THE GREAT NOTHING
Or what awaited us

"Liliana, my dear friend: there's nothing left for us to do, we're all overwhelmed by what's happened to us; there's no hope left for anyone." With these few lines, Primo Levi, in 1986, cuts short a brief and unpublished exchange of letters begun by Liliana Segre after the publication of "The Drowned and the Saved." The concentration camp experience had clearly had diametrically opposed effects on the two, developing in one a cultured pessimism, and in the other an unflagging hope.

"The Great Nothing" explores the genesis of these ideals, episodically retracing parts of both men's biographies and imagining their exchange of letters as a dialogue that took place on the train back to Italy, a journey they actually undertook just a few weeks apart as teenagers.