If This Is a Man

Levi contracts scarlet fever on January 11, 1945, and is sent to Ka-Be. Experienced with camp life, he manages to bring his knife-spoon, a belt of electric wire, a needle and thread, and 18 flints that can be cut down to be used as a cigarette lighter, valued around seven rations of bread.

He hears from the barber on the fifth day that tomorrow everyone will leave the camp, but “the news excited no direct emotion in me” (181). He shares the news only with two Frenchmen, Charles and Arthur, who overwhelm him with questions; they are new, and so they do not know yet not to ask questions.

Twenty thousand prisoners, including Alberto, leave the night of January 18. Levi is too sick to leave in the 50-below-zero weather. About 800 people remain in Ka-Be. The morning of January 19th is the last distribution of soup. Heating is shut off. Some SS men remain, and an SS officer goes around to the huts and categorizes Jews and non-Jews of those remaining. The new Frenchmen are afraid, which annoys Levi, as they have barely been in the Lager, have not dealt with real hunger, and are not Jews. All lighting is permanently shut off at 11pm, and the camp is bombed.

On January 19 Levi forces himself to go with the Frenchmen to try to find something for heating and food, and “what we saw resembled nothing that I had ever seen or heard described” (188). The Lager is destroyed, but it is the sick prisoners themselves, who “dragged themselves everywhere on the frozen soil, like an invasion of worms” that are shocking (188). The sick are not able to control their bowels, and they have “fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, the only source of water remaining in the whole camp” (188).

They are able to scrounge for potatoes and turnips, which they find frozen, and hack at them with a pickaxe. They find a stove and bring it back to their room at Ka-Be, the only place in the Lager with heat, as well as lighting, after Levi finds a charged battery. As a thank you for the stove, fellow prisoners agree to all give them some of their bread. He does not think about the threat of being around people with various contagious infections.

The Germans are everywhere, leaving.

Everything is still by January 21. The bathroom bucket has to be emptied every day, but there is no water to wash hands, and Levi and the two Frenchmen are sick with typhus.

“An indescribable filth had invaded every part of the camp,” (195) because the latrines are no longer maintained, and more than a hundred patients have dysentery and have gone to the bathroom all over Ka-Be, filling buckets, bowls, and pots. It is impossible to walk around without stepping in the filth. They are afraid of it all thawing, too: disease will spread as well as the smell, and there will be no source of water.

On January 22 Levi goes out with Charles to explore the SS camp, only to later find out that that same evening 18 prisoners were shot by SS only a half an hour after they were there. Only a thin wall separates Levi, Charles, and Arthur from the dysentery patients, many of whom are dead or dying. The floor is covered with frozen excrement, and everyone is too sick to get out of bed to look for food. Two Italians, holding on to each other for warmth, hear Levi’s name, and from then on call out to him day and night. He drags himself down the hall to leave water and soup that he and the Frenchmen have made.

Lakmaker, a Dutch teenager under Levi’s bunk, has typhus and gets very sick that night, spreading diarrhea all over his straw mattress. Charles cuts out the filthy patches of the mattress and blanket with a knife and tries to clean him with some of the straw from the mattress and puts him back to bed. He scrapes the floor with part of a tin plate and tries to disinfect it and himself as best he can with chloramine so that typhus does not spread. Levi is awed by this enormous effort.

By January 23 they are out of potatoes. Charles and Levi go beyond the barrier and find some potatoes and dig them out. They make potato soup and potato “pancakes.” One of their roommates, Sertelet, has diptheria, and his throat is starting to close. Levi gives everyone camphorated oil drops, assuring everyone that they will help.

There is a pile of corpses piled outside their window by January 24. In the tuberculosis room everyone that could leave has. Levi goes in one day to get a needle, and one of the patients dies in front of him, after struggling to sit up upon hearing Levi enter. Some of the patients recovering from operations, however, are strong and are able to explore the English camp. They return with margarine, soy flour, custard powders, and other food. Levi had earlier found beeswax, and in his room they make candles to trade for some of the food gathered from the English.

On January 25, Somogyi, a Hungarian chemist, tells them that he will no longer be eating his bread, and they can take the ration of bread he has under a sack. For a night and two days he is delirious, saying Jawohl “at every collapsing of his wretched frame” (203).

Everyone says that the Russians are coming, but “at bottom nobody believed it” (203) because hope has no place in the Lager. That evening, though, around the stove, Charles, Arthur, and Levi “felt ourselves become men again” (204). There are aerial fights above them, and Somogyi dies, and with the silence of his death Levi wakes. Somogyi throws himself to the ground with his last breath, but there is nothing for anyone to do, so they all go back to sleep. The next morning, they empty the latrine and then carry Somogyi outside, which is when the Russians arrive.

Arthur goes back home, and Charles returns to teaching. He and Levi write to each other, and Levi hopes to see him “again one day” (206).