Literary Sampler: Essays, Book Reviews, and More...
Monthly Column by Charity Gingerich

Survival in Auscwhitz opens with Levi’s account of the journey to Auschwitz and the painfulness of not knowing what is waiting for him at the end of the train tracks. This journey almost seems to be symbolic of the transition of being human and free (something that we usually consider synonymous) to, by the end of the journey, finding himself “on the bottom” (23), a place where he and the others are immediately stripped of nearly everything that makes them men. Thus they are forced to begin a different kind of journey, one that is meant to end in complete dehumanization.

When contemplating the question of whether the Nazi’s were in fact successful in reducing Levi and those with him to men whose bodies existed on this side of eternity but whose souls wandered in a hellish “lostness,” it is interesting to note that Levi recounts two incidents, one at the beginning of the book and one at the end, that appear rather pointedly as “bookends of humanity.” The first incident takes place soon after Levi has entered the Lager and everything is horribly new and strange to him. He is speaking with a Polish Jew named Schlome and they are exchanging – despite the language barrier, those personal facts which are important to men; their work, their families. Schlome asks Levi where his mother is, and Levi tries to explain that he does not know where she is, that his mother is somewhere back in Italy and in hiding. Levi recounts that Schlome “now [got] up, approach[ed] me and timidly embrace[ed] me” to show that he understood (31). This gesture, so beautiful and tender, seems completely out of step with the depravity and hardness that surrounds it. Levi says of this incident that although he never saw Schlome again, “I have not forgotten his serious and gentle face of a child, which welcomed me on the threshold of the house of the dead” (31). The second incident appears toward the end of the book in the final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days” and recounts how that after Levi and the two Frenchmen found and brought back a stove to their hut in Ka-Be (using their precious energy and braving the cold to do so), the other men offered to share a portion of their bread ration as a token of appreciation. Of this voluntary act, coming as it did from starved, ill men who had barely managed to survive months (or years) of inhumanity, Levi says that “it was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again” (160).

Between these “bookends,” from the beginning of Levi’s existence in Auschwitz to the time of the liberation, there is a great gulf of brutal “nothingness,” where acts of this nature are not to be found. Existence in the Lager was reduced instead to that of “each man for himself” and consisted of the struggle for individual survival at all costs. Indeed, as a contrast to these two incidents, Levi tells us of the last “selection,” where men were randomly chosen for the gas chambers. Soon after the selections have been completed, he remembers hearing an old man named Kuhn, whose life has been spared, saying a prayer of thanks to God, heedless of the ears of a young man just a few feet from his bunk who has been chosen to die. Levi’s response to this man’s prayer is forceful and biting:

Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer (130).

It is not difficult to derive from Levi’s comment here the meaning rooted deep within which causes the reader to return to the question of what it means to be truly human. In such a situation, the fact that a man could be glad, even thankful, to be allowed to live while another (and hundreds more!) died unjustly speaks volumes to what has been done to such a man’s own state of humanity. 

 Though Levi gives vivid sketches of the lives of four very different types of men in the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved” as a possible means for measuring the “why” behind some men’s survival and other’s demise, I choose rather to refer to what Levi himself said in the conversation recorded at the end of the book with Philip Roth. In addressing the reasons behind his own survival and that of others he says

I insist there was no general rule […] I have seen the survival of shrewd people and silly people, the brave and the cowardly, “thinkers” and madmen. In my case, luck played an essential role […] (180).

Throughout the book Levi seems to make a conscious effort through his portrayal of various types of men in order to show that there was never a singular certainty involved in a man’s survival. He stresses the idea of “luck” almost continually as if to drive home the fact that in such a place, under such circumstances, the life of one man over that of another could not necessarily be looked upon as good, because to acknowledge this would be to somehow acknowledge the twisted ideology of the Lager itself.

As I read this book I was struck more than once at the quiet power packed into each page and the way that Levi makes every word a sharp arrow in order to drive home a point.  Many of his views and remarks concerning human nature and the death of humanity are so potent that they caught me off guard as I read and I was forced to read them again…and again. Even then I had the distinct impression that I was in no position to judge or even pretend to understand what was being said; these were obviously words from a man who had been to a place I had not and had seen things that are for me beyond the scope of human imagination. There are many things to be learned from Survival in Auschwitz, though I think it is presumptuous to pretend that by the end of the book all things are found to be infinitely clear. I think the power of the book is in the uncertainty I am left with in the end, an uncertainty that is uncomfortable enough that I feel the need to search out some of the issues Levi raises about human nature and man’s capacity for evil within myself and the world around me. I feel that Levi accomplishes exactly what he sets out to do with this book. Like my feeling of uncertainty at the end I feel he has told me just enough of his story and the stories of others at Auschwitz to open doors to thought and questions. He does not necessarily answer all the questions that are raised. For example, can a man’s humanity or level of “aliveness” be measured not in what he is but in what he believes himself to be? Though there are unanswered questions, for me it is enough that they have been brought to my attention. When looking at this book in the scope of this history course and in the light of the Holocaust, I feel that it helps me to understand at least one thing quite clearly and that is, no matter how many times we try to rationalize what happened and fit all the pieces of the historical puzzle in all the right places, no excuse or explanation will ever be able to make sense of the sheer madness of it all. In the end, perhaps this is the lesson Levi’s book is ultimately trying to get across: the magnitude of the madness that lay behind the Lager’s existence.

I do not find it difficult to believe Survival in Auschwitz, especially since Primo Levi tells his story as an eyewitness survivor, not as someone telling a story second-hand. We know that Auschwitz existed as a concentration camp through the accounts of other survivors as well documentation on film. Levi’s sources are of course himself, his observations and his memory. Levi is the author of numerous other books and is well known as both a gifted author and a chemist. Other books by Primo Levi include “The Drowned and the Saved,” “The Reawakening,” “The Monkey’s Wrench,” and “If Not Now, When?”  I found Survival in Auschwitz to be a powerful, well-written book that I would recommend as essential reading to both skeptics and non-skeptics of the Holocaust alike. It is a book that I know will haunt me in the days ahead.

The Nazi Officer’s Wife, by Edith Hahn Beer (with Susan Dworkin) (ISBN # 068817776X). The author tells how she, as a Jewess, survived the Holocaust as the wife of a Nazi officer.