BY PRIMO LEVI
The experiences that we survivors of the Nazi Lagers carry within us are extraneous to the new Western generation and become ever more extraneous as the years pass. For the young people of the 1950s and 1960s these were events connected with their fathers: they were spoken about in the family; memories of them still preserved the freshness of things seen. For the young people of the 1980s, they are matters associated with their grandfathers: distant, blurred, “historical.” These young people are besieged by today’s problems, different, urgent: the nuclear threat, unemployment, the depletion of resources, the demographic explosion, frenetically innovative technologies to which they must adjust. The world’s configuration is profoundly changed; Europe is no longer the center of the planet. The colonial empires have yielded to the pressure of the peoples of Asia and Africa thirsting for independence, having been dissolved not without tragedies and ...
