SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ

by Primo Levi

Primo Levi, a 24-year-old Italian Jewish chemist and antifascist partisan, was captured and sent to Auschwitz in July 1944. In this harrowing account he felt compelled to describe his experience there because “it happened once and it can happen again." He saw the concentration camp become a laboratory in which those who summitted to its rules are “drowned”, and died within months, where others who struggled to find a competitive edge survived.

In one compelling scene he is examined for a possible position in a chemical laboratory by a German, Doctor Panwitz. “He raised his eyes and looked at me. That was not a look between men. It was between two beings who live in a different world. If I had been able to explain the nature of that look I could have explained the essence of that great wrong, the Third Germany.”

In October 1944 the camp was flooded with new prisoners. The solution would send the excess to the gas chambers. In each barrack prisoners were given identity cards. They were crowded into a room with two doors. They had to run, naked, from one outside and then return inside from the other. Between the two doors a German officer, flanked by two guards watched them run. In an instant he gave each runner’s identity card to either the right or left guard. It soon became known that those whose cards were given to the left guard were “chosen” for the gas chamber. The dire irony of the “chosen people” was not lost on Levi. “From my bunk I saw and heard old Kuhn praying aloud that he had not been “chosen.” Levi says, “Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened is an abomination that no propitiatory prayer, no pardon can ever clean again. If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”

In January, 1945, as the Russians closed in, the Germans abandoned the camp, leaving behind only those sick patients like Levi and this friend Charlie behind. Levi and Charlie find a working stove and scraps of food. In gratitude, some of the remaining prisoner-patients offer them some of their bread. Levi writes, “It was the moment when we began to change from prisoners to men again.”

Survival In Auschwitz is essential reading. It warns us of our potential peril as those who seek power see the “other” as the enemy within. Never more than today is Levi”s voice prescient.

Daniel Deykin

by P