If This Is a Man

“During the halts, no one tried anymore to communicate with the outside world: we felt ourselves by now on ‘the other side.’”

Levi’s fellow passengers on the transport train, after frantically trying to communicate with anyone outside the train who might listen as they are taken to Auschwitz, stop; there is no one to hear them. The fear of not being heard by the outside world is later articulated in the shared nightmare of familial disinterest upon returning home when stories are shared. This is also the beginning of their understanding of the world of the concentration camp, the Lager, as a world on the “other side” of the “outside” world, with its own unique rules and experiences that will require contextual morality.

“They behaved with the calm assurance of people doing their normal duty of every day.”

Levi describes the SS who begin the selection process after the passengers get off at the loading dock. The “climax” of the trip is not reflected in the manner of the SS, who seem detached and indifferent, as if they were simple police officers. Their calmness and indifference reflect the normalcy of killing and genocide that is the foundation of the camps as they go about determining who they will kill and who they will exploit for labor.

“What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply.”

After the selection, people are sorted into groups to be killed and to be exploited in the work camps. They are also segregated by age and sex. Levi does later determine that the majority of his convoy—five hundred people—were all dead two days later. The image of the night swallowing up people, never to be seen again, echoes the earlier description, on the morning that they are forced to board the transport train of the sun, as a “betrayer.” Both night and day—the whole world—seem out to destroy them. Here, however, the night is not just a betrayer, but a consumer: Auschwitz “swallowed them up.”

“We wait for something, which will surely be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about? One cannot think anymore, it is like being already dead. Someone sits down on the ground. The time passes drop by drop. We are not dead.”

Levi has already been “selected” for the Buna work camp. Waiting in line for very long periods of time, often naked, is one of the ways prisoners are tortured in the camps, and the prisoner who sits on the ground likely risks being beaten. The prisoners are not desperately and frantically resistant, however; instead, existence in the camp already prohibits thinking as their internal lives are being destroyed.

“Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp,’ and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: ‘to lie on the bottom.’”

The Nazis take all the possessions of the incoming prisoners, including their own clothing and shoes, which are replaced with clothing and shoes that are the property of the Nazis. The prisoners have no property rights at all in the camps. Their bodies and lives are also considered property of the Lager. The “extermination” occurring is not only the extermination that is the mass killing of Jews. The extermination also includes the attempted killing of the humanity of the group and each individual’s cultural connections and identity. The extermination is genocide, the destruction of people and culture.

“It was so tiring to walk those few steps and then, meeting each other, to remember and to think. It was better not to think.”

Thinking, unless it is about securing extra rations or other means of survival, is repeatedly described as dangerous. Levi and his fellow Italians quickly realize that they are not going to be able to meet once a week, as they initially thought. It is too exhausting because it requires them to walk to a corner of the Lager, which is energy that they would otherwise not have to expend. It is also exhausting, though, because to get together is to think about where they came from and, specifically, to remember. Any thinking that is not focused on the present moment is dangerous. Any kind of remembering—and especially nostalgia—can destroy you.

“Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study. It is based on an invaluable activity of adaptation, partly passive and unconscious, partly active.”

The “shell” to which Levi refers is not akin to burying one’s head in the sand. Rather, it is like an armor that protects the prisoners as they face the assaults on their lives. The shell is an adaptation in response to the changed conditions of their lives. This shell includes the creation of a contextual morality that tries to respond meaningfully to an environment meant to “exterminate” all meaning in their lives. The prisoners adapt to the unbearable conditions of the camp both actively, such as learning how to secure extra rations, and unconsciously, such as in their changed relation to time.

“In short, the risk which hangs over us, the inexperienced and non-privileged, when we are driven by necessity to the bucket every night is quite serious.”

The camp manipulates bodily functions, such as going to the bathroom, into a medium for turning prisoners against one another. The new (“inexperienced and non-privileged”) prisoners do not yet know how to “read” the Lager, including the sounds of the bucket as it is being filled by prisoners’ excrement through the night. They are more likely, then, to go to the bathroom at the wrong time, when the bucket can no longer contain any more waste. They are then required to empty the full bucket at the latrine, which requires a long walk that only adds to their exhaustion. The simplest thing—going to the bathroom in the middle of the night—must be navigated carefully. This is just one of many similar navigations that must be learned if a prisoner is to survive.

“But for the whole duration of the night, cutting across the alternating sleep, waking and nightmares, the expectancy and terror of the reveille keeps watch.”

With night comes some sleep, but sleep turns into nightmares. Sleep is usually light, too, due to the constant traffic to the bucket to go to the bathroom and the calculations that occur with that. While the prisoners are exhausted and desperately need sleep, the terror of the next day looms through the night. Rather than be woken by the reveille, the prisoners wake themselves up before dawn, guarding themselves against the jolt of dawn. The shock of being woken by the call to work is too terrible to endure.

“A day begins like every other day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separate us from it: so that it is better to concentrate one’s attention and desires on the block of grey bread, which is small but which will certainly be ours in an hour, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will form everything that the law of the place allows us to possess.”

Each day has so much to endure that it is impossible to imagine its end. It is not just easier but also better to focus on the bread that is in the very near future and that, along with soup, is the one thing that the prisoners are allowed to entirely possess. Like the bread that will be possessed only to be consumed, everything is of the moment, with no imaginable future.

“The sores on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.”

The reveille is at dawn, so every single day’s first light is the beginning of every day’s forced labor. There are no “beginnings” with new days: the only thing that a new day opens are the wounds that never heal.

“We know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations.”

As the prisoners experience during transport, discomfort and pain can sometimes be protective against emotional or physical collapse. The prisoners inflict pain on themselves to avoid the exhaustion that is more dangerous than a beating. The “good” Kapos inflict pain on the prisoners as a protective measure, too, as a way to help the prisoners, Levi claims, who receive these blows with this understanding. This is the world of the Lager.

“For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.”

One “good” day when the sun breaks through and the prisoners feel its warmth and extra soup is secured, the prisoners have the luxury of remembering their past relations and feeling their unhappiness. Unhappiness in the camps is not a constant emotion, but a rare luxury that requires remembering. The prisoners’ experience exceeds anything that might be called unhappiness.

“We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing. We would also like to consider that the Lager was a gigantic biological and social experiment.”

Moving into first person plural, the narrator examines the camp as an “experiment” requiring analysis, with all experiences yielding important information. Literal medical experiments were conducted on prisoners, and the question of what could and should be learned from this “biological and social experiment” continues today. The narrator does not exonerate the “evil” of the Lager in trying to gain knowledge from it.

“Although engulfed and swept along without rest by the innumerable crowd of those similar to them, they suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in solitude they die or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.”

The “drowned” are those who do not find ways to survive the camps. They are characterized as a mass, with each drowned prisoner interchangeable with another, all personality and individuality destroyed. While the drowned are remembered as a group, they are not remembered individually, as there is nothing left to remember once a prisoner is drowned. The drowned have been destroyed as individuals.

“Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened.”

Levi draws attention to the present moment in which he writes about his past experiences during the Holocaust. He doubts his own memory of his experiences, which now seem incomprehensible even to him. This present questioning of his grasp of his past experience—and the broader incomprehensibility of the Holocaust—highlights the subjectivity of his narrative, past and present. Admitting to this disbelief, however, also carries some risks within the genre of Holocaust memoir, which carries the burden of “proving” the terrors of the Holocaust.

“When one waits time moves smoothly without need to intervene and drive it forward, while when one works, every minute moves painfully and has to be laboriously driven away. We are always happy to wait.”

Everything is painful during work, and everything, even time, requires physical labor. Time must be pushed out of the way, almost as a physical obstacle. Waiting, however, brings a different relation to time, as time moves of its own volition and does not require the prisoners to move it. Waiting is superior to sleep as a form of rest.

“Balla has a pencil, and we all crowd around him. We are not sure if we still know how to write, and we want to try.”

The SS want Levi and four others from his Chemical Kommando to take an exam to potentially become chemists in a lab at Buna. The prisoners, however, have been so transformed by the camp that they fear they no longer know how to write. The test they are being asked to take is “grotesque” and “absurd” under the conditions they endure, conditions which they SS enforce but which they do not see as limiting the prisoners’ work as chemists. Once again the Germans demonstrate a system of thought that makes no sense; it is a “madman’s dream” to expect a prisoner to be a chemist.

“Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger,’ we say ‘tiredness,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pain,’ we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes.”

Levi describes language as being created by the privileged to describe privileged experiences. While everyone experiences things like hunger and tiredness, “free” language describes those experiences within a state of freedom. To experience hunger while free is not the same as experiencing life-destroying hunger while in a concentration camp. A new language, which has not been created, is needed to describe the Lager.

“Do you know how one says ‘never’ in camp slang? ‘Morgen fruh,’ tomorrow morning.”

In the camps, where life is lived and worked moment to moment, “tomorrow” feels like an impossibility rather than an inevitability. Time and days do not simply “happen,” unfolding organically. Instead, they are struggled through, and no one assumes that there is another day to come. To use “tomorrow morning” as slang for “never” emphasizes not only the futility of thinking about the future, but the dark paradigm shift experienced in the context of the concentration camp.

“For us began the ten days outside both world and time.”

As the Germans retreat in January 1945, abandoning the Lager, Levi remains with other sick prisoners in Ka-Be, too sick to leave. He labors now to care for the sick and the dying in the midst of a lack of heat, water, food, and medicine. With the SS gone, Levi tries to care for the sick and the dying despite the filth and contagion around him. He dedicates himself to this care, which requires him to find heat, food, navigate floors covered in diarrhea, and try to reduce contagion. This is a torturous labor of love that exists in a time and world of limbo and of overwhelming sickness and overwhelming caretaking.

“The work of the bombs had been completed by the work of man: ragged, decrepit, skeleton-like patients at all able to move dragged themselves everywhere on frozen soil, like an invasion of worms.”

The Lager exudes a new desolation after the bombings and the SS’s flight. The scene is terrifyingly macabre: the half-dead patients drag themselves over the bombed, frozen-solid landscape, with neither human nor earth recognizable, forging an other-worldly apocalyptic scene.

“At that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed.

Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,’ and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead.”

The Lager, though it is physically apocalyptic and a space from which the patients cannot yet leave, is culturally dead with this offering of bread. Levi identifies this moment of generosity as the beginning of transformation from prisoner back to man. As Levi becomes a man, he exhausts himself caring for the sick and dying among filthy conditions, and this ethic of care grounds his manhood, just as it defined Lorenzo’s. Lorenzo showed him goodness, and Levi is now able to show goodness to others.