration camp survivor Primo Levi, he wanted to avoid the falsehood of “a free and well-fed man pretending to be one of those walking skeletons.”

So for his one-man play adapted from one of Levi’s memoirs, he wore simple, contemporary clothes and performed on a stage that, except for confining gray walls, remained mostly bare. Simple gestures loomed large. Entrance into Auschwitz, for example, was marked by the removal of black-framed eyeglasses -- a tiny symbol of civilization lost and privation begun.

Captured by camera in a similarly unfussy way, the performance is now available on DVD.

After his liberation from Auschwitz, Levi, an Italian Jew, returned to his training as an industrial chemist but also began to write. His first Holocaust memoir, “If This Is a Man” (retitled “Survival in Auschwitz” for the English-speaking market), is the basis for “Primo,” performed at London’s National Theatre in 2004 and for a limited run this summer on Broadway.

“Death begins with your shoes,” begins one of Levi’s typically spare yet nuanced passages, sensitively distilled into a stage script by Sher. The camp-issued shoes are wooden-soled and ill-fitting. They chafe, raising sores, which become infected. This slows prisoners to a shuffle, which draws beatings.

The life expectancy for a new prisoner, the passage goes on to explain, is eight weeks. “If you last longer, it’s because you’ve mastered two things. One, you learned to obey orders in a language you don’t understand. Two, you have a pair of shoes that fit.”

Still, amid the despair is surpassing kindness, as when a civilian worker secretly supplies Levi with bits and pieces of food each day to supplement the meager camp diet. “A man helping other men out of simple altruism” reminded him “that there still existed a just world

The impact of such moments bears out director Richard Wilson’s assertion -- in an interview included on the DVD -- that this “is not a performance, it is a testimony.”

DVDs are rated from one star (poor) to four stars (excellent).