Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1988)

I come now to the third variant of the question: Why didn't you run away "before"? Before the borders were closed? Before the trap snapped shut? Here too I must point out that many persons threatened by Nazism and fascism did leave "before." These were political exiles, or intellectuals disliked by the two regimes: thousands of names, many obscure, some illustrious, such as Togliatti, Nenni, Saragat, Salvemini, Fermi, Emilio Segre, Lise Meitner, Arnaldo Momigliano, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold and Sephan Zweig, Brecht, and many others. Not all of them returned, and it was a hemorrhage that bled Europe irremediably. Their immigration (to England, the United States, South America, and the Soviet Union, but also to Belgium, Holland, France, where the Nazi tide was to catch up with them a few years later: they were, as are we all, blind to the future) was neither flight nor desertion but a natural joining up with potential or real allies, in citadels from which they could resume their struggle and creative energy.
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Here rises the obligatory question, a counter-question: How securely do we live, we men of the century's and millenium's end? And, more specifically, we Europeans? We have been told, and there's no reason to doubt it, that for every human being on the planet a quantity of nuclear explosive is stored equal to three or four tons of TNT. If even only 1 percent of it were used there would immediately be tens of millions dead, and frightening genetic damage to the entire human species, indeed to all life on earth, with the exception perhaps of the insects. Besides, it is at least probable that a third world war, even conventional, even partial, would be fought on our territory between the Atlantic and the Urals, between the Mediterranean and the Arctic. The threat is different from that of the 1930s: less close but vaster; linked, in the opinion of some, to a demonism of history, new, still undecipherable, but not linked (until now) to human demonism. It is aimed at everyone, and therefore especially "useless."

So then? Are today's fears more or less founded than the fears of that time? When it comes to the future, we are just as blind as our fathers. Swiss and Swedes have their anti-nuclear shelters, but what will they find when they come out into the open? There are Polynesia, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic: perhaps they will remain unharmed. Obtaining a passport and entry visa is much easier than it was then, so why aren't we going? Why aren't we leaving our country? Why aren't we fleeing "before"?