Conquer Club

Levi must have killed himself: the height of the handrail. This, as building regulations required, was 3’2″ (96.5 cm).

Present building regulations in Europe require that handrail height be between 90 and 100 cm. In the US, handrail height is given as between 34 and 38 inches (86 to 97 cm). Levi was a small man (5’5″), hence the rail was proportionally high for him, well over half his height. Indeed, a handrail at navel height is a high handrail. Readers wishing to experiment without anxiety can try such a rail at ground level. They will find, as I did, that one has to climb to get to the other side. It is impossible to “fall” over it.

2dimes wrote:He's not duk (though I have mixed them up in the past too) and he is suggesting the rail was not too high for Levi to have fallen accidentally.

Especially if it was going down a flight of stairs.

Levi had already glimpsed an unpleasant instinct lurking beneath the polite surface of the Bayer headquarters outside Cologne, when an employee observed that it was “most unusual” for an Italian to speak German. Levi countered: “My name is Levi. I am a Jew, and I learned your language at Auschwitz”. A stuttering apology was followed by silence.

...

He was seated at the dining table in shirtsleeves and making small talk when a director asked him about the 174517 tattoo exposed on his forearm. Levi instantly replied: “It’s a memento of Auschwitz”. Accati’s daughter Luisa, who was in Germany with her father to improve her spoken German, recalled the scene: “All one could hear was a polite clatter of forks on plates as ten Germans – all men – shifted awkwardly in their seats”.

From the Greek, “holocaust” means a sacrificial burnt offering to the gods: even by the barbarous standards of antiquity, Levi insisted, the Nazi genocide was not a ritual offering of victims.

2dimes wrote:Maybe he's trying to cover up for someone else. Round up the usual suspects.