The Truce (1997)

John Turturro: Primo Levi

Photos 

Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Primo Levi : [narrating]  You who live secure in your warm houses, who return at evening to find hot food and friendly faces. Consider if this is a man who labors in the mud, who knows no peace, who fights for a crust of bread, who dies at a yes or a no. Meditate that this took place.

• [first lines] 

  Primo Levi : Face to face with freedom. We felt lost, emptied, atrophied, unfit for our new found liberty.

• Primo Levi : But the war is almost over, and perhaps everything will be easier.

  Il Greco : War is always.

• Il Greco : With my belly full, I desire to talk about God.

  Primo Levi : And that is the rapport between body and soul?

  Il Greco : Exactly. When I die, where goes my soul? To hell, or to worms. This is mystery, huh? What do you say?

  Primo Levi : To the worms.

• Daniele : Why was I the only one spared? Why did God want this?

  Primo Levi : God cannot exist if Auschwitz exists.

• Primo Levi : At Auschwitz, the worst thing they did to us was not to deny us bread, torture us, take our lives. The worst thing they did was to crush our souls. Our capacity for compassion. Filling the void with hatred, even toward each other.

• Primo Levi : [hiking]  The forest around the camp exercised a deep attraction upon us. Perhaps it offered to all who sought it the inestimable gift of solitude.

• Daniele : I finally understood why you were spared. God wanted it that way.

  Primo Levi : I don't have a very close relationship with God.

  Daniele : He spared you because he wanted you to write.

  Primo Levi : To write? Write what?

  Daniele : That.

  [indicating notebook in his pocket] 

  Primo Levi : If what you say is true, that I might be alive in place of another, then writing would be an atrocious privilege.