Primo Levi & Vladek Spiegelman

sophie101

primo_levi_.pdf

Home >History homework help >Primo Levi & Vladek Spiegelman

If this is a man

by Primo Levi

Translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf

The Orion Press / New York

1959 by The Orion Press, Inc. - New York

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-13327 Manufactured in

Italy

CONTENTS

page

The Journey 3

On the Bottom 14 Initiation 35

Ka-Be 41

Our Nights 59

The Work 71 A Good Day . 79 This Side of Good and Evil 87

The Drowned and the Saved 99

Chemical Examination 117

The Canto of Ulysses 127

The Events of the Summer 135

October 1944 143

Kraus 153

Die drei Leute vom Labor 159

The Last One 171

The Story of Ten Days 179

The Journey

I was captured by the Fascist Militia on December

13, 1943. I was twenty four, with little wisdom, no

experience, and a decided tendency encouraged by the

life of segregation forced on me for the previous four

years by the racial laws to live in an unrealistic world

of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phan- toms, by sincere male and bloodless fmale friendships. I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion.

It had been by no means easy to flee into the mountains

and to help set up what, both in my opinion and in that

of friends little more experienced than myself, should

have become a partisan

band affiliated with the Resistance

movement Justice and Liberty. Contacts, arms, money and

the experience needed to acquire them were all missing.

We lacked capable men, and instead we were swamped by a deluge of outcasts,

in good or bad faith, who came

from the plain

in search of a non-existent military or

political organization, of arms, or merely of protection,

a hiding place, a fire, a pair

of shoes.

At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine

If This is a Man

I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once

pays dearly. So that I can

only consider the following sequence of events justified.

Three Fascist Militia companies, which had set out in

the night to surprise a much more powerful and dangerous band than ours, broke into our refuge one spectral snowy dawn and took me down to the valley as a suspect person.

During the interrogations that followed, I preferred to admit my status of

" Italian citizen of Jewish race."

I felt that otherwise I would be unable to justify my

presence in places too secluded even for an evacuee;

while I believed (wrongly as was subsequently seen) that

the admission of my political activity would have meant torture and certain death. As a Jew, I was sent to Fossoli, near Modena, where a vast detention camp, originally meant for English and American prisoners-of-war, collected all the numerous categories of people not

approved of by the new-born Fascist Republic. At the moment of my arrival, that is, at the end of

January, 1944, there were about one hundred and fifty Italian Jews in the camp, but within a few weeks their

number rose to over six hundred. For the most part

they consisted of entire families captured by the Fascists

or Nazis through their imprudence or following secret

accusations. A few had given themselves up sponta- neously, reduced to desperation by the vagabond life,

or because they lacked the means to survive, or to

avoid separation from a captured relation, or even

absurdly "to be in conformity with the law." There

were also about a hundred Jugoslavian military internees

and a few other foreigners who were politically suspect. The arrival of a squad of German SS men should

have made even the optimists doubtful; but we still

The Journey

managed to interpret the novelty in various ways without

drawing the most obvious conclusions. Thus, despite

everything, the announcement of the deportation caught us all unawares.

On February 20, the Germans had inspected the

camp with care and had publicly and loudly upbraided the Italian commissar for the defective organization of

the kitchen service and for the scarce amount of wood

distributed for heating; they even said that an infirmary

would soon be opened. But on the morning of the 21st

we learned that on the following day the Jews would be

leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the

children, even the old, even the ill. Our destination?

Nobody knew. We should be prepared for a fortnight of travel. For every person missing at the roll-call, ten

would be shot.

Only a minority of ingenuous and deluded souls

continued to hope; we others had often spoken with

the Polish and Croat refugees and we knew what

departure meant.

For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all

passions and anger have died down, and that the act of

justice represents only a sad duty towards society which

moves even the executioner to pity

for the victim. Thus

the condemned man is shielded from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual

comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel

around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity

and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon. But to us this was not granted, for we were many

and time was short. And in any case, what had we to

repent, for what crime did we need pardon? The Italian

commissar accordingly decreed that all services should

continue to function until the final notice: the kitchens

If This is a Man

remained open,

the corvees for cleaning worked as usual,

and even the teachers of the little school gave lessons

until the evening, as on other days. But that evening the

children were given no homework.

And night came, and it was such a night that one

knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive.

Everyone felt this : not one of the guards, neither Italian

nor German, had the courage to come and see what men

do when they know they have to die.

All took leave from life in the manner which most

suited them. Some praying,

some deliberately drunk,

others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the

mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of

children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor

did they forget the diapers, the

toys, the cushions and the

hundred other small things which mothers remember and

which children always need. Would you not do the

same? If you and your child were going to be killed

tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today? In hut 6A old Gattegno lived with his wife and

numerous children and grandchildren and his sons and

daughters-in-law. All the men were carpenters; they had

come from Tripoli

after many long journeys, and had

always carried with them the tools of their trade, their

kitchen utensils, and their accordions and violins to play and dance to after the day's work. They were happy and

pious folk. Their women were the first to silently

and rapidly

finish the preparations for the journey in

order to have time for mourning. When all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied together, they unloos-

ened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the Yahrzeit

candles on the ground and lit them according to the

customs of their fathers, and sat on the bare soil in a

The Journey

circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping all the

night. We collected in a group in front of their door, and we

experienced within ourselves a grief that was new

for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land,

the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed

every century.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as

though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to

assist in our destruction. The different emotions that

overcame us, of resignation, of futile rebellion, of

religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now joined together after a

sleepless night in a collective, uncontrolled panic.

The time for meditation, the time for decision was over,

and all reason dissolved into a tumult, across which

flashed the happy memories of our homes, still so near

in time and space,

as painful

as the thrusts of a sword.

Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that there remain no memory.

With the absurd precision

to which we later had to

accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll-call. At

the end the officer asked "Wteviel Stuck?" The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred

and fifty "pieces"

and that all was in order. They then

loaded us on to the buses and took us to the station of

Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort

for the journey. Here we received the first blows : and it

was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither

in body nor in spirit. Only a

profound amazement: how

can one hit a man without anger? There were twelve goods wagons for six hundred and

fifty men; in mine we were only forty-five, but it was

a small wagon. Here then, before our very eyes, under

our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains,

If This is a Man

those which never return, and of which, shuddering and

always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak.

Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons closed

from the outside, with men, women and children pressed

together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a

journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. This time it is us who are inside.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect

happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is

equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the real-

ization of both these extreme states are of the same nature:

they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one

instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the

following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for

it places

a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it : for as they poison

every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract

us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of

them intermittent and hence supportable.

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the

thirst that kept us

aloft in the void of bottomless despair,

both during the journey and after. It was not the will

to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men

capable of such resolution, and we were but a common

sample of humanity.

The doors had been closed at once, but the train

did not move until evening. We had learnt of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without

significance for us at that time, but it at least implied

some place

on this earth.

The train travelled slowly, with long, unnerving halts.

The Journey

Through the slit we saw the tall pale cliffs of the Adige Valley and the names of the last Italian cities disappear behind us. We

passed the Brenner at midday of the

second day and everyone stood up, but no one said a

word. The thought of the return journey stuck in my heart, and I cruelly pictured to myself the inhuman joy of that other journey, with doors open, no one wanting to flee, and the first Italian names... and I looked around

and wondered how many, among that poor human dust, would be struck by fate. Among the forty-five people in my wagon only four saw their homes again; and it was

by far the most fortunate wagon. We suffered from thirst and cold; at every stop we

clamoured for water, or even a handful of snow, but we were rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort drove off

anybody who tried to approach the convoy. Two young mothers, nursing their children, groaned night and day,

begging for water. Our state of nervous tension made

the hunger, exhaustion and lack of sleep seem less of a

torment. But the hours of darkness were nightmares without end.

There are few men who know how to go to their

deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom

one would expect.

Few know how to remain silent and

respect the silence of others. Our restless

sleep was often

interrupted by noisy and futile disputes, by curses, by

kicks and blows blindly delivered to ward off some

encroaching and inevitable contact. Then someone would

light a candle, and its mournful flicker would reveal

an obscure agitation, a human mass, extended across the

floor, confused and continuous, sluggish and aching, rising

here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately

collapsing again in exhaustion.

Through the slit, known and unknown names of

Austrian cities, Salzburg, Vienna, then Czech, finally

If This is a Man

Polish names. On the evening of the fourth day the cold became intense: the train ran through interminable

black pine forests, climbing perceptibly. The snow was

high. It must have been a branch line as the stations

were small and almost deserted. During the halts, no

one tried anymore to communicate with the outside world :

we felt ourselves by now "on the other side." There was

a long halt in open country. The train started up with

extreme slowness, and the convoy stopped for the last

time, in the dead of night, in the middle of a dark

silent plain.

On both sides of the track rows of red and white

lights appeared as far as the eye could see; but there was

none of that confusion of sounds which betrays inhabited

places even from a distance. By the wretched light of

the last candle, with the rhythm of the wheels, with

every human sound now silenced, we awaited what was

to happen.

Next to me, crushed against me for the whole journey, there had been a woman. We had known each other for many years, and the misfortune had struck us

together, but we knew little of each other. Now, in the

hour of decision, we said to each other things that are

never said among the living. We said farewell and it was short; everybody said farewell to life through his

neighbour. We had no more fear.

The climax came suddenly. The door opened with

a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in

that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command

which seems to give vent to a millenial anger. A vast

platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little

beyond it, a row of lorries. Then everything was silent

again. Someone translated: we had to climb down with

our luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a

The Journey

moment the platform was swarming with shadows. But

we were afraid to break that silence: everyone busied

himself with his luggage, searched for someone else,

called to somebody, but timidly, in a whisper.

A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an indifferent air. At a certain moment they moved among

us, and in a subdued tone of voice, with faces of stone,

began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad

Italian. They did not interrogate everybody, only a few :

"How old? Healthy or ill?" And on the basis of the

reply they pointed in two different directions.

Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as in

certain dream sequences. We had expected something more

apocalyptic: they seemed

simple police agents. It

was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask

for his luggage: they replied, "luggage afterwards/'

Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said,

"together again afterwards." Many mothers did not

want to be separated from their children: they said

"good, good, stay with child." They behaved with the

calm assurance of people doing their normal duty of

every day. But Renzo stayed an instant too long to say

goodbye to Francesca, his fiancee, and with a single blow

they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday

duty.

In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been

collected together in a group.

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. Today, however,

we know that in that rapid and summary choice each

one of us had been judged capable or not of working

usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy

no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women

entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and

If This is a Man

Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five

hundred in number, not one was living two days later.

We also know that not even this tenuous principle

discrimination between fit and unfit was always followed,

and that later the simpler

method was often adopted of merely opening both the doors of the wagon without warning or instructions to the new arrivals.

Those who by chance climbed down on one side of the

convoy entered the camp; the others went to the gas chamber.

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died:

the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews

was self-demonstrative to the Germans. Emilia, daughter of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful,

intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in washing her during the journey in the packed car in a tub with

tepid water which the degenerate German engineer had

allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging us all to death.

Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our

children disappeared.

We saw them for a short while as an obscure mass at the other end of the platform;

then we saw nothing more.

Instead, two groups of strange individuals emerged into the

light of the lamps. They walked in squads, in

rows of three, with an odd, embarassed step, head

dangling in front, arms rigid. On their heads they wore comic berets and were all dressed in long striped overcoats,

which even by night and from a distance looked filthy and in

rags. They walked in a large circle around us,

never drawing near, and in silence began to busy them-

selves with our luggage and to climb in and out of the

empty wagons. We looked at each other without a word. It was

all incomprehensible and mad, but one thing we had

The Journey

understood. This was the metamorphosis that awaited

us. Tomorrow we would be like them.

Without knowing how I found myself loaded on to a

lorry with thirty others; the lorry sped into the night at

full speed.

It was covered and we could not see outside,

but by the shaking we could tell that the road had many curves and bumps. Are we unguarded? Throw ourselves

down? It is too late, too late, we are all "down."

In any case we are soon aware that we are not without

guard. He is a strange guard, a German soldier bristling with arms. We do not see him because of the thick darkness, but we feel the hard contact every time that

a lurch of the lorry throws us all in a heap. At a certain

point he switches on a pocket torch and

instead of

shouting threats of damnation at us, he asks us courte-

ously, one by one, in German and in pidgin language, if we have any money or watches to give him, seeing that they will not be useful to us anymore. This

no order, no regulation: it is obvious that it is a small

private initiative of our Charon. The matter stirs us to

anger and laughter and brings relief.

On the bottom

The journey did not last more than twenty minutes.

Then the lorry stopped, and we saw a large door, and

above it a sign, brightly illuminated (its memory still

strikes me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Fret, work gives freedom.

We climb down, they make us enter an enormous empty room that is poorly heated. We have a terrible thirst. The weak gurgle of the water in the radiators

makes us ferocious; we have had nothing to drink for

four days. But there is also a tap and above it a card

which says that it is forbidden to drink as the water

is dirty. Nonsense. It seems obvious that the card

is a joke, "they" know that we are dying of thirst and

they put us in a room, and there is a tap, and Wasser-

trinken Verboten. I drink and I incite my companions to do likewise, but I have to spit it out, the water is

tepid and sweetish, with the smell of a swamp. This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like

this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink

If This is a Man

the water, and we wait for something which will certainly 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. The door is opened and an SS

man enters, smoking. He looks at us slowly and asks, "Wer kann Deutsch?" One of us whom I have never

seen, named Flesch, moves forward; he will be our

interpreter. The SS man makes a long calm speech;

the interpreter

translates. We have to form rows of five, with intervals of two yards between man and man; then

we have to undress and make a bundle of the clothes

in a special manner,

the woollen garments on one side,

all the rest on the other; we must take off our shoes

but pay great attention that they are not stolen.

Stolen by whom? Why should our shoes be stolen? And what about our documents, the few things we have

in our pockets,

our watches? We all look at the

interpreter, and the

interpreter asks the German, and

the German smokes and looks him through and through as if he were transparent, as if no one had spoken.

I had never seen old men naked. Mr. Bergmann wore a truss and asked the interpreter if he should take

it off, and the interpreter hesitated. But the German

understood and spoke seriously to the

interpreter pointing

to someone. We saw the interpreter swallow and then he said: "The officer says, take off the truss, and you

will be given that of Mr. Coen." One could see the

words coming bitterly out of Flesch's mouth; this was

the German manner of laughing. Now another German comes and tells us to put the

shoes in a certain corner, and we put them there, because

now it is all over and we feel outside this world and the

only thing is to obey. Someone comes with a broom

On the Bottom

and sweeps away all the shoes, outside the door in a

heap. He is crazy, he is mixing them all together,

ninety-six pairs, they will be all mixed

up. The outside

door opens,

a freezing wind enters and we are naked

and cover ourselves up with our arms. The wind blows

and slams the door; the German reopens it and stands

watching with interest how we writhe to hide from the

wind, one behind the other. Then he leaves and closes it.

Now the second act begins. Four men with razors,

soap-brushes and clippers burst in; they have trousers and

jackets with stripes, with a number sewn on the front;

perhaps they are the same sort as those others of this

evening (this evening or yesterday evening?); but these

are robust and flourishing. We ask many questions but

they catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves

shaved and sheared. What comic faces we have without

hair! The four speak a language which does not seem

of this world. It is certainly not German, for I under-

stand a little German.

Finally another door is opened: here we are, locked

in, naked, sheared and standing, with our feet in water

it is a shower-room. We are alone. Slowly the aston- ishment dissolves, and we speak, and everyone asks

questions and no one answers. If we are naked in a

shower- room, it means that we will have a shower. If

we have a shower it is because they are not going to

kill us yet. But why then do they keep us standing, and give us nothing to drink, while nobody explains

anything, and we have no shoes or clothes, but we are

all naked with our feet in the water, and we have been

travelling five days and cannot even sit down.

And our women?

Mr. Levi asks me if I think that our women are

like us at this moment, and where they are, and if we

will be able to see them again. I say yes, because he is

If This is a Man

married and has a daughter; certainly we will see them

again. But by now my belief is that all this is a game

to mock and sneer at us. Clearly they will kill us, who-

ever thinks he is going to live is mad, it means that

he has swallowed the bait, but I have not; I have

understood that it will soon all be over, perhaps in this

same room, when they get bored of seeing us naked,

dancing from foot to foot and trying every now and again to sit down on the floor. But there are two inches of cold

water and we cannot sit down.

We walk up and down without sense, and we talk, everybody talks to everybody else, we make a great noise. The door opens, and a German enters; it is the

officer of before. He speaks briefly, the interpreter translates. "The officer says you must be quiet, because

this is not a rabbinical school." One sees the words which

are not his, the bad words, twist his mouth as they come

out, as if he was spitting out a foul taste. We beg him to ask what we are waiting for, how long we will stay

here, about our women, everything; but he says no, that

he does not want to ask. This Flesch, who is most

unwilling to translate into Italian the hard cold German

phrases and refuses to turn into German our questions

because he knows that it is useless, is a German Jew of about

fifty, who has a large scar on his face from a

wound received fighting the Italians on the Piave. He

is a closed, taciturn man, for whom I feel an instinctive

respect as I feel that he has begun to suffer before us.

The German goes and we remain silent, although we

are a little ashamed of our silence. It is still night and

we wonder if the day will ever come. The door opens

again, and someone else dressed in stripes comes in. He

is different from the others, older, with glasses, a more

civilized face, and much less robust. He speaks to us in

Italian.

On the Bottom

(By now we are tired of being amazed. We seem to be watching some mad play, one of those plays in

which the witches, the Holy Spirit and the devil appear. He speaks Italian badly, with a strong foreign accent. He makes a long speech, is very polite, and tries to reply to all our

questions.

We are at Monowitz, near Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia, a region inhabited by both Poles and Germans.

This camp is a work-camp, in German one says Arbeits-

lager; all the

prisoners (there are about ten

thousand] work in a factory which produces a type of rubber called

Buna, so that the camp itself is called Buna.

We will be given shoes and clothes no, not our own, other shoes, other clothes, like his. We are naked now because we are waiting for the shower and the disinfection, which will take place immediately after

the reveille, because one cannot enter the camp without

being disinfected.

Certainly there will be work to do, everyone must

work here. But there is work and work: he, for

example, acts as doctor. He is a Hungarian doctor who studied in

Italy and he is the dentist of the Lager. He has been in the Lager for four and a half years (not in this one: Buna has only been open for a year and a

half), but we can see that he is still

quite well, not

very thin. Why is he in the Lager? Is he Jewish like us? "No," he says simply, "I am a criminal."

We ask him many questions. He laughs, replies to some and not to others, and it is clear that he avoids

certain subjects. He does not speak of the women: he

says they are well, that we will see them again soon, but he does not say how or where. Instead he tells us other

things, strange and crazy things, perhaps he too is playing with us.

Perhaps he is mad one goes mad in the Lager. He says that every Sunday there are concerts and football

If This is a Man

matches. He says that whoever boxes well can become

cook. He says that whoever works well receives prize-

coupons with which to buy tobacco and soap. He says

that the water is really not drinkable, and that instead

a coffee substitute is distributed every day, but generally

nobody drinks it as the soup itself is sufficiently watery

to quench thirst. We beg him to find us something to drink, but he says that he cannot, that he has come to see

us secretly, against SS orders, as we still have to be

disinfected, and that he must leave at once; he has come

because he has a liking for Italians, and because, he says,

he "has a little heart." We ask him if there are other Italians in the camp and he says there

are some, a few,

he does not know how many; and he at once changes the

subject. Meanwhile a bell rang and he immediately

hurried off and left us stunned and disconcerted. Some

feel refreshed but I do not. I still think that even this

dentist, this incomprehensible person, wanted to amuse

himself at our expense,

and I do not want to believe a

word of what he said.

At the sound of the bell, we can hear the still dark

camp waking up. Unexpectedly the water gushes out

boiling from the showers five minutes of bliss; but

immediately after, four men (perhaps they are the barb-

ers) burst in yelling and shoving and drive us out, wet

and steaming, into the adjoining room which is freezing;

here other shouting people throw at us unrecognisable

rags and thrust into our hands a pair of broken-down

boots with wooden soles; we have no time to understand

and we already find ourselves in the open, in the blue

and icy snow of dawn, barefoot and naked, with all our

clothing in our hands, with a hundred yards to run to

the next hut. There we are finally allowed to get dressed.

When we finish, everyone remains in his own corner

and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another.

On the Bottom

There is nowhere to look in a mirror, but our appearance stands in front of us, reflected in a hundred livid

faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets. We

are transformed into the phantoms glimpsed yesterday

evening.

Then for the first time we became aware that our lan-

guage lacks words to express this offence, the demolition

of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition,

the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the

bottom. It is not possible

to sink lower than this; no

human condition is more miserable than this, nor could

it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore;

they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our

hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they

listen, they will not understand. They will even take

away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will

have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us

as we were, still remains.

We know that we will have difficulty in being understood, and this is as it should be. But consider

what value, what meaning is enclosed even in the smallest

of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions which even

the poorest beggar owns: a handkerchief, an old letter,

the photo of a cherished person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs of our body; nor is it conceivable

that we can be deprived of them in our world, for we

immediately find others to substitute the old ones, other

objects which are ours in their personification and evoca-

tion of our memories.

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

If This is a Man

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."

Haffling 1

: I have learnt that I am a Haftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will

carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

The operation

was slightly painful

and extraordinarily

rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one,

according to the alphabetical order of our names, we

filed past

a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is

the real, true initiation: only by "showing one's number"

can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and

not a few cuffs and punches,

before we became used

to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder

the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and

months were needed to learn its sound in the German

language. And for many days, while the habits of

freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt

something of the funereal science of the numbers of

Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction

of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into

the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and

consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with

1 A prisoner.

On the Bottom

respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are

only a few hundred left and they represent the few

survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch

out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000:

they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull

the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers,

they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the

words "

freshman "

or "

conscript

" in ordinary life. The

typical high number is a

corpulent, docile and stupid

fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are

distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate

feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his

bowl of soup "in your custody"; you can sell him a

spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to

the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is

the Kartoffe/schalen-

kommando, the "Potato Peeling Command," and if one

can be enrolled in it.

In fact, the whole process of introduction to what

was for us a new order took place in a grotesque and sarcastic manner. When the tattooing operation was finished, they shut us in a vacant hut. The bunks

are made, but we are severely forbidden to touch or sit

on them: so we wander around aimlessly for half the

day in the limited space available, still tormented by the

parching thirst of the journey. Then the door opens

and a boy in a striped suit comes in, with a fairly

civilized air, small, thin and blond. He speaks French

and we throng around him with a flood of questions which till now we had asked each other in vain.

But he does not speak willingly; no one here speaks

willingly. We are new, we have nothing and we know

nothing; why waste time on us? He reluctantly explains

If This is a Man

to us that all the others are out at work and will come

back in the evening. He has come out of the infirmary this morning and is exempt from work for today. I asked

him (with an ingenuousness that only a few days later

already seemed incredible to me) if at lease they would

give us back our toothbrushes. He did not laugh, but with

his face animated by fierce contempt, he threw at me

"Vous n'etes pas a la maison" And it is this refrain

that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at

home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were

all to learn what it meant.) And it was in fact so. Driven by thirst, I eyed a

fine icicle outside the window, within hand's reach. I

opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once

a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally

snatched

it away from me. "WarumT' 1

I asked him in my poor German. "Hier 1st kein warum" (there is no why here), he

replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

The explanation

is repugnant but simple: in this

place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons,

but because the camp has been created for that purpose. If one wants to live one must learn this quickly and

well:

"No Sacred Face will help thee here! it's not

A Serchio bathing-party...."

Hour after hour, this first long day of limbo draws

to its end. While the sun sets in a tumult of fierce,

blood-red clouds, they finally make us come out of the

hut. Will they give us something to drink? No, they

place us in line again, they lead us to a huge square

which takes up the centre of the camp and they arrange us meticulously in squads. Then nothing happens

On the Bottom

for another hour: it seems that we are waiting for

someone.

A band begins to play, next to the entrance of the

camp: it plays Rosamunda, the well known sentimental

song, and this seems so strange to us that we look

sniggering at each other; we feel a shadow of relief,

perhaps all these ceremonies are nothing but a colossal

farce in Teutonic taste. But the band, on finishing

Rosamunda, continues to play other marches, one after

the other, and suddenly the squads of our comrades

appear, returning from work. They walk in columns

of five with a strange, unnatural hard gait, like

stiff puppets made of jointless bones; but they walk

scrupulously in time to the band.

They also arrange themselves like us in the huge

square, according to a precise order; when the last squad

has returned, they count and recount us for over an

hour. Long checks are made which all seem to go to

a man dressed in stripes,

who accounts for them to a

group of SS men in full battle dress.

Finally (it is dark by now, but the camp is brightly

lit by headlamps and reflectors) one hears the shout

"Absperre!" at which all the squads break up in a

confused and turbulent movement. They no longer walk

stiffly and erectly as before: each one drags himself

along with obvious effort. I see that all of them carry

in their hand or attached to their belt a steel bowl as

large as a basin.

We new arrivals also wander among the crowd, searching for a voice, a friendly

face or a guide. Against

the wooden wall of a hut two boys are seated on the

ground: they seem very young, sixteen years old at the

outside, both with their face and hands dirty with soot.

One of the two, as we are passing by, calls me and asks

me in German some questions which I do not understand;

If This is a Man

then he asks where we come from. "Italien" I reply; I want to ask him many things, but my German vocabulary is very limited.

"Are you a Jew?" I ask him.

"Yes, a Polish Jew."

"How long have you been in the Lager?" "Three years," and he lifts up three fingers. He must

have been a child when he entered, I think with horror;

on the other hand this means that at least some manage to live here.

"What is your work?"

"Schlosser" he replies.

I do not understand. "Eisen,

Feuer" (iron, fire),

he insists, and makes a play with

his hands of someone beating with a hammer on an

anvil. So he is an ironsmith.

"hh Chemtker? I state; and he nods earnestly with

his head, "Chemiker gut" But all this has to do with

the distant future: what torments me at the moment

is my thirst.

"Drink, water. We no water," I tell him. He looks at me with a serious face, almost severe,

and states clearly: "Do not drink water, comrade," and

then other words that I do not understand.

"Warum?"

"Geschwollen? he replies cryptically. I shake my

head, I have not understood. "Swollen" he makes me

understand, blowing out his cheeks and sketching with

his hands a monstruous tumefaction of the face and

belly. "Warten bis heute Abend." "Wait until this

evening," I translate word by word.

Then he says: "Ich Schlome. Du?" I tell him my name, and he asks me: "Where your mother?"

"In Italy." Schlome is amazed: a Jew in Italy?

"Yes," I explain as best I can, "hidden, no one knows,

run away, does not speak, no one sees her." He has

On the Bottom

understood; he now gets up, approaches me and timidly embraces me. The adventure is over, and I feel filled

with a serene sadness that is almost joy.

I have never

seen Schlome since, but I have not forgotten his serious

and gentle face of a child, which welcomed me on the

threshold of the house of the dead.

We still have a great number of things to learn, but we have learnt many already. We already have a certain idea of the topography of the Lager; our Lager

is a square of about six hundred yards in length,

surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one

carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty

wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which

are in construction. In addition, there is the body of

the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm,

run by a detachment of privileged Haftlinge; the huts

with the showers and the latrines, one for each group

of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks

are reserved for specific purposes.

First of all, a group of

eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms

the infirmary and clinic; then there is Block 24 which

is the Kratzeblock, reserved for infectious skin-diseases;

Block 7 which no ordinary Haftling has ever entered,

reserved for the "Prominenz," that is, the aristocracy, the

internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved

for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, 'politicals'

or criminals);

Block 49, for the Kapos alone; Block 12,

half of which, for use of the Reichsdeutsche and the

Kapos, serves as canteen, that is, a distribution centre for

tobacco, insect powder and occasionally other articles;

Block 37, which formed the Quartermaster's office and

the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which always has its windows closed as it is the Frauenhlock, the

If This is a Man

camp brothel, served by Polish Haftling girls, and

reserved for the Reichsdeutsche.

The ordinary living Blocks are divided into two

parts. In one Tagesraum lives the head of the hut

with his friends. There is a long table, seats, benches,

and on all sides a heap of strange objects in bright

colours, photographs, cuttings from magazines, sketches,

imitation flowers, ornaments; on the walls, great sayings,

proverbs and rhymes in praise of order, discipline and

hygiene; in one corner, a shelf with the tools of the

Blockfrisor (official barber), the ladles to distribute the

soup, and two rubber truncheons, one solid and one

hollow, to enforce discipline should the

proverbs prove

insufficient. The other part

is the dormitory: there

are only one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three

levels, fitted close to each other like the cells of a

beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize

without wastage all the space in the room up to the

roof. Here all the ordinary Haftlinge live, about two

hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut. Consequently there are two men in most of the bunks, which are

portable planks of wood, each covered by a thin straw

sack and two blankets.

The corridors are so narrow that two people can

barely pass together; the total area of the floor is so

small that the inhabitants of the same Block cannot all

stay there at the same time unless at least half are

lying on their bunks. Hence the prohibition to enter

a Block to which one does not belong. In the middle of the Lager is the roll-call square,

enormous, where we collect in the morning to form

the work-squads and in the evening to be counted.

Facing the roll-call square there is a bed of grass,

carefully mown, where the gallows are erected when

necessary.

On the Bottom

We had soon learned that the guests of the Lager are divided into three

categories: the criminals, the

politicals and the Jews. All are clothed in stripes, all

are Haftlinge, but the criminals wear a green triangle next to the number sewn on the jacket; the politicals wear a red

triangle; and the Jews, who form the large majority, wear the Jewish star, red and yellow. SS men

exist but are few and outside the camp, and are seen

relatively infrequently. Our effective masters in practice are the green triangles, who have a free hand over us, as well as those of the other two categories who are

ready to help them and they are not few.

And we have learnt other things, more or less

quickly, according to our intelligence: to reply "Jawohl" never to ask

questions, always to pretend to understand.

We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape

the bottom of the bowl after the ration

and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so

as not to lose the crumbs. We, too, know that it is not

the same thing to be given a ladleful of soup from the

top or from the bottom of the vat, and we are already able to judge, according to the capacity of the various

vats, what is the most suitable place to try and reach

in the queue when we line up. We have learnt that everything is useful: the wire

to tie up our shoes, the rags to wrap around our feet,

waste paper to (illegally) pad out our jacket against the cold. We have learnt, on the other hand, that

everything can be stolen, in fact is automatically stolen

as soon as attention is relaxed; and to avoid this, we

had to learn the art of sleeping

with our head on a

bundle made up of our jacket and containing all our

belongings, from the bowl to the shoes.

We already know in good part the rules of the

camp, which are incredibly complicated. The prohibitions

If This is a Man

are innumerable: to approach nearer to the barbed wire

than two yards; to sleep with one's jacket, or without

one's pants,

or with one's cap on one's head; to use

certain washrooms or latrines which are "nur fur Kapos" or "nur fur Reichsdeutsche"\ not to go for the shower

on the prescribed day,

or to go there on a day not

prescribed; to leave the hut with one's jacket unbuttoned,

or with the collar raised; to carry paper or straw under

one's clothes against the cold; to wash except stripped to the waist.

The rites to be carried out were infinite and senseless :

every morning one had to make the "bed" perfectly flat and smooth; smear one's muddy and repellent wooden

shoes with the appropriate machine grease; scrape the

mudstains off one's clothes (paint, grease

and rust-stains

were, however, permitted); in the evening one had to

undergo the control for lice and the control of washing

one's feet; on Saturday, have one's beard and hair

shaved, mend or have mended one's rags; on Sunday,

undergo the general control for skin diseases and the

control of buttons on one's jacket, which had to be five.

In addition, there are innumerable circumstances,

normally irrelevant, which here become problems. When

one's nails grow long, they have to be shortened, which

can only be done with one's teeth (for the toenails, the

friction of the shoes is sufficient);

if a button comes

off, one has to tie it on with a piece of wire; if one

goes to the latrine or the washroom, everything has to

be carried along, always and everywhere, and while one

washes one's face, the bundle of clothes has to be held

tightly between one's knees: in any other manner it

will be stolen in that second. If a shoe hurts, one has

to go in the evening to the ceremony of the changing of the shoes: this tests the skill of the individual who,

in the middle of the incredible crowd, has to be able

On the Bottom

to choose at an eye's glance one (not a pair, one) shoe,

which fits. Because once the choice is made, there can

be no second change. And do not think that shoes form a factor of

secondary importance in the life of the Lager. Death

begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show

themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a

few hours of marching cause painful sores which become

fatally infected. Whoever has them is forced to walk

as if he was dragging a convict's chain (this explains the strange gait of the army which returns every evening

on parade); he arrives last everywhere, and everywhere

he receives blows. He cannot escape if they run after

him; his feet swell and the more they swell, the more

the friction with the wood and the cloth of the shoes

becomes insupportable. Then only the hospital is left:

but to enter the hospital with a diagnosis of "dicke

Fusse" (swollen feet) is extremely dangerous, because

it is well known to all, and especially to the SS, that

here there is no cure for that complaint. And in all this we have not yet mentioned the work,

which in its turn is a Gordian knot of laws, taboos and

problems.

We all work, except those who are ill (to be

recognized as ill implies in itself an important equipment

of knowledge and experience). Ever) 7

morning we leave

the camp in squads for the Buna; every evening, in

squads, we return. As regards the work, we are divided

into about two hundred Kommandos, each of which

consists of between fifteen and one hundred and fifty

men and is commanded by a Kapo. There are good and

bad Kommandos; for the most part they are used as

transport and the work is quite hard, especially in the

winter, if for no other reason merely because it always

takes place

in the open. There are also skilled

If This is a Man

Kommandos (electricians, smiths, brick-layers, welders,

mechanics, concrete-layers, etc.), each attached to a

certain workshop or department of the Buna, and

depending more directly on civilian foremen, mostly German and Polish. This naturally only applied to

the hours of work; for the rest of the day the skilled

workers (there are no more than three or four hundred

in all)

receive no different treatment from the ordinary workers. The detailing of individuals to the various

Kommandos is organized by a special office of the Lager, the Arbeitsdienst, which is in continual touch with the

civilian direction of the Buna. The Arbeitsdienst decided

on the basis of unknown criteria, often openly on the

basis of protection or corruption, so that if anyone

manages to find enough to eat, he is practically certain

to get a good post at Buna.

The hours of work vary with the season. All hours

of light are working hours: so that from a minimum

winter working day (8-12 a. m. and 12.30-4 p.m.) one

rises to a maximum summer one (6.30-12 a.m. and 1-6

p.m.). Under no excuse are the Haftlinge allowed to be

at work during the hours of darkness or when there

is a thick fog, but they work regularly even if it rains

or snows or (as occurs quite frequently)

if the fierce

wind of the Carpathians blows; the reason being that the

darkness or fog might provide opportunities to escape. One Sunday in every two is a regular working day;

on the so-called holiday Sundays, instead of working at

Buna, one works normally on the upkeep of the Lager, so that days of real rest are extremely rare.

Such will be our life. Every day, according to the

established rhythm, Ausrucken and Emrucken, go out

and come in; work, sleep and eat; fall ill, get better

or die.

On the Bottom

... And for how long? But the old ones laugh at

this question: they recognize the new arrivals by this

question. They laugh and they do not reply. For

months and years, the problem of the remote future

has grown pale to them and has lost all intensity in

face of the far more urgent and concrete problems of the

near future: how much one will eat today, if it will

snow, if there will be coal to unload.

If we were logical,

we would resign ourselves to the

evidence that our fate is beyond human knowledge, that

every conjecture is arbitrary and demonstrably devoid

of foundation. But men are rarely logical when their

own fate is at stake; on every occasion, they prefer the

extreme positions. According to our character, some of

us are immediately convinced that all is lost, that one

cannot live here, that the end is near and sure; others

are convinced that however hard the present life may

be, salvation is probable and not far off, and if we have

faith and strength, we will see our houses and our dear

ones again. The two classes of pessimists and optimists are not so clearly defined, however, not because there

are many agnostics, but because the majority, without

memory or coherence, drift between the two extremes,

according to the moment and the mood of the person

they happen to meet.

Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly

enough to wipe out the past and the future when one

is forced to. A fortnight after my arrival I already had the

prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown

to free men, which makes one dream at night, and

settles in all the limbs of one's body. I have already

learnt not to let myself be robbed, and in fact if I find

a spoon lying around, a piece of

string, a button which

I can acquire

without danger of punishment, I

pocket

them and consider them mine by full right. On the

If This is a Man

back of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already

my own body is no longer mine : my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my face is thick in the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others

grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly

recognize each other.

We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday evening in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped it at once, because it was too sad to count our numbers and find

fewer each time, and to see each other ever more

deformed and more squalid.

And 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.

Initiation

After the first day of capricious transfer from hut

to hut and from Kommando to Kommando, I am assigned to Block 30 late one evening, and shown a bunk in

which Diena is already sleeping. Diena wakes up, and

although exhausted, makes room for me and receives

me hospitably.

I am not sleepy,

or more accurately, my sleepiness is

masked by a state of tension and anxiety of which I

have not yet managed to rid myself, and so I talk

and talk.

I have too many things to ask. I am hungry and

when will they distribute the soup tomorrow? And will

I be able to eat it without a spoon? And where will I

be able to find one? And where will they send me to

work? Diena knows no more than I, and replies with

other questions.

But from above and below, from near

by and from far away, from all corners of the now dark

hut, sleepy and angry voices shout at me: "Ruhe, Ruhel"

I understand that they are ordering me to be quiet, but the word is new to me, and since I do not know

If This is a Man

its meaning and implications, my inquietude increases.

The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the manner of

living here: one is surrounded by a

perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and

threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide

whoever fails to grasp

the meaning. No one has time

here, no one has patience, no one listens to you; we

latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against

the walls, afraid of being beaten.

So I give up asking questions and soon slip into

a bitter and tense sleep.

But it is not rest: I feel

myself threatened, besieged, at every moment I am ready to draw myself into a spasm of defence.

I dream and

I seem to sleep

on a road, on a bridge, across a door

through which many people are passing. And now,

oh, so early, the reveille sounds. The entire hut shakes

to its foundations, the lights are put on, everyone near

me bustles around in a sudden frantic activity. They shake the blankets raising clouds of fetid dust, they dress

with feverish hurry, they run outside into the freezing

air half-dressed, they rush headlong towards the latrines

and washrooms. Some, bestially, urinate while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins

the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-

lechem-kenyer, of the holy grey slab which seems

gigantic in your neighbour's hand, and in your own

hand so small as to make you cry. It is a daily hallucination to which in the end one becomes accus-

tomed : but at the beginning it is so irresistible that many of us, after long discussions on our own open and

constant misfortune and the shameless luck of others,

finally exchange our ration, at which the illusion is

renewed inverted, leaving everyone discontented and

frustrated.

Bread is also our only money: in the few minutes

Initiation

which elapse

between its distribution and consumption, the Block resounds with claims, quarrels and scuffles.

It is the creditors of yesterday who are claiming payment in the brief moment in which the debtor is solvent.

After which a relative quiet begins and many take

advantage to go to the latrines again to smoke half

a cigarette, or to the washrooms to wash themselves

properly.

The washroom is far from attractive. It is badly

lighted, full of draughts, with the brick floor covered

by a layer of mud. The water is not drinkable; it has

a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The

walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes: for

example, there is the good Haftling, portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared

and

rosy cranium, and the bad Haftling, with a strong

Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his

ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head,

who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the

washbasin. Under the first is written: "So hist du

rein" (like

this you are clean), and under the second:

"So gehst du em" (like this you come to a bad end); and lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic

script: "La

proprete, c'est la sante"

On the opposite

wall an enormous white, red and

black louse encamps, with the writing: "Erne Laus, dein

Tod" (a

louse is your death), and the inspired distich:

"Nach dem Abort, vor dem Essen

Hande waschen, nicht vergessen"

(After the latrine, before eating, wash your hands, do not

forget.)

For many weeks I considered these warnings about

hygiene as pure examples of the Teutonic sense of

If This is a Man

humour, in the style of the dialogue about the truss

which we had heard on our entry into the Lager. But

later I understood that their unknown authors, perhaps without realising it, were not far from some very

important truths. In this place

it is practically pointless

to wash every day in the turbid water of the filthy

washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but

it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality,

and necessary as an instrument of moral survival.

I must confess it: after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness disappeared

in me. I wander

aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see

Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso,

scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he

has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and

greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why

I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would

I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a

shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of

energy and warmth. Does not Steinlauf know that

after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference

between him and me will have disappeared? The more

I think about it, the more washing one's face in

our condition seems a stupid feat, even frivolous: a

mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an

extinct rite. We will all die, we are all about to die: if they give

me ten minutes between the reveille and

work, I want to dedicate them to something else, to

draw into myself, to weigh up things, or merely to

look at the sky and think that I am looking at it

perhaps for the last time; or even to let myself live,

to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.

But Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing

and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which

Initiation

he was holding before wrapped up between his knees

and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson.

It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain,

outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf

of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the '14-' 18

war. It grieves me because it means that I have to

translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet manner

of speaking of a good soldier into my language of an

incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten

either then or later: that precisely because the Lager

was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must

not become beasts; that even in this place one can

survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell

the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must

force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the

scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived

of every right, exposed to every insult,

condemned to certain death, but we still possess one

power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it

is the last the power to refuse our consent. So we

must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty

water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but

for

dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without

dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

These things Steinlauf, a man of good will, told

me; strange things to my unaccustomed ear, understood

and accepted only

in part,

and softened by an easier,

more flexible and blander doctrine, which for centuries

has found its dwelling place on the other side of the

Alps; according to which, among other things, nothing

is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow

whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another

If This is a Man

sky. No, the wisdom and virtue of Steinlauf, certainly

good for him, is not enough for me. In the face of

this complicated world my ideas of damnation are

confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system

and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to

acknowledge one's lack of a system?

Ka-Be

The days all seem alike and it is not easy to count

them. For days now we have formed teams of two, from the railway to the store a hundred yards over

thawing ground. To the store, bending underneath

the load, back again, arms hanging down one's sides, not speaking.

Around us, exerything is hostile. Above us the

malevolent clouds chase each other to separate

us from

the sun; on all sides the squalor of the toiling steel

closes in on us. We have never seen its boundaries, but we feel all around us the evil

presence of the

barbed wire that separates

us from the world. And on

the scaffolding, on the trains being switched about, on

the roads, in the pits, in the offices, men and more men,

slaves and masters, the masters slaves themselves. Fear

motivates the former, hatred the latter, all other forces

are silent. All are enemies or rivals.

No, I honestly do not feel my companion of today, harnessed with me under the same load, to be either

enemy or rival.

If This is a Man

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything

except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of

his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no

longer a man. I think that even he has forgotten his

name, certainly he acts as if this was so. When he

speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression

of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre,

like the slough of certain insects which one finds on

the banks of swamps, held by a thread to the stones

and shaken by the wind.

Null Achtzehn is very young, which is a grave

danger. Not only because boys support exhaustion and

fasting worse than adults, but even more because a

long training is needed to survive here in the struggle of each one against all, a training which young people

rarely have. Null Achtzehn is not even particularly

weak, but all avoid working with him. He is indifferent to the

point of not even troubling to avoid tiredness

and blows or to search for food. He carries out all

the orders that he is given, and it is foreseeable that

when they send him to his death he will go with the

same total indifference.

He has not even the rudimentary astuteness of a

draughthorse, which stops pulling a little before it

reaches exhaustion: he pulls

or carries or pushes

long as his strength allows him, then he gives way at

once, without a word of warning, without lifting his

sad, opaque eyes from the ground. He made me think of the sledge-dogs in London's books, who slave until

the last breath and die on the track.

But as all the rest of us try by every possible means

to avoid work, Null Achtzehn is the one who works

more than all. It is because of this, and because he is

a dangerous companion, that no one wants to work

Ka-Be

with him; and as, on the other hand, no one wants to

work with me, because I am weak and clumsy, it often

happens that we find ourselves

paired together.

As we come back once again from the store, with

hands empty, dragging our feet, an engine whistles

briefly and cuts off our path. Happy at the enforced

delay, Null Achtzehn and I stop; bent and in

rags,

we wait for the wagons to pass slowly by. ...Deutsche Reichsbahn. Deutsche Reichsbahn. SNCF.

Two huge Russian goods wagons with the hammer and

sickle badly rubbed off. Then, Cavalli 8, Uomini 70,

Tara, Portata: an Italian wagon.... Oh, to climb into

a corner, well-hidden under the coal, and to stay there

quiet and still in the dark, to listen endlessly to the

rhythm of the wheels, stronger than hunger or tiredness;

until, at a certain moment, the train would stop and I

would feel the warm air and the smell of hay and

I would get out into the sun; then I would lie down

on the ground to kiss the earth, as you read in books,

with my face in the grass. And a woman would pass, and she would ask me "Who are you?" in Italian, and

I would tell her my story in Italian, and she would

understand, and she would give me food and shelter.

And she would not believe the things I tell her, and I

would show her the number on my arm, and then

she would believe....

... It is over. The last wagon has passed, and as

if the curtain had been raised, the pile of cast-iron

supports lies before our eyes. The Kapo on his feet

the pile

with a switch in his hand, the wan companions

who come and go in pairs. Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness

that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of

If This is a Man

sufferings. But it does not often happen to us,

and

they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.

We are once again at the foot of the pile. Mischa and the Galician lift a support and put it roughly

our shoulders. Their job is the least tiring, so that

they show excess zeal to keep it: they shout at

companions who dawdle, they incite them, they admonish

them, they drive on the work at an unbearable pace. This fills me with anger, although I already know that

it is in the normal order of things that the privileged

oppress the unprivileged:

the social structure of the

camp is based on this human law.

This time it is my turn to walk in front. The

support is heavy but very short, so that at every step

I feel behind me Null Achtzehn's feet which tread on

mine, as he is unable or cannot be bothered to keep

in step.

Twenty steps, we have arrived at the railroad, there

is a cable to climb over. The load is badly placed,

something is not right, it seems to be slipping from my

shoulder. Fifty steps, sixty. The door of the store:

still the same distance to walk and we can put it down.

It is enough, I cannot go any further, the load is now

weighing entirely on my arm. I cannot stand the pain and exhaustion any longer: I shout, I try to turn around,

just in time to see Null Achtzehn

trip and throw

everything down.

If I had still had my agility of earlier days I could

have jumped back: instead, here I am on the ground,

with all my muscles contracted, the wounded foot tight between my hands, blind with pain. The corner of

the piece

of iron had cut across the back of my foot.

For a moment all is blank in the giddiness of pain. When I manage to look around, Null Achtzehn is still

Ka-Be

there on his feet, he has not moved, with his hands

in his sleeves, his face expressionless, he does not say

a word. Mischa and the Galician arrive, speaking Yiddish to each other, they give me incomprehensible advice. Templer and David and the others arrive: they

profit from the distraction to

stop work. The Kapo

arrives, he distributes kicks, punches and abuse, and the

comrades disperse

like chaff in the wind. Null Achtzehn

puts his hand to his nose and blankly looks at it, dirty

with blood. I only receive two blows on the head, of

the sort that do no harm but simply stun.

The incident is closed. It is proven, for good or

bad, that I can stand up, so that the bone cannot be

broken. I do not dare to cut the boot open for fear

of wakening the pain again, and also because I know

that the foot will swell and I will be unable to put the

boot on again. The Kapo sends me to take the place of the Galician

at the pile,

and the latter, glaring at me, takes his place

alongside Null Achtzehn; but by now the English

prisoners have

passed, it will soon be time to return

to the camp.

During the march I do my best to walk quickly, but I cannot keep up the pace. The Kapo picks out

Null Achtzehn and Finder to help me as far as the

procession in front of the SS, and finally (fortunately

there is no roll-call this evening) I am in the hut and I

can throw myself on the bunk and breathe.

Perhaps it is the heat, perhaps the fatigue

of the

march, but the pain has begun again, together with a

strange feeling of humidity in the wounded foot. I take

off my shoe: it is full of blood, by now congealed and

kneaded into the mud and rags of the cloth I found

a month ago, and which I use as a foot-pad, one day on

the right,

one day on the left foot.

If This is a Man

This evening, after soup, I will go to Ka-Be.

Ka-Be is the abbreviation of Krankenbau, the

infirmary. There are eight huts, exactly like the others

in the camp, but separated by a wire fence. They

permanently hold a tenth of the population of the camp,

but there are few who stay there longer than two

weeks and none more than two months: within these

limits they are held to die or be cured. Those who

show signs of improvement are cured in Ka-Be, those who

seem to get worse are sent from Ka-Be to the gas chambers. All this because we, fortunately, belong to

the category of "economically useful Jews."

I have never been to Ka-Be nor to the clinic, and it is

all new to me. There are two clinics, medical and surgical. In front of the door, exposed to the night and the wind,

there are two long rows of shadows. Some only have

need of a bandage or a pill, others ask to be examined;

some show death in their faces. Those at the front of

both rows are already barefoot and ready to enter. Others,

as their turn to enter approaches, contrive in the middle

of the crush to loosen the haphazard laces and wire

threads of their shoes and to unfold the precious foot-pads without losing them; not too early, so as not to stand

pointlessly in the mud in bare feet; not too late, so as

not to lose their turn to enter, because it is rigolously

forbidden to enter Ka-Be with shoes. A gigantic French

Haftling, sitting in the porch between the doors of the

two clinics, enforces respect for the prohibition. He is

one of the few French officials of the camp. And do

not think that to spend one's day among the muddy and

broken shoes is a small privilege:

it is enough to

think of how many enter Ka-Be with shoes, and leave

with no further need of them....

When my turn comes I manage miraculously to

Ka-Be

take off my shoes and rags without losing any of them, without

letting my bowl and gloves be stolen, without

losing my balance, and keeping my beret in my hand all the time, as for no reason can one wear it on

entering a hut.

I leave the shoes at the deposit

and am given the

appropriate check, after which, barefoot and limping,

my hands full of all my poor possessions that I dare not leave anywhere, 1 am admitted inside and join a new queue which ends in the examination rooms.

In this queue one progressively undresses so as to

be naked when one arrives at the head, where a male

nurse puts

a thermometer under one's arm-pit.

If anyone is dressed he loses his turn and goes back to join the

queue. Everybody has to be given the thermometer,

even if he only has a skin disease or toothche. In this

way they make sure that whoever is not seriously ill will not submit himself to this

complicated ritual for

the sake of caprice.

My turn finally arrives and I am brought in front of the doctor. The nurse takes out the thermometer

and presents me: "Nummer 174517, kern Fieber." I do

not need a long examination : I am immediately declared

Arztvormelder. What it means I do not know, but this is certainly not the place to ask for explanations. I find

myself thrown out, I get back my shoes and go back to the hut.

Chajim rejoices with me: I have a good wound,

it does not seem dangerous, but it should be enough to

guarantee me a discreet period of rest. I will spend the night in the hut with the others, but tomorrow

morning, instead of going to work, I will have to show

myself to the doctors for the definitive examination:

this is what Arztvormelder means. Chajim is experienced in these matters and he thinks that I will

probably

If This is a Man

be admitted tomorrow to Ka-Be. Chajim is my bed-

companion and I trust him blindly. He is Polish, a

religious Jew, learned in rabbinical law. He is about

as old as I, a watchmaker by profession, and here in

Buna works as a precision mechanic; so he is among the few who are able to preserve their dignity and

self-assurance through the practice of a profession in

which they are skilled.

And so it happened. After the reveille and the

bread they called me out with three others from my hut.

They took us to a corner of the roll-call square where

there was a long queue, all the Arztvormelder of today; someone came and took away my bowl, spoon, beret

and gloves.

The others laughed. Did I not know that I

had to hide them or leave them with someone, or best

of all sell them, as they cannot be taken in Ka-Be?

Then they look at my number and shake their heads:

any stupidity is to be expected from one with so high a number.

Then they counted us, they made us undress outside

in the cold, they took our shoes, they counted us again,

and they made us take a shower. Then an SS man

came, he looked at us without interest, stopping in front

of one with a large hydrocele, whom he placed apart. After which they counted us again and made us take

another shower, although we were still wet from the

first one and some were trembling from a chill.

We are now ready for the definitive examination. Outside the window one can see the white sky and

sometimes the sun; in this country one can look at it

fixedly, through the clouds, as through a misty window.

To judge by its position it must be past 2 p.m. Good-bye

soup by now, and we have been on our feet for ten

hours and naked for six.

This second medical examination is also extraordi-

Ka-Be

narily rapid: the doctor (he has a striped suit like us,

but with a white coat over it, with the number sewn

on the coat, and he is much fatter than us) looks at

and touches my swollen and bloody foot, at which I cry out from

pain. Then he says: "Aufgenommen, Block 23."

I stand there with my mouth open, waiting for some other indication, but someone pulls me backwards

brutally, throws a gown on my bare shoulders, gives me

a pair

of sandals, and drives me out into the open. A hundred yards away is Block 23; written on it is

"'"Schonungsblock." Who knows what it means? Inside

they take off my gown and sandals and I find myself naked and last again in a queue of human skeletons

the inmates of today.

I have stopped trying to understand for a long time

now. As far as I am concerned, I am by now so tired

of standing on my wounded foot, still untended, so

hungry and frozen, that nothing can interest me any more.

This might easily be my last day and this room the

gaschamber of which all speak, but what can I do

about it? I might just as well lean against the wall,

close my eyes and wait.

My neighbour cannot be Jewish. He is not circumcised and besides

(this is one of the few things

that I have so far learnt),

so blond a skin, a face and

a body so huge, are characteristics of non-Jewish Poles.

He is a whole head taller than me but he has quite cordial features, as have only those who do not suffer

from hunger. I tried to ask him if he knew when they would let

us enter. He turned to the nurse who resembled him

like a twin and was smoking in the corner; they talked

and laughed together without replying, as if I was not

there. Then one of them took my arm and looked

at my number and then both laughed still more strongly.

If This is a Man

Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian Jews who arrived two months

ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, who were more than

a hundred and are now only forty; the ones who do

not know how to work, and let their bread be stolen, and are slapped from the morning to the evening.

The

Germans call them "zwei Imke Hande" (two left hands), and even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not

speak Yiddish.

The nurse points to my ribs to show the other, as

if I was a corpse

in an anatomy class: he alludes to my

eyelids and my swollen cheeks and my thin neck, he

stoops to

press on my tibia with his thumb, and shows

the other the deep impression that his finger leaves in

the pale flesh,

as if it was wax.

I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as

if I had never in all my life undergone an affront worse

than this. The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have finished

his demonstration in this language which I do not

understand and which sounds terrible. He turns to me, and in near-German, charitably, tells me the conclusion:

"Du ]ude, kaputt. Du schnell Krematorium fertig"

(You Jew, finished. You soon ready for crematorium.)

Some more hours pass before all the inmates are

seen, are given a shirt and their details taken. I, as

usual, am the last. Someone in a brand-new striped suit asks me where I was born, what profession I

practised "as a civilian," if I had children, what diseases

I had had, a whole series of questions. What use could

they be? Is this a complicated rehearsal to make fools

of us? Could this be the hospital? They make us stand

naked and ask us questions.

Finally the door is opened, even for me, and I can

enter the dormitory.

Ka-Be

Here as everywhere there are bunks on three levels,

in three rows throughout the hut, separated by two

narrow corridors. The bunks are 150, the patients 250;

so there are two in almost all the bunks. The patients

in the upper bunks, squashed against the ceiling, can

hardly sit up; they lean out, curious to see the new

arrivals of today. It is the most interesting moment of

the day, for one always finds some acquaintances. I am

assigned bunk number 10 a miracle! It is empty! I stretch myself out with delight; is is the first time

since I entered the camp that I have a bunk all to

myself. Despite my hunger, within ten minutes I am

asleep.

The life of Ka-Be is a life of limbo. The material

discomforts are relatively few, apart from hunger and

the inherent pains

of illness. It is not cold, there is

no work to do, and unless you commit some grave

fault, you are not beaten.

The reveille is at 4 a.m., even for the patients. One

has to make one's bed and wash, but there is not much

hurry and little severity. The bread is distributed at

half past five, and one can cut it comfortably into

thin slices and eat it lying down in complete peace; then

one can fall asleep again until

the soup is distributed at

midday. Until about 4 p.m. it is Mittagsruhe, afternoon

rest-time; then there is often the medical visit and

dispensing of medicines, and one has to climb down from

the bunks, take off one's shirt and file past the doctor.

The evening ration is also served in bed, after which,

at 9 p.m., all the lights are turned off

except for the

shaded lamp of the nightguard, and there is silence.

... And for the first time since I entered the camp the reveille catches me in a deep sleep and its ringing

If This is a Man

is a return from nothingness. As the bread is distributed

one can hear, far from the windows, in the dark air,

the band beginning to play: the healthy comrades are

leaving in squads for work.

One cannot hear the music well from Ka-Be. The

beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us

continuously and monotonously, but on this weft the

musical phrases

weave a pattern only intermittently,

according to the caprices of the wind. We all look

at each other from our beds, because we all feel that

this music is infernal.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every

day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds

and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget:

they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression

of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others

to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more

slowly afterwards.

When this music plays

we know that our comrades, out in the

fog, are marching like automatons; their

souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind

drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills.

There is no longer any will: every beat of the drum

becomes a step,

a reflected contraction of exhausted

muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They are ten thousand and they are a single grey machine;

they are exactly determined; they do not think and they

do not desire, they walk.

At the departure and the return march the SS are

never lacking. Who could deny them their right to watch this coreography of their creation, the dance

of dead men, squad after squad, leaving the fog to

enter the fog? What more concrete proof of their

victory?

Ka-Be

Even those in Ka-Be recognize this departure and

return from work, the hypnosis of the interminable

rhythm, which kills thought and deadens pain; they

have experienced it themselves and they will experience it again. But one had to escape from the enchantment,

to hear the music from outside, as happened in Ka-Be,

and as we think back now after the liberation and the

rebirth, without obeying it, without enduring it, to

understand what it was, for what meditated reason the

Germans created this monstruous rite, and why even

today, when we happen to remember some of those

innocent songs, our blood freezes in our veins and we

become aware that to escape from Auschwitz was no

small fortune.

I have two neighbours in the adjoining bunk. They lie down all day and all night, side by side, skin against

skin, crossed like the Pisces of the zodiac, so that each

has the feet of the other beside his head.

One is Walter Bonn, a Dutchman, civilized and

quite well mannered. He sees that I have nothing with

which to cut my bread and loans me his knife, and then

offers to sell it to me for half a ration of bread. I discuss

the price

and then turn it down, as I think that I will

always find someone to lend me one here in Ka-Be, while outside it only costs a third of a ration. Walter

is by no means less courteous because of this, and at

midday, after eating his soup, he cleans his spoon with

his mouth (which is a good rule before loaning it, so

as to clean it and not to leave waste any traces of soup

which may still be there) and spontaneously offers me it.

"What are you suffering from, Walter?"

"Korperschwache" organic decay. The worst disease :

it cannot be cured, and it is very dangerous to enter

Ka-Be with such a diagnosis. If it had not been for

If This is a Man

the oedema of his ankles (and he shows me it) which

hinders him from marching to work, he would have

been very cautious about reporting ill.

I still have quite confused ideas about this kind of

danger. Everybody speaks about it indirectly, by

allusions, and when I ask some question they look at

me and fall silent.

Is it true what one hears of selections, of gas, of

crematoriums?

Crematoriums. The other one, Walter's neighbour,

wakes up startled and sits up: who is talking about

the crematorium? what is happening? cannot a

sleeping

person be left in peace?

He is a Polish Jew, albino, with

an emaciated and goodnatured face, no longer young.

His name is Schmulek, he is a smith. Walter tells

him briefly.

So, "der Italeyner" does not believe in selections.

Schmulek wants to speak German but speaks Yiddish;

I understand him with difficulty, only because he wants

to be understood. He silences Walter with a sign, he

will see about persuading me:

"Show me your number: you are 174517. This

numbering began eighteen months ago and applies to

Auschwitz and the dependent camps. There are now

ten thousand of us here at Buna-Monowitz; perhaps

thirty thousand between Auschwitz and Birkenau. Wo

sind die Anderet Where are the others?"

"Perhaps transferred to other camps?" I suggest.

Schmulek shakes his head, he turns to Walter.

"Er will nix verstayen" he does not want to under-

stand.

But destiny ordained that I was soon to understand,

and at the expense of Schmulek himself. That evening

the door of the hut opened, a voice shouted "Achtung!"

Ka-Be

and every sound died out to give way to a leaden

silence.

Two SS men enter (one of them has many chevrons,

perhaps he is an officer?). One can hear their steps in

the hut as if it was empty; they speak to the chief

doctor, and he shows them a register, pointing here

and there. The officer notes down in a book. Schmulek

touches my knee:

"Pass* auf, pass' auf" keep your eyes open. The officer, followed by the doctor, walks around in

silence, nonchalantly, between the bunks; he has a switch

in his hand, and flicks at the edge of a blanket hanging

down from a top bunk, the patient

hurries to adjust it.

One has a yellow face; the officer pulls away his

blankets, he starts back, the officer touches his belly,

says, "Gut, gut" and moves on.

Now he is looking at Schmulek; he brings out the

book, checks the number of the bed and the number

of the tattoo. I see it all clearly from above: he has

drawn a cross beside Schmulek's number. Then he

moves on.

I now look at Schmulek and behind him I see

Walter's eyes, so I ask no questions.

The day after, in place of the usual group of patients who have recovered, two distinct groups are led out.

The first have been shaved and sheared and have had

a shower. The second left as they are, with long hair

and without being treated, without a shower. Nobody said goodbye to the latter, nobody gave

them messages

for healthy comrades.

Schmulek formed part of this group.

In this discreet and composed manner, without

display

or anger, massacre moves through the huts of Ka-Be

every day, touching here and there. When Schmulek

left, he gave me his spoon and knife; Walter and I

If This is a Man

avoided looking at each other and remained silent for a

long time. Then Walter asked me how I manage to

keep my ration of bread so long, and explained to me

that he usually cuts his bread lengthwise to have longer

slices in order to smear on the margarine more easily. Walter

explains many things to me: Schonungsblock means the rest hut, where there are only the less serious

patients or convalescents, or those not requiring attention.

Among them, at least fifty more or less serious dysentery

patients.

These are checked every third day. They are placed in a line along the corridor. At the end there are two

tin-plate pots, and the nurse with a

pencil. Two at a time, the patients present themselves

and have to show, on the spot and at once, that they

still have diarrhoea; to prove it, they are given exactly

one minute. After which, they show the result to the

nurse who looks at it and judges. They wash the pots

quickly in a wash-tub near-by and the next two take over.

Of those waiting, some are contorted in the pain of

keeping in their precious evidence another ten, another

twenty minutes; others, without resources at the moment,

strain veins and muscles in a contrary effort. The nurse

watches, impassive, chewing his pencil, one eye on the

watch, one eye on the specimens gradually presented him. In doubtful cases, he leaves with the pot to show

it to the doctor.

I receive an unexpected visit: it is Piero Sonnino,

my friend from Rome. "Have you seen how I have

fixed it?" Piero has mild enteritis, has been here for

twenty days, and is quite happy, rested and growing

fatter; he could not care less about the selections and

has decided to stay in Ka-Be until the end of the winter,

at all costs. His method consists of placing himself

in line behind some authentic dysentery patient who

Ka-Be

offers a guarantee of success; when it is his turn he

asks for his collaboration (to

be rewarded with soup or bread),

and if the latter agrees, and the nurse has

a moment of inattention, he switches over the pots in

the middle of the crowd, and the deed is done. Piero

knows what he is risking, but it has gone well so far.

But life in Ka-Be is not this. It is not the crucial

moments of the selections, it is not the grotesque episodes of the diarrhoea and lice controls, it is not even the

illnesses.

Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts.

So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience,

feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty

days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work

and one begins to consider what they have made us

become, how much they have taken away from us, what

this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace,

we have learnt that our personality

is fragile,

that it is

much more in danger than our life; and the old wise

ones, instead of warning us "remember that you must

die", would have done much better to remind us of

this greater danger that threatens us. If from inside

the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free

men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer

in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.

When one works, one suffers and there is no time

to think: our homes are less than a memory. But

here the time is ours: from bunk to bunk, despite the

prohibition, we exchange visits and we talk and we

talk. The wooden hut, crammed with suffering human-

ity, is full of words, memories and of another pain.

"Heimweh" the Germans call this pain; it is a beautiful

word, it means "

longing for one's home."

We know where we come from; the memories of

If This is a Man

the world outside crowd our sleeping and our waking

hours, we become aware, with amazement, that we

have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in

front of us painfully clear.

But where we are going we do not know. Will

we perhaps be able to survive the illnesses and escape the selections, perhaps even

resist the work and hunger which wear us out but then, afterwards? Here, momen-

tarily far away from the curses and the blows, we can

re-enter into ourselves and meditate, and then it becomes

clear that we will not return. We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children

leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves,

have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards

to our silent labours, killed in our spirit long before our

anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed

on his

skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made

of man in Auschwitz.

Our Nights

After twenty days of Ka-Be, when my wound was

practically healed, I was discharged to my great displeasure.

The ceremony is simple, but implies a painful and

dangerous period of readjustment. All who have no

special contacts are not returned to their former Block

and Kommando on leaving Ka-Be, but are enrolled, on the basis of criteria wholly unknown to me, in any other hut and given any kind of work. Moreover,

they leave Ka-Be naked; they are given "new" clothes

and shoes (I

mean not those left behind at their entry)

which need to be adapted with speed and diligence to their own

persons, which implies effort and expense.

They have to worry about acquiring a new spoon and

knife as at the beginning. An finally and this is the gravest aspect they

find themselves inserted in

an unknown environment, among hostile companions never seen before, with leaders whose characters they do not know and against whom it is consequently difficult to guard themselves.

If This is a Man

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: of hammering in a nail above his bunk

from which to hang up his shoes; of concluding tacit

pacts of non-aggression with neighbours; of understand-

ing and accepting the customs and laws of a single

Kommando, a single Block. By virtue of this work,

one manages to gain a certain equilibrium after a few

weeks, a certain degree of security in face of the

unforeseen; one has made oneself a nest, the trauma

of the transplantation

is over.

But the man who leaves Ka-Be, naked and almost

always insufficiently cured, feels himself ejected into

the dark and cold of sidereal space.

His trousers fall

down, his shoes hurt him, his shirt has no buttons. He

searches for a human contact and only finds backs

turned on him. He is as helpless

and vulnerable as

a new-born baby, but the following morning he will

still have to march to work.

It is in these conditions that I find myself when the

nurse entrusts me, after various administrative rites, to

the care of the Blockaltester of Block 45. But at

once a thought fills me with joy: I am in luck, this is

Alberto's Block.

Alberto is my best friend. He is only twenty-two, two years younger than me, but none of us Italians

have shown an equal capacity for adaptation. Alberto

entered the Lager with his head high, and lives in

here unscathed and uncorrupted.

He understood before

any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself

no indulgences, he lost no time complaining and com-

miserating with himself and with others, but entered the

Our Nights

battle from the beginning. He has the advantage of

intelligence and intuition: he reasons correctly, often

he does not even reason but is equally right. He

understands everything at once: he only knows a little

French but understands whatever the Germans and Poles

tell him. He replies

in Italian and with gestures, he

makes himself understood and at once wins sympathy. He

fights for his life but still remains everybody's

friend. He "knows" whom to corrupt,

whom to avoid, whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist.

Yet (and it is for this virtue of his that his memory is still dear and close to me) he himself did not become

corrupt. I always saw, and still see in him, the rare

figure of the strong yet peace-loving man against whom the weapons of night are blunted.

But I did not manage to gain permission to sleep in

a bunk with him, and not even Alberto succeeded,

although by now he enjoyed a certain popularity in

Block 45. It is a pity,

because to have a bed-companion whom one can trust, or at least with whom one can reach an understanding, is an inestimable advantage;

and besides, it is winter now and the nights are long, and since we are forced to exchange sweats, smells and

warmth with someone under the same blanket, and in

a width little more than two feet, it is quite desirable

that he be a friend.

In the winter the nights are long and we are allowed

a considerable interval of time to sleep.

The tumult of the Block dies down; the distribution

of the evening ration ended over an hour ago, and only

a few stubborn people continue to scrape the by-now

shining bottom of the bowl, turning it around with care

under the lamp, frowning with attention. Engineer

Kardos moves around the bunks, tending wounded feet

and suppurating corns. This

is his trade : there is no one

If This is a Man

who will not willingly renounce a slice of bread to

soothe the torment of those numbed sores which bleed

at every step all day. And so, in this manner, honestly,

engineer Kardos solves the problem of living. From the outside door, secretly and looking around

cautiously, the story-teller comes in. He is seated on Wachsmann's bunk and at once gathers around him a

small, attentive, silent crowd. He chants an interminable Yiddish

rhapsody, always the same one, in rhymed

quatrains, of a resigned and penetrating melancholy

(but perhaps I only remember it so because of the time

and the place that

I heard it?);

from the few words

that I understand, it must be a song that he composed

himself, in which he has enclosed all the life of the

Lager in minute detail. Some are generous and give the

story-teller a pinch of tobacco or a needleful of

thread; others listen intently but give nothing.

The bell rings suddenly for the last ceremony of the

day: "Wer hat kaputt die Schuhe?" (who has broken

shoes?), and at once the noise of forty or fifty claimants

to the exchange breaks out as they rush towards the

Tagesraum in desperate haste, well knowing that only the first ten, on the best of hypotheses, will be satisfied.

Then there is quiet.

The light goes out a first time

for a few seconds to warn the tailors to put away the

precious needle and thread; then the bell sounds in the

distance, the night-guard installs himself, and all the

lights are turned out definitively. There is nothing to do but to undress and go to bed.

I do not know who my neighbour is; I am not even sure that it is always the same person because I have

never seen his face except

for a few seconds amidst

the uproar of the reveille, so that I know his back and his feet much better than his face. He does not work

Our Nights

in my Kommando and only comes into the bunk at curfew time; he wraps himself in the blanket, pushes me aside with a blow from his bony hips, turns his back on me and at once begins to snore. Back against back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw

mattress: with the base of my back I exercise a progressive pressure against his back; then I turn around and try to push with my kness; I take hold of his ankles and

try to place them a little further over so as not to

have his feet next to my face. But is is all in vain: he is much heavier than me and seems turned to stone in

his sleep.

So I adapt myself to lie like this, forced into immo-

bility, half-lying on the wooden edge. Nevertheless I am

so tired and stunned that I, too, soon fall asleep, and

I seem to be sleeping on the tracks of a railroad.

The train is about to arrive: one can hear the engine

panting, it is my neighbour. I am not yet so asleep as

not to be aware of the double nature of the engine. It

is, in fact, the very engine which towed the wagons we

had to unload in Buna today. I recognise it by the

fact that even now, as when it passed close by us, I feel

the heat it radiates from its black side. It is puffing,

it is ever nearer, it is on the point of running over me,

but instead it never arrives. My sleep is very light, it is a veil, if I want I can tear it. I will do it, I want

to tear it, so that I can get off the railway track. Now I have done it and now I am awake: but not really

awake, only a little more, one step higher on the ladder

between the unconscious and the conscious. I have my

eyes closed and I do not want to open them lest my

sleep escape me, but I can register noises: I am sure

this distant whistle is real, it does not come from an

engine in a dream, it can be heard objectively. It is

the whistle of the small-gauge track, it comes from

If This is a Man

the yard where they work at night as well. A long, firm note, then another one a semitone lower, then again the

first, but short and cut off. This whistle is an

important thing and in some ways essential: we have heard it so often associated with the

suffering of the

work and the camp that it has become a symbol and

immediately evokes an image like certain music or smells.

This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, my neighbour whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake as he is

stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our

hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical,

inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot

help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In

fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak con-

fusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away without a word.

A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain

barely remembered pains of one's early infancy. It is

pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children

cry; and it is better for

me to swim once again up to the surface, but this time I

deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me of

being effectively awake.

My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and

although awake I am still full of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, but that

I have dreamed it not once but many times since I

Our Nights

arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment

or details. I am now quite awake and I remember

that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided

to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and

the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene

of the unlistened-to story?

While I meditate on this, I try to profit from the

interval of wakefulness to shake off the painful remnants

of the preceding sleep, so as not to compromise the

quality of the next dream. I crouch in the dark, I look

around and I listen.

One can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring; some groan and speak. Many lick their lips and

move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating; this

is also a collective dream. It is a pitiless dream which

the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known.

You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands,

distinct and concrete, you are aware of its rich and

striking smell; someone in the dream even holds it up

to your lips, but every time a different circumstance,

intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then

the dream dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but

it re-forms itself immediately after and begins again,

similar, yet changed; and this without pause, for all

for us, every night and for the whole of our

sleep.

It must be later than 11 p.m. because the movement

to and from the bucket next to the night-guard is already

intense. It is an obscene torment and an indelible

shame: every two or three hours we have to get up

to discharge ourselves of the great dose of

water which

during the day we are forced to absorb in the form

of soup in

order to satisfy our hunger: that same

If This is a Man

water which in the evenings swells our ankles and the

hollows of our eyes, conferring on all physiognomies a likeness of deformation, and whose elimination imposes an enervating toil on our kidneys.

It is not merely a question of a procession to a

bucket; it is the rule that the last user of the bucket

goes and empties it in the latrines; it is also the rule

that at night one must not leave the hut except in night

uniform (shirt

and pants), giving one's number to the

guard. It is easily foreseeable that the night-guard will

try to exempt his friends, his co-nationals and the

Prominents from this duty. Add to this that the old

members of the camp have refined their senses to such

a degree that, while still in their bunks, they are

miraculously able to distinguish if the level is at a

dangerous point, purely on the basis of the sound that

the sides of the bucket make with the result that they almost always manage to avoid emptying it. So the

candidates for the bucket service are a fairly limited

number in each hut, while the total volume to eliminate

is at least 40 gallons, which means that the bucket has to

be emptied about twenty times.

In short, the risk which hangs over us, the inex-

perienced and non-privileged, when we are driven by

necessity to the bucket every night is quite serious. The

night-guard unexpectedly jumps from his corner and

seizes us, scribbles down our number, hands us a pair of wooden shoes and the bucket and drives us out into

the middle of the snow, shivering and sleepy. It is our

task to shuffle to the latrine with the bucket which

knocks against our bare calves, disgustingly warm; it

is full beyond all reasonable limit, and inevitably with

the shaking some of the content overflows on our feet,

so that however repugnant this duty may be, it is always

Our Nights

preferable that we, and not our neighbour, be ordered

to do it.

So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and

the dream of the story are woven into a texture of more

indistinct images: the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear and promiscuity, turns at night-time into shapeless nightmares of unheard-

of violence, which in free life would only occur during a

fever. One wakes up at every moment, frozen with

terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of

an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a

language not understood. The procession to the bucket

and the thud of bare heels on the wooden floor turns

into another symbolic procession : it is us again, grey and

identical, small as ants, yet so huge as to reach up to

the stars, bound one against the other, countless, covering the

plain as far as the horizon; sometimes melting

into a single substance, a sorrowful turmoil in which we

all feel ourselves trapped

and suffocated; sometimes

marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with

a blinding giddiness and a sea of nausea rising from

the praecordia to the gullet; until hunger or cold or

the fullness of our bladders turn our dreams into their

customary forms. We try in vain, when the nightmare itself or the discomforts wake us, to extricate the various

elements and drive them back, separately, out of the field

of our present attention, so as to defend our sleep

from

their intrusion: but as soon as we close our eyes, once

again we feel our brain start up, beyond our control; it knocks and hums, incapable of rest, it fabricates

phantasms and terrible symbols, and without rest projects and shapes their images, as a grey fog, on to the screen of

our dreams.

But for the whole duration of the night, cutting

If This is a Man

across the alternating sleep, waking and nightmares, the

expectancy and terror of the moment of the reveille

keeps watch. By means of that mysterious faculty of

which many are aware, even without watches we are

able to calculate the moment with close accuracy. At the

hour of the reveille, which varies from season to season

but always falls a fair time before dawn, the camp bell

rings for a long time, and the night-guard in every hut goes off duty; he switches on the light gets up, stretches himself and pronounces the daily condemnation :

"Aujstehen? or more often in Polish: "Wstavac"

Very few sleep on till the Wstavac\ it is a moment

of too acute pain

for even the deepest sleep

not to

dissolve as it approaches. The night guard knows it

and for this reason does not utter it in a tone of command,

but with the quiet

and subdued voice of one who knows

that the announcement will find all ears waiting, and will

be heard and obeyed. Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom

of every soul. "Get up": the illusory barrier of the

warm blankets, the thin armour of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around

us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to

insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins like every 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.

At the Wstavac the hurricane starts up again. The

entire hut enters without transition into frantic activity:

Our Nights

everybody climbs up and down, remakes his bed and tries

at the same time to dress himself in a manner so as

to leave none of his objects unguarded; the air is filled

with so much dust as to become opaque; the quickest

ones elbow their way through the crowd to go to the

washroom and latrine before the queue begins. The

hut-sweepers at once come onto the scene and drive

everyone out, hitting and shouting at them.

When I have remade my bed and am dressed, I climb

down on to the floor and put on my shoes. The sores

on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.

The Work

Before Resnyk came, I slept with a Pole whose name

no one knew; he was gentle and silent, with two old

sores on his shin-bones, and during the night gave out

a squalid smell of illness; he also had a weak bladder,

and so woke up and woke me up eight or ten times

a night.

One night he left his gloves in my care and entered

the hospital.

For half an hour I hoped that the quarter- master would forget that I was the sole occupant of my bunk, but when the curfew bell had already sounded, the bed trembled and a long, red-haired fellow, with the

number of the French of Drancy, climbed up beside me.

To have a bed companion of tall stature is a

misfortune and means losing hours of sleep; I always have tall companions as

I am small and two tall ones

cannot sleep together.

But it could at once be seen

that Resnyk, despite everything, was not a bad companion. He spoke little and courteously, he was clean, he did

not snore, did not get up more than two or three times

a night and always with great delicacy. In the morning

If This is a Man

he offered to make the bed (this

is a complicated

and difficult operation,

and also carries a notable res-

ponsibility, as those who remake the bed badly, the

"schlechte Bettenbauer" are diligently punished) and

did it quickly and well; so that I experienced a certain

fleeting pleasure later in the roll-call square on seeing

that he had been assigned to my Kommando.

On the march to work, limping in our large wooden

shoes on the icy snow, we exchanged a few words, and

I found out that Resnyk is Polish; he lived twenty years

at Paris but speaks an incredible French. He is thirty, but like all of us, could be taken for seventeen or fifty.

He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but

it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of

stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing

necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place

in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine,

and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories

in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a

new Bible?

When we arrived at the yard they took us to the

Eisenrohreplatz, which is the levelling where they unload

the iron pipes,

and then the normal things of every day

began. The Kapo made a second roll-call, briefly made

note of the new acquisition and arranged with the civilian

Meister about the day's work. He then entrusted us to

the Vorarbeiter and went to sleep

in the tool cabin,

next to the stove; he is not a Kapo who makes trouble, for he is not a Jew and so has no fear of losing his

post. The Vorarbeiter distributed the iron levers among

us and the jacks among his friends. The usual little

struggle took place to get the lightest levers, and today

it went badly for me: mine is the twisted one which

The Work

weighs perhaps thirty-five pounds; I know that even

if I only had to use it without any weight on it, I would

be dead of exhaustion in half an hour.

Then we left, each with his own lever, limping in

the melting snow. At every step a little snow and mud

stuck to the wooden soles of our shoes, until one walked

unsteadily on two heavy, formless masses of which it

was impossible to free oneself; then, when one suddenly came unstuck, it felt as if one leg was a hand shorter

than the other.

Today we have to unload an enormous, cast-iron

cylinder from the wagon: I think it is a synthesis tube

and will weigh several tons. This is better for us, as it

is notoriously less exhausting to work with big loads

than with small ones; in fact, the work is better subdi-

vided, and we are given adequate tools. However, it is

dangerous, one dare not let one's attention wander, a

moment's oversight is sufficient to find oneself crushed.

Meister Nogalla, the Polish superintendent, rigid,

serious and taciturn, supervised in person the unloading

operation. Now the cylinder lies on the ground and

Meister Nogalla says: "Bohlen holen?

Our hearts sink. It means "carry the sleepers" in

order to build the path in the soft mud on which the

cylinder will be pushed by lever into the factory. But

the wooden sleepers

are mortized in the ground and

weigh about 175 pounds; they are more or less at the

limits of our strength. The more robust of us, working in

pairs, are able to carry sleepers

for a few hours; for

me it is a torture, the load maims my shoulder-bone.

After the first journey I am deaf and almost blind from

the effort, and I would stoop to any baseness to avoid

the second journey.

I will try and place myself with Resnyk; he seems

a good worker and being taller will support the greater

If This is a Man

part of the weight. I know that it is in the natural

order of events that Resnyk refuse me with disdain and form a

pair with another more robust individual; then

I will ask to go to the latrine and I will remain there

as long as possible, and afterwards I will try to hide, with the

certainty of being immediately traced, mocked

at and hit; but anything is better than this work.

Instead Resnyk accepts, and even more, lifts up the

sleeper by himself and rests it on my right shoulder with

care; then he lifts up the other end, stoops to place it

on his left shoulder and we leave.

The sleeper is coated with snow and mud; at every

step it knocks against my ear and the snow slides down

my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of what a

person is theoretically able to support: my knees bend,

my shoulder aches as if pressed in a vice, my equilibrium is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked away by the greedy mud, by this omnipresent Polish mud whose

monotonous horror fills our days. I bite deeply into my lips; 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 when we are under a

load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with

exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses.

When we reach the cylinder we unload the sleeper on the ground and I remain stiff, with empty eyes, open mouth and hanging arms, sunk in the ephemeral and

negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain. In a twilight

of exhaustion I wait for the push which will force me to begin work again, and I try to take advantage of

every second of waiting to recuperate some energy. But the push never comes : Resnyk touches my elbow,

we return as slowly as possible to the sleepers. There

The Work

the others are wandering around in pairs, all

trying to

delay as long as possible before submitting to the load.

"Allans, petit, attrape." This sleeper is dry and a

little lighter,

but at the end of the second journey I go to the Vorarbeiter and ask to go the latrine.

We have the advantage that our latrine is rather far; this permits us, once a day, a slightly longer absence

than normal. Moreover, as it is also forbidden to go there alone, Wachsmann, the weakest and most clumsy of the Kommando, has been invested with the duty of

Scheissbegleiter, "toilet companion"; by virtue of

this appointment, Wachsmann is responsible for any

hypothetical ( laughable hypothesis!) attempt to

escape,

and more realistically,

for every delay.

As my request was accepted, I leave in the mud

and the grey snow among the scraps of metal, escorted

by the small Wachsmann. I never manage to reach

an understanding with him, as we have no language in common; but his comrades tell me that he is a rabbi, in fact a Melamed, a person learned in the Torah,

and even more, in his own village in Galicia, was famed

as a healer and a thaumaturge. Nor am I far from

believing it when I think that this thin, fragile and

soft figure has managed to work for two years without

falling ill and without dying, but on the contrary is

lit up by an amazing vitality in actions and words

and spends long evenings discussing Talmudic questions

incomprehensibly in Yiddish and Hebrew with Mendi,

who is a modernist rabbi.

The latrine is an oasis of peace. It is a provisional latrine which the Germans have not yet provided with

the customary wooden partitions to separate the various

divisions: "Nur fur Englunder" "Nur fur Polen" "Nur

fur Ukrainische Frauen" and so on, with, a little apart

"Nur fur Hdftlinge." Inside, shoulder by shoulder, sit

If This is a Man

four hollow-faced Haftlinge; a bearded old Russian

worker with the blue stripe

OST on his left arm; a

Polish boy, with a large white P on his back and chest;

an English P.o.W., with his face splendidly shaven and

rosy and his khaki uniform neat, ironed and clean,

except for a large KG (Kriegsgefangener) on his back.

A fifth Haftling stands at the door patiently and

monotonously asking every civilian who enters loosening his belt: "Etes-vous franfais?"

When I return to work the lorries with the rations

can be seen passing, which means it is ten o' clock.

It is already a respectable hour, as the midday pause

can be almost glimpsed in the fog of the remote future,

allowing us to derive a little more strength from the

expectation.

I do another two or three trips

with Resnyk, searching

attentively, even going to distant piles, to find

lighter

sleepers, but by now all the best ones have already

been carried and only the other ones remain, repellent, with

sharp corners, heavy with mud and ice, with metal

plates nailed in to fix the rails.

When Franz comes to call Wachsmann to go and

claim the ration, it means that it is already eleven o'clock

and the morning has almost finished no one thinks

about the afternoon. Then the corvee returns at 11.30,

and the standard interrogation begins: how much soup

today, what quality, if we were given it from the top or the bottom of the vat; I force myself not to ask

these questions,

but I cannot help listening eagerly to

the replies, sniffing

at the smoke carried by the wind

from the kitchen.

And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and

impersonal like a sign from heaven, the midday siren

explodes, granting a brief

respite to our anonymous

and concord tiredness and hunger. And the usual things

The Work

happen again: we all run to the hut, and we queue

up with our bowls ready and we all have an animal

hurry to swell our bellies with the warm stew, but no

one wants to be first, as the first person receives the most

liquid ration. As usual, the Kapo mocks and insults

us for our voracity and takes care not to stir the pot, as the bottom belongs notoriously to him. Then comes

the bliss (positive,

from the belly)

of the distension

and warmth of the stomach and of the cabin around

the noisy stove. The smokers, with miserly and reverent

gestures, roll a thin

cigarette, while everybody's clothes,

humid with mud and snow, give out a dense smoke at

the heat of the stove, with the smell of a kennel or of

a sheepfold.

A tacit convention ordains that no one speak : within a minute everyone is sleeping, jammed elbow against

elbow, falling suddenly forwards and recovering with a

stiffening of the back. Behind the barely-closed eyelids,

dreams break out violently, the usual dreams. To be at

home, in a wonderfully hot bath. To be at home,

seated at a table. To be at home, and tell the story of this hopeless

work of ours, of this never-ending

hunger, of the slave's way of sleeping.

Then, in the bosom of the vapours of our torpid

digestions, a

painful nucleus condenses, and

jars us and

grows until it crosses the threshold of the consciousness

and takes away the joy of sleep. "Ej wtrd bald em Vhr

sem"\ it is almost one o'clock. Like a rapid, voracious

cancer, it kills our sleep and oppresses us with a

foreboding anguish: we listen to the wind blowing

outside, and to the light rustle of the snow against the

window, "es wird schnell ein Uhr sein" While everyone

clings on to his sleep, so as not to allow it to abandon

him, all senses are taut with the horror of the signal

If This is a Man

which is about to come, which is outside the door,

which is here....

Here it is. A thud at the window : Meister Nogalla has thrown a snowball against the window pane, and

now stands stiffly outside, holding his watch with its

face turned towards us. The Kapo gets up, stretches

himself, and says quietly as one who does not doubt

that he will be obeyed: "Alles heraus? all out.

Oh, if one could only cry! Oh, if one could only

affront the wind as we once used to, on equal terms, and not as we do here, like cringing dogs.

We are outside and everyone picks up his lever. Resnyk drops his head between his shoulders, pulls his

beret over his ears and lifts his face up to the low grey

sky where the inexorable snow whirls around: "Si j'avey une chien, je ne le chasse pas dehors."

A Good Day

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted

in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human

substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and many think and talk about its nature. But for us

the question is simpler.

Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach

the spring.

At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in the roll-call square for the time to leave

for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our

clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless

bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at

the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder

season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every

day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little

warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the

cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less.

Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time

from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white

If This is a Man

and distant, and only warms the skin, but when it

dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our

colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth

through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.

"Das Schlimmste ist voruber? said Ziegler, turning his pointed shoulders to the sun : the worst is over. Next

to us there is a group of Greeks, those admirable and

terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving, wise,

ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless

opponents in the struggle for life; those Greeks who have conquered in the kitchens and in the yards, and

whom even the Germans respect

and the Poles fear.

They are in their third year of camp, and nobody knows

better than them what the camp means. They now stand

closely in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one

of their interminable chants.

Felicio the Greek knows me. "L'annee prochaine a la maison\" he shouts at me, and adds: "a la matson

par la Cheminee\" Felicio has been at Birkenau. And

they continue to sing and beat their feet in time and

grow drunk on songs. When we

finally left by the main entrance of the

camp, the sun was quite high and the sky serene.

At midday one could see the mountains; to the west, the

steeple of Auschwitz

(a steeple here!), and all

around the barrage balloons. The smoke from the

Buna lay still in the cold air, and a row of low hills

could be seen, green with forests : and our hearts tighten because we all know that Birkenau is there, that our women finished there, and that soon we too will finish

there; but we are not used to seeing it. For the first time we are aware that on both sides

of the road, even here, the meadows are green; because, without a sun, a meadow is as if it were not green.

A Good Day

The Buna is not: the Buna is desperately and

essentially opaque and grey. This huge entanglement of

iron, concrete, mud and smoke is the negation of beauty. Its roads and buildings are named like us, by numbers

or letters, or by weird and sinister names. Within its

bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is

impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and

petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and

slaves and the former are more alive than the latter.

The Buna is as large as a city; besides the managers and German technicians, forty thousand foreigners work

there, and fifteen to twenty languages are spoken. All

the foreigners live in different Lagers which surround

the Buna: the Lager of the English prisoners-of-war,

the Lager of the Ukrainian women, the Lager of the

French volunteers, and others we do not know. Our

Lager (Judenlager, Vernichtungslager^ Kazetf) by itself

provides ten thousand workers who come from all the

nations of Europe. We are the slaves of the slaves,

whom all can give orders to, and our name is the

number which we carry tattooed on our arm and sewn

on our jacket.

The Carbide Tower, which rises in the middle of

Buna and whose top

is rarely visible in the fog, was

built by us. Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula,

cegli, kamenny, mattom, teglak, and they were cemented

by hate; hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel,

and it is this that we call it: Babelturm, Bobelturm;

and in it we hate the insane dream of grandeur of our

masters, their contempt for God and men, for us men.

And today just as in the old fable, we all feel, and

the Germans themselves feel, that a curse not

trascendent and divine, but inherent and historical

If This is a Man

hangs over the insolent building based on the confusion

of languages and erected in defiance of heaven like a

stone oath.

As will be told, the Buna factory, on which the

Germans were busy for four years and for which

countless of us suffered and died, never produced a

pound of synthetic rubber.

But today the eternal puddles, on which a rainbow

veil of petroleum trembles, reflect the serene sun. Pipes,

rails, boilers, still cold from the freezing of the night, are

dripping with dew. The earth dug up from the

pits, the

piles of coal, the blocks of concrete, exhale

in light vapours the humidity of the winter.

Today is a good day. We look around like blind people who have recovered their sight, and we look

at each other. We have never seen each other in

sunlight: someone smiles. If it was not for the hunger! For human nature is such that grief and pain even

simultaneosly suffered do not add up as a whole

in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the

greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is

providential and is our means of surviving in the camp.

And this is the reason why so often in free life one

hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is

not a question of a human incapacity for a state of

absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge

of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so

that the single name of the major cause is given to

all its causes, which are composite and set out in an

order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed

to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a

whole series of others.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the

winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we

A Good Day

became aware of our hunger; and repeating the same

error, we now say: "If it was not for the hunger!..." But how could one imagine not being hungry? The

Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger. On the other side of the road a steam-shovel is

working. Its mouth, hanging from its cables, opens wide its steel jaws, balances a moment as if uncertain in its choice, then rushes upon the soft, clayey soil and

snaps it up voraciously, while a satisfied snort of thick white smoke rises from the control cabin. Then it

rises, turns half around, vomits backwards its mouthful

and begins again.

Leaning on our shovels, we stop to watch, fascinated. At every bite of its mouth our mouths also open, our Adam's

apples dance up and down, wretchedly visible under the flaccid skin. We are unable to tear ourselves away from the sight of the steam-shovel's meal.

Sigi is seventeen years old and is hungrier than

everybody, although he is given a little soup every

evening by his probably not disinterested protector. He had begun to speak of his home in Vienna and of his

mother, but then he slipped on to the subject of food

and now he talks endlessly about some marriage luncheon and remembers with genuine regret that he failed to

finish his third plate of bean soup. And everyone

tells him to keep quiet, but within ten minutes Bela

is describing his Hungarian countryside and the fields

of maize and a recipe

to make meat-pies with corncobs

and lard and spices and... and he is cursed, sworn at,

and a third one begins to describe....

How weak our flesh is! I am perfectly well aware

how vain these fantasies of hunger are, but dancing before my eyes I see the spaghetti which we had just cooked, Vanda, Luciana, Franco and I, at the sorting-

camp when we suddenly heard the news that we would

If This is a Man

leave for here the following day; and we were eating it

(it was so good, yellow, filling), and we stopped,

fools, stupid as we were if we had only known!

And if it happened again.... Absurd. If there is one

thing sure in this world it is certainly this: that it will

not happen to us a second time.

Fischer, the newest arrival, pulls out of his pocket

a bundle, tied together with the painstaking exactitude

of the Hungarians, and inside there is a half-ration of

bread: half the bread of this morning. It is notorious

that only the High Numbers keep their bread in their

pockets; none of us old ones are able to preserve our

bread for an hour. Various theories circulate to justify

this incapacity

of ours: bread eaten a little at a time is

not wholly assimilated; the nervous tension needed to

preserve the bread without touching it when one is

hungry is in the highest degree harmful and debilitating;

bread which is turning stale soon loses its alimentary

value, so that the sooner it is eaten, the more nutritious

it is; Alberto says that hunger and bread in one's pocket are terms of opposite sign which automatically cancel

each other out and cannot exist in the same individual;

and the majority affirm justly that, in the end, one's

stomach is the securest safe against thefts and extortions.

"Moi, on m'a jamais vole mon pain!" David snarls,

hitting his concave stomach: but he is unable to take

his eyes off Fischer who chews slowly and methodically,

"lucky" enough to still have half-a-ration at ten in the

morning: "Sacre veinard, val"

But it is not only because of the sun that today is a

happy day: at midday a surprise awaits us. Besides

the normal morning ration, we discover in the hut a

wonderful pot

of over eleven gallons,

one of those from

A Good Day

the Factory Kitchen, almost full. Templet looks at us,

triumphant; this "organization" is his work.

Templer is the official organizer of the Kommando :

he has an astonishing nose for the soup of civilians, like

bees for flowers. Our Kapo, who is not a bad Kapo, leaves him a free hand, and with reason: Templer slinks

off, following imperceptible tracks like a bloodhound,

and returns with the priceless

news that the Methanol

Polish workers, one mile from here, have abandoned

ten gallons of soup that tasted rancid, or that a wagon- load of

turnips is to be found unguarded on the siding

next to the Factory Kitchen.

Today there are ninety pints and we are fifteen,

Kapo and Vorarbeiter included. This means six pints

each; we will have two at midday as well as the normal

ration, and will come back to the hut in turns for the

other four during the afternoon, besides being granted

an extra five minutes' suspension

of work to fill

ourselves up.

What more could one want? Even our work seems

light, with the prospect of four hot, dense pints waiting

for us in the hut. The Kapo comes to us periodically and calls: "Wer hat noch zu jressen!" He does not

say it from derision or to sneer, but because this way of eating on our feet, furiously, burning our mouths and

throats, without time to breathe, really is "fressen," the

way of eating of animals, and certainly not "ess en," the

human way of eating, seated in front of a table>

religiously. "Fressen" is exactly the word, and is used

currently among us.

Meister Nogalla watches and closes an eye at our

absences from work. Meister Nogalla also has a hungry

look about him, and if it was not for the social

conventions, perhaps he would not despise a couple

of pints

of our warm broth.

If This is a Man

Templer's turn comes. By plebiscitary consensus,

he has been allowed ten pints,

taken from the bottom

of the pot.

For Templer is not only a good organizer, but an exceptional soup-eater, and is uniquely able to

empty his bowels at his own desire and in anticipation of a large meal, which contributes to his amazing gastric

capacity.

Of this gift of his, he is justly proud, and everybody, even Meister Nogalla, knows about it. Accompanied

by the gratitude of all, Templer the benefactor enters

the latrine for a few moments and comes out beaming and ready, and amidst the general benevolence prepares to enjoy the fruits of his work:

"Du, Templer, hast du Platz genug fur die Suppe

gemacht?" At sunset, the siren of the Feterabend sounds, the

end of work; and as we are all satiated, at least for

a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of

our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner

of free men.

This Side of Good

and Evil

We had an incorrigible tendency to see a symbol and

a sign in every event. For seventy days we had been

waiting for the Waschetauschen, the ceremony of the

change of underclothes, and a rumour circulated persis-

tently that the change of washing had not taken place because, as the front had moved forward, the Germans

were unable to gather together new transport at Auschwitz, and "therefore" the liberation was near. And equally, the

opposite interpretation circulated: that the delay in

the change was a sure sign of an approaching integral

liquidation of the camp. Instead the change took place, and as usual, the directors of the Lager took every care to

make it occur unexpectedly and at the same time in all the huts.

It has to be realized that cloth is lacking in the

Lager and is precious; and that our only way of acquiring a rag to blow our noses, or a pad for our shoes, is

precisely that of cutting off the tail of a shirt at the

time of the exchange. If the shirt has long sleeves,

If This is a Man

one cuts the sleeves; if not, one has to make do with

a square from the bottom, or by unstitching one of the

many patches. But in all cases a certain time is needed

to get hold of needle and thread and to carry out

the operation

with some skill, so as not to leave the

damage too obvious at the time of handing it in. The

dirty, tattered washing is passed on, thrown together, to the tailor's workshop in the camp, where it is

summarily pieced up, sent to the steam disinfection (not

washed!) and is then re-distributed; hence the need to

make the exchanges as unexpected as possibile, so as

to save the soiled washing from the above mutilations.

But, as always happens, it was not possible to prevent a cunning glance piercing through

the canvas of the

cart which was leaving after the disinfection, so that

within a few minutes the camp knew of the imminence

of a Waschetauschen, and in addition, that this time there

were new shirts from a convoy of Hungarians which

had arrived three days ago. The news had immediate

repercussions. All who

illegally possessed second shirts, stolen or organised,

or even honestly bought with bread as a protection against

the cold or to invest capital

in a moment of prosperity,

immediately rushed to the Exchange Market, hoping to arrive in time to barter their reserve shirts for food

products before the flood of new shirts, or the certainty of their arrival, irreparably devaluated the price

of the

article.

The Market is always very active. Although every

exchange (in fact, every form of possession) is explicitly

forbidden, and although frequent swoops of Kapos or

Blockalteste send merchants, customers and the curious

periodically flying, nevertheless, the northeast corner of

the Lager (significantly the corner furthest from the SS

huts) is permanently occupied by a tumultuous throng,

This Side of Good and Evil

in the open during the summer, in a wash-room during the winter, as soon as the squads return from work.

Here scores of prisoners driven desperate by hunger

prowl around, with lips half-open and eyes gleaming, lured by a deceptive instinct to where the merchandise

shown makes the gnawing of their stomachs more acute

and their salivation more assiduous. In the best of cases

they possess a miserable half-ration of bread which,

with painful effort, they have saved since the morning,

in the senseless hope of a chance to make an advantageous

bargain with some ingenuous person, unaware of the

prices of the moment. Some of these, with savage patience,

acquire with their half-ration two pints of soup which,

once in their possession, they subject

to a methodical

examination with a view to extracting the few pieces of

potato lying at the bottom; this done, they exchange

it for bread, and the bread for another two pints to

denaturalize, and so on until their nerves are exhausted,

or until some victim, catching them in the act, inflicts

on them a severe lesson, exposing them to public derision.

Of the same kind are those who come to the market

to sell their only shirt; they well know what will happen on the next occasion that the Kapo finds out that they are

bare underneath their jackets. The Kapo will ask them

what they have done with their shirt; it is a purely rhetorical

question, a formality useful only to begin

the game. They will reply that their shirt was stolen

in the wash-room; this reply is equally customary, and

is not expected to be believed; in fact, even the stones

of the Lager know that ninety nine times out of a

hundred whoever has no shirt has sold it because of

hunger, and that in any case one is responsible for

one's shirt because it belongs to the Lager. Then the

Kapo will beat them, they will be issued another shirt,

and sooner or later they will begin again.

If This is a Man

The professional

merchants stand in the market, each

one in his normal corner; first among them come the

Greeks, as immobile and silent as sphinxes, squatting

on the ground behind their bowls of thick soup,

the

fruits of their labour, of their co-operation and of their

national solidarity. The Greeks have been reduced to

very few by now, but they have made a contribution

of the first importance to the physiognomy

of the camp and to the international slang in circulation. Everyone

knows that "caravana" is the bowl, and that "la comedera

es buena" means that the soup is good; the word that

expresses the generic

idea of theft is "klepsiklepsF of

obvious Greek origin. These few survivors from the

Jewish colony of Salonica, with their two languages,

Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities are

the repositories

of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom,

in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean

civilizations blend together. That this wisdom was

transformed in the camp into the systematic and scientific

practice of theft and seizure of positions and

the monopoly

of the bargaining Market, should not let one forget

that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing

consciousness of the survival of at least a potential

human dignity made of the Greeks the most coherent

national nucleus in Lager, and in this respect, the most

civilized.

At the Market you can find specialists in kitchen

thefts, their jackets swollen with strange bulges. While

there is a virtually stable price for soup (half

a ration

of bread for two pints),

the quotations for

turnips,

carrots, potatoes are extremely variable and depend

greatly, among other factors, on the diligence and the

corruptibility of the guards at the stores.

Mahorca is sold. Mahorca is a third-rate tobacco,

crude and wooden, which is officially on sale at the

This Side of Good and Evil

canteen in one and a half ounce packets,

in exchange

for the prize-coupons

that the Buna ought to distribute

to the best workers. Such a distribution occurs irregularly,

with great parsimony and open injustice, so that the

greatest number of the coupons end up, either legitimately

or through abuse of authority, in the hands of the

Kapos and of the Prominents, nevertheless the prize-

coupons still circulate on the market in the form of

money, and their value changes in strict obedience to

the laws of classical economics.

There have been periods

in which the prize-coupon

was worth one ration of bread, then one and a quarter,

even one and a third; one day it was quoted at one

and a half ration, but then the supply of Mahorca to

the canteen failed, so that, lacking a coverage, the

money collapsed at once to a quarter of a ration. Another

boom period occurred for a singular reason : the arrival of

a fresh contingent of robust Polish girls in

place of the

old inmates of the Frauenblock. In fact, as the prize-

coupon is valid for entry to the Frauenblock (for

the

criminals and the politicals;

not for the Jews, who on

the other hand, do not feel affected by this restriction),

those interested actively and rapidly cornered the market:

hence the revaluation, which, in any case, did not last

long.

Among the ordinary Haftlinge there are not many who search for Mahorca to smoke it personally; for

the most part it leaves the camp and ends

in the hands

of the civilian workers of the Buna. The traffic is an

instance of a kind of "kombinacja" frequently practised:

the Haftling, somehow saving a ration of bread, invests

it in Mahorca; he cautiously gets in touch with a civilian

addict who acquires the Mahorca, paying in cash with

a portion

of bread greater than that initially invested.

The Haftling eats the surplus, and puts back on the

If This is a Man

market the remaining ration. Speculations of this kind

establish a tie between the internal economy of the

Lager and the economic life of the outside world: the

accidental failure of the distribution of tobacco among the civilian population of Cracow, overcoming the barrier

of barbed wire which segregates us from human society, had an immediate

repercussion in camp, provoking

a notable rise in the quotation of Mahorca, and

consequently of the prize-coupon.

The process outlined above is no more than the

most simple of examples: another more complex one

is the following. The Haftling acquires in exchange for Mahorca or bread, or even obtains as a gift from

a civilian, some abominable, ragged, dirty shred of a

shirt, which must however have three holes suitable to

fit more or less over the head and arms. So long as

it only carries signs of wear, and not of artificially

created mutilations, such an object, at the time of the

Waschetauschen, is valid as a shirt and carries the right of an exchange; at the most, the person who presents it will receive an adequate measure of blows for having

taken so little care of camp clothing.

Consequently, within the Lager, there is no great difference in value between a shirt worthy of the name

and a tattered thing full of patches; the Haftling described

above will have no difficulty

in finding a comrade in

possession of a shirt of commercial value who is unable

to capitalize

on it as he is not in touch with civilian

workers, either because of his place of work, or through difficulties of language or intrinsic incapacity. This latter

will be satisfied with a modest amount of bread for the

exchange, and in fact the next Waschetauschen will

to a certain extent re-establish equilibrium, distributing

good and bad washing in a perfectly casual manner.

But the first Haftling will be able to smuggle the good

This Side of Good and Evil

shirt into Buna and sell it to the original civilian (or to

any other) for four, six, even ten rations of bread. This

high margin of profit is correlative to the gravity of

the risk of leaving camp wearing more than one shirt

or re-entering with none.

There are many variations on this theme. There

are some who do not hesitate to have the gold fillings of their teeth extracted to sell them in Buna for bread

or tobacco. But the most common of cases is that such

traffic takes place through

an intermediary. A "high number," that is, a new arrival, only recently but

sufficiently besotted by hunger and by the extreme tension

of life in the camp, is noticed by a "low number" for

the number of his gold teeth; the "low" offers the "high" three or four rations of bread to be

paid in return for

extraction. If the high number accepts, the low one

pays, carries the gold to Buna, and if in contact with

a civilian of trust, from whom he fears neither denuncia-

tion nor fraudulent dealing, he can make a gain of

ten or even as much as twenty or more rations, which

are paid

to him gradually, one or two a day. It is

worth noting in this respect that contrary to what takes

place in Buna, the maximum total of any transaction

negotiated within the camp is four rations of bread,

because it would be practically impossible

either to make

contracts on credit, or to preserve a larger quantity of

bread from the greed of others or one's own hunger. Traffic with civilians is a characteristic element of the

Arbeitslager, and as we have seen, determines its economic

life. On the other hand, it is a crime, explicitly foreseen

by the camp regulations, and considered equivalent to

"political" crimes; so that it is punished

with particular

severity. The Haftling convicted of "Handel mit

Zivilisten" unless he can rely on powerful influences,

ends up at Gleiwitz III, at Janina or at Heidebreck

If This is a Man

in the coal-mines; which means death from exhaustion

in the course of a few weeks. Moreover, his accomplice, the civilian worker, may also be denounced to the

competent German authority and condemned to pass a

period in

Vernichtungslager, under the same conditions

as us; a period varying, as far as I can see, from a

fortnight to eight months. The workmen who experience this retaliation have their

possessions taken away like

us on their entry, but their personal effects are kept

in a special

store-room. They are not tattooed and they

keep their hair, which makes them easily recognizable, but for the whole duration of the punishment they

are subjected to the same work and the same discipline as us

except, of course, the selections.

They work in separate Kommandos and they have

no contact of any sort with the common Haftlinge. In fact, the Lager is for them a punishment, and if they do

not die of exhaustion or illness they can expect to return

among men; if they could communicate with us, it would

create a breach in the wall which keeps

us dead to

the world, and a ray of light into the mystery which

prevails among free men about our condition. For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us,

no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a

manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time,

in the bosom of the Germanic social organism. One section of the camp itself is in fact set aside

for civilian workers of all nationalities who are compelled to stay there for a longer or shorter period

in expiation

of their illicit relations with Haftlinge. This section is

separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire,

and is called E-Lager, and its guests E-Haftlinge. "E" is

the initial for "Erziehung" which means education.

All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are

based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the

This Side of Good and Evil

Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress them: the very gold of our teeth is their property,

sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or

the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is natural

that they should take care that the gold does not leave

the camp.

But against theft in itself, the direction of the camp

has no prejudice.

The attitude of open connivance by

the SS as regards smuggling in the opposite direction

shows this clearly.

Here things are generally more simple. It is a

question of stealing or receiving any of the various tools,

utensils, materials, products, etc. with which we come in

daily contact in Buna in the course of our work, of

introducing them into the camp in the evening, of

finding a customer and of effecting the exchange for

bread or soup.

This traffic is intense: for certain articles,

although they are necessary for the normal life of the

Lager, this method of theft in Buna is the only and

regular way of provisioning. Typical are the instances

of brooms, paint, electric wire, grease for shoes. The

traffic in this last item will serve as an example.

As we have stated elsewhere, the camp regulations

prescribe the greasing

and polishing

of shoes every

morning, and every Blockaltester is responsible to the

SS for obedience to this order by all the men in his

hut. One would think that each hut would enjoy a

periodic assignment of grease for shoes,

but this is not

so; the mechanism is completely different. It needs to

be stated first that each hut receives an assignment of

soup somewhat higher than that

prescribed for regulation

rations; the extra is divided according to the discretion

of the Blockaltester, who first of all distributes the

gifts to his friends and

proteges, then the recompense

to the hut-sweepers, to the night-guards,

to the lice-

If This is a Man

controllers and to all other prominents and functionaries

in the hut. What is still left over (and every smart Blockdltester makes sure that there is always some over) is used

precisely for these

acquisitions.

The rest is obvious. Those Haftlinge at Buna who have the chance to fill their bowl with grease or

machine-oil (or anything else: any blackish and greasy

substance is considered suitable for the purpose),

their return to the camp in the evening, make a systematic tour of the huts until they find a Blockaltester who has run out of the article and wants a fresh

supply. In

addition, every hut usually has its habitual supplier, who has been allotted a fixed daily recompense on condition that he

provides the grease every time that

the reserve is about to run out.

Every evening, beside the doors of the Tagesrdume, the groups of suppliers stand patiently around; on their

feet for hours and hours in the rain or snow, they discuss excitedly matters relating to the fluctuation of

prices and value of the

prize-coupon. Every now and

again one of them leaves the group, makes a quick visit to the Market, and returns with the latest news.

Besides the articles already described, there are

innumerable others to be found in Buna, which might be useful to the Block or welcomed by the Blockaltester, or might excite the interest or curiosity of the prominents :

light-bulbs, ordinary or shaving-soap, files, pliers, sacks,

nails; methylic alcohol is sold to make drinks; while

petrol is useful for the rudimentary lighters, prodigies of the secret industry of the Lager craftsmen.

In this complex network of thefts and counter-thefts, nourished by the silent hostility between the SS command and the civilian authorities of the Buna, Ka-Be plays a

part of prime importance. Ka-Be is the place of least

resistance, where the regulations can most easily be

This Side of Good and Evil

avoided and the surveillance of the Kapos eluded.

Everyone knows that it is the nurses themselves who

send back on the market, at low prices, the clothes and

shoes of the dead and of the selected who leave naked

for Birkenau; it is the nurses and doctors who export the restricted sulphonamides to Buna, selling them to

civilians for articles of food.

The nurses also make huge profits from the trade

in spoons. The Lager does not provide the new arrivals

with spoons, although the semi-liquid soup cannot be

consumed without them. The spoons are manufactured

in Buna, secretly and in their spare moments, by Haftlinge who work as

specialists in the iron and tin-smith

Kommandos: they are rough and clumsy tools, shaped from

iron-plate worked by hammer, often with a sharp

handle-edge to serve at the same time as a knife to cut

the bread. The manufacturers themselves sell them

directly to the new arrivals: an ordinary spoon is worth

half a ration, a knife-spoon three quarters of a ration

of bread. Now it is a law that although one can enter Ka-Be with one's spoon, one cannot leave with it. At

the moment of release, before the clothes are given, the

healthy patient's spoon is confiscated by the nurses and

placed on sale in the Market. Adding the spoons of

the patients

about to leave to those of the dead and

selected, the nurses receive the gains of the sale of

about fifty spoons every day. On the other hand, the

dismissed patients

are forced to begin work again with

the initial disadvantage of half a ration of bread, set

aside to acquire a new

spoon.

Finally, Ka-Be is the main customer and receiver

of thefts occurring in Buna: of the soup assigned to

Ka-Be, a good forty pints are set aside every day as

the theft-fund to acquire the most varied of goods from

the specialists.

There are those who steal thin rubber

If This is a Man

tubing which is used in Ka-Be for enemas and for

stomach-tubes; others offer coloured pencils and inks,

necessary for Ka-Be's complicated book-keeping system;

and thermometers and glass instruments and chemicals,

which come from the Buna stores in the Haftlinge's

pockets and are used in the infirmary as sanitary

equipment.

And I would not like to be accused of immodesty if I add that it was our idea, mine and Alberto's, to

steal the rolls of graph-paper from the thermographs

of the Desiccation Department, and offer them to the

Medical Chief of Ka-Be with the suggestion that they

be used as paper for pulse-temperature charts.

In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil

direction, is authorized and encouraged by the SS; theft

in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by

the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among

Haftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal gravity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words "good" and "evil", "just" and

"unjust"; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive

on this side of the barbed wire.

The Drowned

and the Saved

What we have so far said and will say concerns the

ambiguous life of the Lager. In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the

bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that

we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state.

To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. 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 pre-eminently a gigantic biological and

social experiment.

Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition,

origin, language, culture and customs are enclosed within

barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life

which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs,

and which is much more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and

If This is a Man

what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the

struggle for life.

We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and

stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution

is taken away, and that the Haftling is consequently

nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the

face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many

social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.

But another fact seems to us worthy of attention:

there comes to light the existence of two particularly

well differentiated categories among men the saved

and the drowned. Other pairs

of opposites (the good

and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and

the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are

considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and

above all they allow for more numerous and complex

intermediary gradations.

This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fail is tied to the destinies of his neighbours; so that it is

exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or

to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin.

Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such

spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the

probabilities of a

shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the

face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite

cushioning effect exercised both

by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes

a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more

civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws

hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a

powerful one too powerful.

100

The Drowned and the Saved

But in the Lager things are different: here the

struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone

is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null

Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to extend a

helping hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him

aside, because it is in no one's interest that there be one

more "mussulman" *

dragging himself to work every

day; and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest

work, a new art which yields him an ounce of bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be

esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from

it an exclusive, personal benefit; he will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: "to he that has, will be

given; to he that has not, will be taken away." In the

Lager, where man is alone and where the struggle for

life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust

law is openly in force, is recognized by all. With the

adaptable, the strong and astute individuals, even the

leaders willingly keep contact, sometimes even friendly

contact, because they hope later to perhaps derive some

benefit. But with the mussulmans, the men in decay, it

is not even worth speaking, because one knows already that they will complain and will speak about what they

used to eat at home. Even less worthwhile is it to make

friends with them, because they have no distinguished

acquaintances in camp, they do not gain any extra

rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos and

1 This word "Muselmann" I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those

doomed to selection.

101

If This is a Man

they know no secret method of organizing. And in any case, one knows that they are only here on a visit, that

in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a

handful of ashes in some near-by field and a crossed-out

number on a register. 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 result of this

pitiless process of natural selection

could be read in the statistics of Lager population movements. At Auschwitz, in 1944, of the old Jewish

prisoners (we will not speak of the others here, as their

condition was different),

"kleine Nummer" low numbers less than 150,000, only a few hundred had survived; not

one was an ordinary Haftling, vegetating in the ordinary

Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There

remained only the doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians,

cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compat- riots of some authority in the camp; or they were

particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals, installed (following an investiture by the SS command, which showed itself in such choices to

possess satanic

knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos, Blockaltester, etc.; or finally, those who, without

fulfilling particular functions, had always succeeded

through their astuteness and energy in successfully

organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advan-

tages and reputation, the indulgence and esteem of the

powerful people in the camp. Whosoever does not

know how to become an "Organisator," "Kombinator," "Prominent"

(the savage eloquence of these words!) soon becomes a "musselman." In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; it does not exist in the

concentration camp.

102

The Drowned and the Saved

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to

carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the

ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the

camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could

one survive more than three months in this way. All the

mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the

same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed

the slope

down to the bottom, like streams that run down

to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic

incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal

incident, they are overcome before they can adapt

themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of

laws and prohibitions until their body is already in

decay, and nothing can save them from selections or

from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their

number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass,

continually renewed and always identical, of non-men

who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead

within them, already too empty to really suffer. One

hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their

death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one

image, I would choose this image which is familiar to

me : an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders

curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace

of a thought is to be seen.

If the drowned have no story, and single and broad

is the path to perdition, the paths to salvation are many,

difficult and improbable. The most travelled road, as we have stated, is the

"Prominenz." "Prominenten" is the name for the camp

103

If This is a Man

officials, from the Haftling-director (Lageraltester) to

the Kapos, the cooks, the nurses, the night-guards, even

to the hut-sweepers

and to the Scheissminister and

Bademeister (superintendents of the latrines and showers). We are more

particularly interested in the Jewish

prominents, because while the others are automatically

invested with offices as they enter the camp in virtue

of their natural supremacy, the Jews have to plot and

struggle hard to gain them.

The Jewish prominents form a sad and notable human

phenomenon. In them converge present, past and atavistic

sufferings, and the tradition of hostility towards the

stranger makes of them monsters of asociality and

insensitivity.

They are the typical product of the structure of the

German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to

a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in

exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their

comrades, there will certainly be someone who will

accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law

and will become untouchable; the more power that he is

given, the more he will be consequently hateful and

hated. When he is given the command of a group of

unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them,

he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand

that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post. Moreover, his

capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the

oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on

the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he

has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received

from above.

We are aware that this is very distant from the

picture that is usually given of the oppressed who unite,

if not in resistance, at least in suffering. We do not

104

The Drowned and the Saved

deny that this may be possible when oppression does not

pass a certain limit, or perhaps when the oppressor,

through inexperience or magnanimity, tolerates or favours

it. But we state that in our days, in all countries in

which a foreign people have set foot as invaders, an

analogous position of rivalry and hatred among the

subjected has been brought about; and this, like many other human characteristics, could be experienced in the

Lager in the light of particularly cruel evidence.

About the non-Jewish prominents there is less to say,

although they were far and away the most numerous

(no "Aryan" Haftling was without a post, however

modest). That they were stolid and bestial is natural

when one thinks that the majority were ordinary

criminals, chosen from the German prisons for the very

purpose of their employment as superintendents of the

camps for Jews; and we maintain that it was a very

apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the squalid human specimens whom we saw at work were an average

example, not of Germans in general, but even of German

prisoners in

particular. It is difficult to

explain how in

Auschwitz the political German, Polish and Russian

prominents rivalled the ordinary convicts in brutality.

But it is known that in Germany the qualification of

political crime also

applied to such acts as clandestine

trade, illicit relations with Jewish women, theft from

Party officials. The "real" politicals lived and died in

other camps, with names now sadly famous, in notoriously

hard conditions, which, however, in many aspects differed

from those described here.

But besides the officials in the strict sense of the

word, there is a vast category of prisoners, not

initially

favoured by fate, who fight merely with their own

strength to survive. One has to fight against the

current; to battle every day and every hour against

105

If This is a Man

exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia; to

resist enemies and have no pity

for rivals; to sharpen one's wits, build up one's patience, strengthen one's

will-power. Or else, to throttle all dignity and kill all

conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast

agains other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those

unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families

and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways devised and put into effect by us in order not to die:

as many as there are different human characters. All

implied a weakening struggle of one against all,

and a by no means small sum of aberrations and

compromises. Survival without renunciation of any part of one's own moral world

apart from

powerful and

direct interventions by fortune was conceded only to

very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of

martyrs and saints.

We will try

to show in how many ways it was

possible to reach salvation with the stories of Schepschel,

Alfred L., Elias and Henri.

Schepschel has been living in the Lager for four years.

He has seen the death of tens of thousands of those

like him, beginning with the pogrom which had driven

him from his village in Galicia. He had a wife and five children and a prosperous business as a saddler, but

for a long time now he has grown accustomed to thinking of himself only as a sack which needs periodic refilling.

Schepschel is not very robust, nor very courageous, nor

very wicked; he is not even particularly astute, nor has

he ever found a method which allows him a little

respite, but he is reduced to small and occasional

expedients, "kombinacje" as they are called here.

Every now and again he steals a broom in Buna and

sells it to the Blockaltester, when he manages to set

106

The Drowned and the Saved

aside a little bread-capital,

he hires the tools of the

cobbler in the Block, his compatriot, and works on his

own account for a few hours; he knows how to make

braces with interlaced electric wires. Sigi told me that he has seen him during the midday interval singing and

dancing in front of the hut of the Slovak workers, who

sometimes reward him with the remainders of their soup. This said, one would be inclined to think of

Schepschel with indulgent sympathy, as of a poor wretch

who retains only a humble and elementary desire to

live, and who bravely carries on his small struggle not

to give way. But Schepschel was no exception, and

when the opportunity showed itself, he did not hesitate

to have Moischl, his accomplice in a theft from the

kitchen, condemned to a flogging, in the mistaken hope of gaining favour in the eyes of the Blockaltester

and furthering his candidature for the position of

Kesselwascher, "vat-washer."

The story of engineer Alfred L. shows among other

things how vain is the myth of original equality among men.

In his own country L. was the director of an extremely

important factory of chemical products, and his name

was (and is) well-known in industrial circles throughout

Europe. He was a robust man of about fifty; I do not

know how he had been arrested, but he entered the

camp like all others: naked, alone and unknown. When

I knew him he was very wasted away, but still showed

on his face the signs of a disciplined and methodical

energy; at that time, his privileges were limited to the

daily cleaning of the Polish workers' pots; this work,

which he had gained in some manner as his exclusive

monopoly, yielded him half a ladleful of soup per day.

Certainly it was not enough to satisfy his hunger;

107

If This is a Man

nevertheless, no one had ever heard him complain. In

fact, the few words that he let slip implied imposing secret resources, a solid and fruitful "organization."

This was confirmed by his appearence. L. had a

"line" : with his hands and face always perfectly clean, he

had the rare self-denial to wash his shirt every fortnight, without waiting for the bi-monthly change (we would

like to point out here that to wash a shirt meant finding

soap, time and

space in the overcrowded washroom;

adapting oneself to carefully keep watch on the wet

shirt without losing attention for a moment, and to put it on, naturally still wet, in the silence-hour when the

lights are turned out); he owned a pair of wooden

shoes to go to the shower, and even his striped suit

was singularly adapted to his appearance, clean and new.

L. had acquired in practice the whole appearance of a

prominent considerably before becoming one; only a

long time after did I find out that L. was able to earn

all this show of prosperity

with incredible tenacity,

paying for his individual acquisitions and services with

bread from his own ration, so imposing upon himself

a regime of supplementary privations.

His plan was a long-term one, which is all the more

notable as conceived in an environment dominated by a

mentality of the provisional; and L. carried it out with

rigid inner discipline, without pity for himself or with

greater reason for comrades who crossed his path. L. knew that the

step was short from being judged

powerful to effectively becoming so, and that everywhere, and

especially in the midst of the general levelling of

the Lager, a respectable appearance is the best guarantee

of being respected. He took every care not to be confused with the mass; he worked with stubborn duty, even occasionally admonishing his lazy comrades in a

persuasive and

deprecatory tone of voice; he avoided

108

The Drowned and the Saved

the daily struggle for the best place in the queue for

the ration, and prepared to take the first ration,

notoriously the most liquid, every day, so as to be noticed

by his Blockaltester for his discipline. To complete the

separation, he always behaved in his relations with

his comrades with the maximum courtesy compatible with his egotism, which was absolute.

When the Chemical Kommando was formed, as will be described, L. knew that his hour had struck: he

needed no more than his spruce suit and his emaciated

and shaved face in the midst of the flock of his sordid

and slovenly colleagues to at once convince both Kapo and Arbeitsdienst that he was one of the genuinely

saved, a potential prominent; so that (to he who has, shall be

given) he was without hesitation appointed

"specialist," nominated technical head of the Kommando,

and taken on by the Direction of the Buna as analyst in the laboratory of the styrene department.

He was

subsequently appointed to examine all the new intake

to the Chemical Kommando, to judge their professional

ability; which he always did with extreme severity,

especially when faced with those in whom he smelled

possible future rivals.

I do not know how his story continued; but I feel

it is quite probable that he managed to escape death,

and today is still living his cold life of the determined

and joyless dominator.

Elias Lindzin, 141565, one day rained into the

Chemical Kommando. He was a dwarf, not more than

five feet high, but I have never seen muscles like his.

When he is naked you can see every muscle taut under his skin, like a poised animal; his body, enlarged

without alteration of proportions,

would serve as a good model for a Hercules: but you must not look at his head.

109

If This is a Man

Under his scalp,

the skull sutures stand out immoder-

ately. The cranium is massive and gives the impression of being made of metal or stone; the back limit of his

shaven hair shows up barely a finger's width above his

eyebrows. The nose, the chin, the forehead, the

cheekbones are hard and compact, the whole face looks

like a battering ram, an instrument made for butting. A sense of bestial vigour emanates from his body.

To see Elias work is a disconcerting spectacle; the

Polish Meister, even the Germans sometimes stop to

admire Elias at work. Nothing seems impossible to him.

While we barely carry one sack of cement, Elias carries

two, then three, then four, keeping them balanced no one

knows how, and while he hurries along on his short,

squat legs, he makes faces under the load, he laughs,

curses, shouts and sings without pause, as if he had

lungs made of bronze. Despite his wooden shoes Elias

climbs like a monkey on to the scaffolding and runs

safely on cross-beams poised over nothing; he carries

six bricks at a time balanced on his head; he knows

how to make a spoon from a piece of tin, and a knife from a

scrap of steel; he finds dry paper, wood and

coal everywhere and knows how to start a fire in a few

moments even in the rain. He is a tailor, a carpenter, a cobbler, a barber; he can spit incredible distances; he

sings, in a not unpleasant bass voice, Polish and Yiddish

songs never heard before; he can ingest ten, fifteen,

twenty pints of soup without vomiting and without

having diarrhoea, and begin work again immediately after. He knows how to make a big hump come out between his shoulders, and goes around the hut,

bow-legged and mimicking, shouting and declaiming

incomprehensibly, to the joy of the Prominents of

the camp. I saw him fight a Pole a whole head taller

than him and knock him down with a blow of his

110

The Drowned and the Saved

cranium into the stomach, as powerful and accurate as a

catapult. I never saw him rest, I never saw him quiet

or still, I never saw him injured or ill.

Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything; and in any case, to imagine Elias as a free man requires a great effort of fantasy and induction; he only speaks

Yiddish, and the surly and deformed Yiddish of Warsaw;

besides it is impossible to keep him to a coherent

conversation. He might be twenty or forty years old; he usually says that he is thirty three, and that he has

begot seventeen children which is not unlikely. He

talks continuously on the most varied of subjects; always

in a resounding voice, in an oratorical manner, with

the violent mimicry of the deranged; as if he was

always talking to a dense crowd and, as is natural,

he never lacks a public.

Those who understand his

language drink up his declamations, shaking with

laughter; they pat him enthusiastically on the back

a back as hard as iron inciting him to continue;

while he, fierce and frowning, whirls around like a wild

animal in the circle of his audience, apostrophizing now

one, now another of them; he suddenly grabs hold of

one by the chest with his small hooked paw, irresistibly

drags him to himself, vomits into his face an incom-

prehensible invective, then throws him back like a piece

of wood, and amidst the applause and laughter, with

his arms reaching up to the heavens like some little

prophetic monster, continues his raging and crazy speech.

His fame as an^exceptional worker spread quite soon,

and by the absurd law of the Lager, from then on he

practically ceased to work. His help was requested

directly by the Meister only for such work as required

skill and special vigour. Apart

from these services he

insolently and violently supervized our daily, flat

exhaustion, frequently disappearing on mysterious visits

111

If This is a Man

and adventures in who knows what recesses of the yard, from which he returned with large bulges in his pockets and often with his stomach visibly full.

Elias is naturally and innocently a thief: in this he

shows the instinctive astuteness of wild animals. He is never caught in the act because he only steals when there

is a good chance; but when this chance comes Elias

steals as fatally and foreseeably as a stone drops. Apart from the fact that it is difficult to

surprise him, it is

obvious that it would be of no use punishing him for

his thefts: to him they imply a vital act like breathing or

sleeping.

We can now ask who is this man Elias. If he is a madman, incomprehensible and para-human, who ended

in the Lager by chance. If he is an atavism, different from

our modern world, and better adapted to the primordial conditions of camp life. Or if he is perhaps a product of the camp itself, what we will all become if we do

not die in the camp, and if the camp itself does not

end first.

There is some truth in all three suppositions.

Elias

has survived the destruction from outside, because he is

physically indestructable; he has resisted the annihilation

from within because he is insane. So, in the first place, he is a surviver: he is the most adaptable, the human

type most suited to this way of living.

If Elias regains his liberty he will be confined to the

fringes of human society, in a prison or a lunatic asylum. But here in Lager there are no criminals nor madmen;

no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene,

no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.

In the Lager Elias prospers and is triumphant. He is a good worker and a good organizer, and for this

112

The Drowned and the Saved

double reason, he is safe from selections and respected

by both leaders and comrades. For those who have no

sound inner resources, for those who do not know how

to draw from their own consciences sufficient force to

cling to life, the only road to salvation leads to Elias:

to insanity and to deceitful bestiality. All the other

roads are dead-ends.

This said, one might perhaps be tempted to draw

conclusions, and perhaps even rules for our daily life.

Are there not all around us some Eliases, more or less

in embryo? Do we not see individuals living without

purpose, lacking all forms of self-control and conscience,

who live not in spite of

these defects, but like Elias

precisely because of them?

The question is serious, but will not be further

discussed as we want these to be stories of the Lager, while much has already been written on man outside the

Lager. But one thing we would still like to add: Elias, as far as we could judge from outside, and as far as

the phrase

can have meaning, was probably a happy

person.

Henri, on the other hand, is eminently civilized and

sane, and possesses a complete and organic theory on

the ways to survive in Lager. He is only twenty-two, he is extremely intelligent, speaks French, German,

English and Russian, has an excellent scientific and

classical culture.

His brother died in Buna last winter, and since then

Henri has cut off every tie of affection; he has closed

himself up,

as if in armour, and fights to live without

distraction with all the resources that he can derive

from his quick intellect and his refined education.

According to Henri's theory, there are three methods

open to man to escape extermination which still allow

113

If This is a Man

him to retain the name of man: organization, pity and

theft.

He himself practises all three. There is no better

strategist than Henri in seducing ("cultivating" he says)

the English PoWs. In his hands they become real geese

with golden eggs if you remember that in exchange

for a single English cigarette you can make enough in

Lager not to starve for a day. Henri was once seen in

the act of eating a real hard-boiled egg.

The traffic in products of English origin is Henri's

monopoly, and this is all a matter of organization; but

his instrument of penetration, with the English and with

others, is pity. Henri has the delicate and subtly perverse

body and face of Sodoma's San Sebastian: his eyes are

deep and profound, he has no beard yet, he moves with

a natural languid elegance (although when necessary

he knows how to run and jump like a cat, while the

capacity of his stomach is little inferior to that of Elias).

Henri is perfectly aware of his natural gifts and exploits

them with the cold competence of a

physicist using a

scientific instrument: the results are surprising . Basically

it is a question of a discovery: Henri has discovered

that pity, being

a primary and instinctive sentiment,

grows quite well if ably cultivated, particularly in the

primitive minds of the brutes who command us, those

very brutes who have no scruples about beating us up without a reason, or treading our faces into the ground;

nor has the great practical importance of the discovery

escaped him, and upon it he has built up

his personal

trade.

As the ichneumon paralyses the great hairy caterp-

illar, wounding it in its only vulnerable ganglion,

so Henri at a glance sizes up the subject, "son type";

speaks to him briefly, to each with the appropriate

language, and the "type" is conquered: he listens with

114

The Drowned and the Soved

increasing sympathy, he is moved by the fate of this

unfortunate young man, and not much time is needed

before he begins to yield returns.

There is no heart so hardened that Henri cannot breach

it if he sets himself to it seriously. In the Lager, and

in Buna as well, his protectors are very numerous : English

soldiers, French Ukrainian, Polish civilian workers;

German "politicals";

at least four Blockdltester, a cook,

even an SS man. But his favourite field is Ka-Be: Henri

has free entry into Ka-Be; doctor Citron and doctor Weiss

are more than his protectors, they

are his friends and

take him in whenever he wants and with the diagnosis he wants. This takes place especially immediately before

selections, and in the periods of the most laborious

work: "hibernation," as he says.

Possessing such conspicuous friendships, it is natural

that Henri is rarely reduced to the third method, theft;

on the other hand, he naturally does not talk much

about this subject.

It is very pleasant to talk to Henri in moments of

rest. It is also useful : there is nothing in the camp that

he does not know and about which he has not reasoned

in his close and coherent manner. Of his conquests, he

speaks with educated modesty, as of prey of little worth,

but he digresses willingly into an explanation of the

calculation which led him to approach Hans asking him

about his son at the front, and Otto instead showing him the scars on his shins.

To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one

sometimes also feels him warm and near; communica-

tion, even affection seems possible. One seems to

glimpse, behind his uncommon

personality, a human

soul, sorrowful and aware of itself. But the next

moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace which

seems studied at the mirror; Henri politely excuses

If This is a Man

himself ("... fai quelque

chose a faire" "... fai quelqu'un

a voir")

and here he is again, intent on his hunt and

his struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armour, the

enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible like the Serpent

in Genesis. '

From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of defeat;

of also

having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him,

but an instrument in his hands.

I know that Henri is living today. I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want

to see him again.

116

Chemical Examination

Kommando 98, called the Chemical Kommando, should have been a squad of skilled workers. :

The day on which its formation was officially announced a meagre group of fifteen Haftlinge gathered in the grey of dawn around the new Kapo in the

roll-call squarre.

This was the first disillusion: he was a "green

triangle," a professional delinquent, the Arbeitsdienst

had not thought is necessary for the Kapo of the Chemical

Kommando to be a chemist. It was pointless wasting

one's breath asking him questions; he would not have

replied, or else he would have

replied with kicks and

shouts. On the other hand, his not very robust appearance and his smaller than average stature were reassuring.

He made a short speech in the foul German of the

barracks, and the disillusion was confirmed. So these

were the chemists : well, he was Alex, and if they thought

they were entering paradise, they were mistaken. In the

first place,

until the day production began, Kommando 98 would be no more than an ordinary transport- Kommando attached to the magnesium chloride warei-

117

If This is a Man

house. Secondly, if they imagined, being Intelligenten,

intellectuals, that they could make a fool of him, Alex, a Reichsdeutscher, well, Herrgottsacrament, he would

show them, he would... (and with his fist clenched and

index finger extended he cut across the air with the

menacing gesture of the Germans); and finally, they should not imagine that they would fool anyone, if they had

applied for the

position without any qualifications

an examination, yes gentlemen, in the very near future;

a chemistry examination, before the triumvirate of the

Polymerization Department: Doktor Hagen, Doktor

Probst, and Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz.

And with this, meine Herren, enough time had been

lost, Kommandos 96 and 97 had already started, forward

march, and to begin with, whosoever failed to walk in

line and step

would have to deal with him.

He was a Kapo like all the other Kapos.

Leaving the camp, in front of the musical band and

the SS counting-post

we march in rows of five, beret

in hand, arms hanging down our sides and neck rigid;

speaking is forbidden. Then we change to threes and

it is possible to exchange a few words amidst the clatter

of then thousand pairs

of wooden shoes.

Who are my new comrades? Next to me walks Alberto; he is in his third year at university, and once

again we have managed to stay together. The third

person on my left I have never seen; he seems very

young, is as pale as wax, and has the number of the

Dutch. The three backs in front of me are also new.

It is dangerous to turn around, I might lose step or

stumble; but I try for a moment, and see the face of

Iss Clausner.

So long as one walks there is no time to think, one

has to take care not to step

on the shoes of the fellow

118

Chemical Examination

hobbling in front, and not let them be stepped on by the

fellow behind; every now and again there is a hole to

be walked over, an oily puddle to be avoided. I know

where we are, I have already come here with my preceding Kommando, it is the H-Strasse, the road of the stores, I tell Alberto, we are really going to the magnesium chloride warehouse, at least that was not a lie.

We have arrived, we climb down into a large damp cellar, full of draughts; this is the headquarters of the

Kommando, the Bude as it is called here. The Kapo divides us into three squads: four to unload the sacks

from the wagon, seven to carry them down, four to

pile them up in the deposit. We form the last squad,

I, Alberto, Iss and the Dutchman.

At last we can speak,

and to each one of us what

Alex said seems a madman's dream.

With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared

craniums, with these shameful clothes, to take a chemical

examination. And obviously it will be in German; and

we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan doctor hoping that we do not have to blow our noses, because perhaps he will not know that we do not have

handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to

explain it to him. And we will have our old comrade

hunger with us, and we will hardly be able to stand still

on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odour, to

which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days, the odour of turnips and cabbages,

raw, cooked and digested.

Exactly so, Clausner confirms. But have the Germans

such great need of chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new

machine "pour faire chier les JuifsT' Are they aware of

the grotesque and absurd test asked of us, of us who

are no longer alive, of us who have already gone half-

crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing?

119

If This is a Man

Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our

names, Clausner has written: "Ne pas chercher a com-

prendre"

Although we do not think for more than a few

minutes a day, and then in a strangely detached and

external manner, we well know that we will end in

selections. I know that I am not made of the stuff of those who resist, I am too civilized, I still think too

much, I use myself up at work. And now I also know

that I can save myself if I become a Specialist, and

that I will become a Specialist

if I pass a chemistry

examination.

Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a

table, I myself am not convinced that these things really

happened.

Three days passed, three of those usual immemorable

days, so long while they are passing, and so short

afterwards, and we were already all tired of believing in

the chemistry examination.

The Kommando was reduced to twelve men: three

had disappeared in the customary manner of down there,

perhaps into the hut next door, perhaps cancelled from

this world. Of the twelve, five were not chemists; all

five had immediately requested permission from Alex

to return to their former Kommandos. They were given a few kicks, but unexpectedly, and by who knows whose

authority, it was decided that they should remain as

auxiliaries to the Chemical Kommando.

Down came Alex into the magnesium chloride yard and called us seven out to go and face the examination.

We go like seven awkward chicks behind the hen, following Alex up the steps of the Polimerisations-

Biiro. We are in the lobby, there is a brass-plate on

120

Chemical Examination

the door with the three famous names. Alex knocks

respectfully, takes off his beret and enters. We can hear

a quiet voice; Alex comes out again. "Ruhe, jetzt. Warten" wait in silence.

We are satisfied with this. 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; we are capable of waiting for

hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old

webs.

Alex is nervous, he walks up and down and we move

out of his way each time. We too, each in our own way, are uneasy; only Mendi is not. Mendi is a rabbi; he

comes from sub-Carpathian Russia, from that confusion of

peoples where everyone speaks at least three languages, and Mendi speaks seven. He knows a great number of

things; besides being a rabbi, he is a militant Zionist,

a comparative philologist, he has been a partisan and a

lawyer; he is not a chemist, but he wants to try all the

same, he is a stubborn, courageous keen little man.

Balla has a pencil

and we all crowd around him.

We are not sure if we still know how to write, we want to

try.

Kohlenwasserstoffe, Massenwirkungsgesetz. The Ger-

man names of compounds and laws float back into my

memory. I feel grateful towards my brain: I have not

paid much attention to it, but it still serves me so well.

Here is Alex. I am a chemist. What have I to do with this man Alex? He

plants his feet in front of me,

he roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, he takes out

my beret and slaps it on my head, then he steps batkwards,

eyes the result with a disgusted air, and turns his back,

muttering: "Was fiir em Muselmann Zugang." What a

messy recruit!

121

If This is a Man

The door opens.

The three doctors have decided that

six candidates will be examined in the morning. The

seventh will not. I am the seventh, I have the highest entry number, I have to return to work. Alex will only come to fetch me in the afternoon. What ill-luck, I

cannot even talk to the others to hear what questions

they are asking.

This time it really is my turn. Alex looks at me

blackly on the doorstep; he feels himself in some way

responsible for my miserable appearance. He dislikes me because I am Italian, because I am Jewish and because, of all of us, I am the one furthest from his sergeants' mess ideal of

virility. By analogy, without understanding

anything, and proud of this very ignorance, he shows a

profound disbelief in my chances for the examination.

We have entered. There is only Doktor Pannwitz; Alex, beret in hand, speaks to

him in an undertone: "

...an Italian, has been here only three months, already

half kaputt...

Er sagt er ist Chemtker..." But he, Alex,

apparently has his reservations on the subject. Alex is briefly dismissed and put aside, and I feel like

Oedipus in front of the Sphinx. My ideas are clear, and I am aware even at this moment that the

position at

stake is important; yet I feel a mad desire to disappear, not to take the test.

Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair, and

nose as all Germans ought to have them, and sits

formidably behind a complicated writing-table. I, Haftling

174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched.

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz

many times and in many ways. I have asked myself

122

Chemical Examination

how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time,

outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic

conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him

again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look was not one between two men; and

if I had known how completely to explain the nature

of that look, which came as if across the glass window

of an acquarium between two beings who live in different

worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the

great insanity of the third Germany. One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner,

what we all thought and said of the Germans. The

brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured

hands said: "This something in front of me belongs to a

species which it is obviously opportune to suppress.

In this particular case,

one has to first make sure that

it does not contain some utilizable element." And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: "Blue eyes and

fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication

possible. I am a

specialist in mine chemistry. I am a

specialist in organic syntheses. I am a specialist... ".

And the interrogation began, while in the corner that

third zoological specimen, Alex, yawned and chewed

noisily.

"Wo sind Sie geboren?" He addresses me as Sie, the

polite form of address: Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz has

no sense of humour. Curse him, he is not making the

slightest effort to speak a slightly more comprehensible

German.

I took my degree at Turin in 1941, summa cum

laude and while I say it I have the definite sensation

of not being believed, of not even believing it myself;

it is enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores,

my convict's trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he,

123

If This is a Man

the B. Sc. of Turin, in fact, at this particular moment

it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, as my

reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after

so long an inertia, responds at request with unexpected

docility. And even more, this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize it,

it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my examinations, that spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge, which my friends at university so envied me.

The examination is going well. As I gradually realize

it, I seem to grow in stature. He is asking me now on

what subject

I wrote my degree thesis. I have to make a violent effort to recall that sequence of memories, so

deeply buried away: it is as if I was trying to remember

the events of a previous incarnation.

Something protects me. My poor old "Measurements of dielectrical constants" are of

particular interest to this

blond Aryan who lives so safely: he asks me if I know

English, he shows me Gatterman's book, and even this is absurd and

impossible, that down here, on the other

side of the barbed wire, a Gatterman should exist, exactly similar to the one I studied in

Italy in my fourth year,

at home.

Now it is over: the excitement which sustained me for the whole of the test suddenly gives way and, dull

and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand writing down

my fate on the white page in incomprehensible symbols. "Los, abF Alex enters the scene again, I am once

more under his jurisdiction. He saluted Pannwitz,

clicking his heels, and in return receives a faint nod of

the eyelids. For a moment I grope around for a suitable

formula of leave-taking: but in vain. I know how to

say to eat, to work, to steal, to die in German; I also

know how to say sulphuric acid, atmospheric pressure,

124

Chemical Examination

and short-wave generator, but I do not know how to

address a person of

importance.

Here we are again on the steps. Alex flies down the

stairs: he has leather shoes because he is not a Jew, he

is as light on his feet as the devils of Malabolge. At

the bottom he turns and looks at me sourly as I walk

down hesitantly and noisily in my two enormous unpaired wooden shoes, clinging on to the rail like an old man.

It seems to have gone well, but I would be crazy to rely

on it. I already know the Lager well enough to realize

that one should never anticipate, especially optimistically.

What is certain is that I have spent a day without

working, so that tonight I will have a little less hunger,

and this is a concrete advantage, not to be taken away.

To re-enter Bude, one has to cross a space cluttered

up with piles of cross-beams and metal frames. The steel

cable of a crane cuts across the road, and Alex catches

hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his

hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have

joined him. Without hatred and without sneering, Alex

wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the

back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the

poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the

basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the

innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz

and everywhere.

125

The Canto of Ulysses

There were six of us, scraping and cleaning the inside

of an underground petrol tank; the daylight only reached

us through a small manhole. It was a luxury job because

no one supervized us; but it was cold and damp. The

powder of the rust burnt under our eyelids and coated

our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood.

The rope-ladder hanging from the manhole began to

sway: someone was coming. Deutsch extinguished his

cigarette, Goldner woke Sivadjan; we all began to

vigorously scrape the resonant

steelplate wall.

It was not the Vorarbeiter, it was only Jean, the

Pikolo of our Kommando. Jean was an Alsatian student;

although he was already twenty four, he was the youngest

Haftling of the Chemical Kommando. So that he was

given the post of Pikolo, which meant the messenger-

clerk, responsible for the cleaning of the hut, for the

distribution of tools, for the washing of bowls, and for

keeping record of the working hours of the Kommando.

Jean spoke French and German fluently: as soon as

we recognized his shoes on the top step of the ladder

we all stopped scraping.

127

If This is a Man

"Also, Pikolo, was gibt es Neues?'

"Qu'est ce qu'il-y-a comme soupe aujourd'hui?"

...in what mood was the Kapo? And the affair of the

twenty five lashes given to Stern? What was the weather

like outside? Had he read the newspaper? What smell

was coming from the civilian kitchen? What was the

time?

Jean was liked a great deal by the Kommando. One

must realize that the post

of Pikolo represented

a quite

high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominents: the Pikolo

(who is usually no more than seventeen years old) does

no manual work, has an absolute right to the remainder

of the daily ration to be found on the bottom of the vat,

and can stay all day near the stove. He "therefore" has

the right to a supplementary half-ration and has a good

chance of becoming the friend and confidant of the Kapo, from whom he officially receives discarded clothes and

shoes. Now Jean was an exceptional Pikolo. He was shrewd and physically robust, and at the same time gentle and friendly : although he continued his secret individual

struggle against the camp and against death, he did not

neglect his human relationships with less privileged comrades; at the same time he had been so able and

persevering that he had managed to establish himself

in the confidence of Alex, the Kapo. Alex had kept all his promises. He had shown himself

a violent and unreliable rogue, with an armour of solid

and compact ignorance and stupidity, always excepting his intuition and consummate technique as convict-keeper. He never let

slip an

opportunity of proclaiming his pride

in his pure blood and his green triangle, and displayed a lofty contempt for his ragged and starving chemists:

"Ihr Doktoren! Ihr IntelligentenT he sneered every day,

watching them crowd around with their bowls held out

for the distribution of the ration. He was extremely

128

The Canto of Ulysses

compliant and servile before the civilian Meister and with

the SS he kept up ties of cordial friendship. He was clearly intimidated by the register of the

Kommando and by the daily report of work, and this

had been the path that Pikolo had chosen to make

himself indispensable.

It had been a long, cautious and

subtle task which the entire Kommando had followed

for a month with bated breath; but at the end the

porcupine's defence was

penetrated, and Pikolo confirmed

in his office to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Although Jean had never abused his position, we had

already been able to verify that a single word of his, said

in the right tone of voice and at the right moment, had

great power; many times already it had saved one of us

from a whipping or from being denounced to the SS.

We had been friends for a week: we discovered each other during the unusual occasion

of an air-raid alarm,

but then, swept by the fierce rhythm of the Lager, we had

only been able to greet each other fleetingly, at the

latrines, in the washroom.

Hanging with one hand on the swaying ladder, he

pointed to me: "Aujourd'huz c'est Primo qui viendra avec

mot chercher la souped Until yesterday it had been Stern, the squinting

Transylvanian; now he had fallen into disgrace for some

story of brooms stolen from the store, and Pikolo had

managed to support my candidature as assistant to the

"Essenholen," the daily corvee of the ration.

He climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the

brightness of the day. It was warmish outside, the sun

drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth,

which made me think of a holiday beach of my infancy. Pikolo gave me one of the two wooden poles, and we

walked along under a clear June sky.

129

If This is a Man

I began to thank him, but he stopped me: it was not

necessary. One could see the Carpathians covered in

snow. I breathed in the fresh air, I felt unusually light-

hearted. u Tu es jou de marcher si vite. On a le temps, tu

sais" The ration was collected half a mile away; one

had to return with the pot weighing over a hundred

pounds sopported on the two poles. It was quite a tiring

task, but it meant a pleasant walk there without a load,

and the ever-welcome chance of going near the kitchens.

We slowed down. Pikolo was expert.

He had chosen

the path cleverly so that we would have to make a long

detour, walking at least for an hour, without arousing

suspicion. We spoke of our houses, of Strasbourg and

Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied,

of our mothers: how all mothers resemble each other!

His mother too had scolded him for never knowing how

much money he had in his pocket; his mother too would

have been amazed if she had known that he had found

his feet, that day by day he was finding his feet.

An SS man passed on a bicycle. It is Rudi, the

Blockfiihrer. Halt! Attention! Take off your beret! "Sale

brute, celui-la. Bin ganz gememer Hund." Can he speak French and German with equal facility? Yes, he thinks

indifferently in both languages. He spent a month in

Liguria, he likes Italy, he would like to learn Italian.

I would be pleased to teach him Italian: why not try? We can do it. Why not immediately, one thing is as

good as another, the important thing is not to lose time,

not to waste this hour.

Limentani from Rome walks by, dragging his feet, with a bowl hidden under his jacket. Pikolo listens

carefully, picks up a few words of our conversation and

repeats them smiling: "Zup-pa, cam-po, acqua."

130

The Canto of Ulysses

Frenkl the spy passes. Quicken our pace, one never

knows, he does evil for evil's sake.

... The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind. But we have no time to change, this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is

intelligent he will understand. He will understand

today I feel capable of so much.

...Who is Dante? What is the Comedy? That curious

sensation of novelty which one feels if one tries to explain

briefly what is the Divine Comedy. How the Inferno is divided up, what are its punishments. Virgil is Reason,

Beatrice is Theology.

Jean pays great attention, and I begin slowly and

accurately :

"Then of that age-old fire the loftier horn

Began to mutter and move, as a wavering flame

Wrestles against the wind and is over-worn;

And, like a speaking tongue vibrant to frame

Language, the tip of it flickering to and fro

Threw out a voice and answered: 'When I came...' "

Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous poor

Dante and poor French! All the same, the experience seems to promise well: Jean admires the bizarre simile

of the tongue and suggests the appropriate word to

translate "age-old."

And after "When I came?" Nothing. A hole in my memory. "Before Aeneas ever named it so." Another

hole. A fragment floats into my mind, not relevant: "...nor

piety To my old father, nor the wedded love That

should have comforted Penelope...," is it correct?

"...So on the open sea I set forth."

Of this I am certain, I am sure, I can explain it to

131

If This is a Man

Pikolo, I can point out why "I set forth" *

is not *je

mis? it is much stronger and more audacious, it is a

chain which has been broken, it is throwing oneself on

the other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well. The open sea: Pikolo has travelled by sea, and knows

what it means : it is when the horizon closes in on itself,

free, straight ahead and simple, and there is nothing but the smell of the sea; sweet things, ferociously far

away.

We have arrived at Kraftwerk, where the cable-laying Kommando works. Engineer Levi must be here. Here he is, one can only see his head above the trench. He waves to me, he is a brave man, I have never seen his

morale low, he never speaks of eating.

"Open sea," "open sea." I know it rhymes with "left

me" : "... and that small band of comrades that had never

left me," but I cannot remember if it comes before or

after. And the journey as well, the foolhardy journey

beyond the Pillars of Hercules, how sad, I have to tell it in

prose a sacrelegi. I have only rescued two lines, but

they are worth stopping for:

"...that none should prove so hardy To venture the uncharted distances..."

"to venture" 2

: I had to come to the Lager to realize that

it is the same expression as before

"I set forth." But

I say nothing to Jean, I am not sure that it is an

important observation. How many things there are to

say, and the sun is already high, midday is near. I am in a hurry, a terrible hurry.

Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind,

you have to understand, for my sake:

1 "misi me" [Translator's note]. 2

"si metta" [Translator's note].

132

The Canto of Ulysses

'Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance Your mettle was not made; you were made men, To follow after

knowledge and excellence."

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the

blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment

I forget who I am and where I am.

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is

something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation

and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received

the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that

it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in

particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these

things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.

"My little speech made every one so keen..."

...and I try,

but in vain, to explain how many things this "keen" means. There is another lacuna here, this

time irreparable,

"...the light kindles and grows Beneath

the moon" or something like it; but before it?... Not an

idea, "keine Ahnung" as they say here. Forgive me,

Pikolo, I have forgotten at least four triplets. "* ne fait rien, vas-y tout de meme" "...When at last hove up a mountain, grey With distance, and so lofty and so steep, I never had seen the like on any day."

Yes, yes, "so lofty and so steep," not "very steep" \ a

consecutive proposition. And the mountains when one

sees them in the distance... the mountains... oh, Pikolo,

Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my mountains which used to show up against the dusk of

evening as I returned by train from Milan to Turin!

1 "alta tanto", not "molto alta" {translator's note].

133

If This is a Man

Enough, one must go on, these are things that one

thinks but does not say. Pikolo waits and looks at me.

I would give today's soup to know how to connect

"the like on any day" to the last lines. I try to reconstruct

it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers but it is no use, the rest is silence. Other verses dance

in my head: "...The sodden ground belched wind...", no, it is something else. It is late, it is late, we have

reached the kitchen, I must finish:

"And three times round she went in roaring smother

With all the waters; at the fourth the poop Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another."

I keep Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent

that he listen, that he understand this "as pleased Another" before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must

tell him, I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I

myself have only just seen, in a flask of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today....

We are now in the soup queue, among the sordid,

ragged crowd of soup-carriers from other Kommandos.

Those just arrived press against our backs. "Kraut und

Ruben? Kraut und Ruben." The official announcement

is made that the soup today is of cabbages and turnips:

"Choux et navets. Kaposzta es repak"

"And over our heads the hollow seas closed up."

134

The Events of the Summer

Throughout the spring, convoys arrived from

Hungary; one prisoner in two was Hungarian, and

Hungarian had become the second language in the camp after Yiddish.

In the month of August 1944, we who had entered

the camp five months before now counted among the

old ones. As such, we of Kommando 98 were not

amazed that the promises

made to us and the examination

we had passed had brought no result; neither amazed

nor exceptionally saddened. At bottom, we all had a

certain dread of changes: "When things change, they

change for the worse" was one of the proverbs of the

camp. More generally, experience had shown us many times the vanity of every conjecture: why worry oneself

trying to read into the future when no action, no word

of ours could have the minimum influence? We were old Haftlinge: our wisdom lay in "not trying to

understand," not imagining the future, not tormenting

ourselves as to how and when it would all be over; not

asking others or ourselves any questions.

135

If This is a Man

We preserved the memories of our previous life, but

blurred and remote, profoundly sweet and sad, like

the memories of early infancy. While for everybody, the moment of entry into the camp was the starting point of a different sequence of thoughts, those near and

sharp, continually confirmed by present experience, like

wounds re-opened every day.

The news heard in the Buna yards of the allied

landing in Normandy, of the Russian offensive and of

the failed attempt against Hitler, had given rise to waves

of violent but ephemeral hope. Day by day everyone felt his strength vanish, his desire to live melt away, his mind grow dim; and Normandy and Russia were

so far away, and the winter so near; hunger and desolation

so concrete, an^l all the rest so unreal, that it did not

seem possible that there could really exist any other

world or time other than our world of mud and our sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now

incapable of imagining.

For living men, the units of time always have a

value, which increases in ratio to the strength of the

internal resources of the person living through them;

but for us, hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the

past, always too slowly, a

valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought

to rid ourselves as soon as possible.

With the end of the season when the days chased each other, vivacious,

precious and irrecoverable, the future stood in front of

us, grey and inarticulate, like an invincible barrier. For

us, history had stopped.

But in August '44 the bombardments of Upper Silesia

began, and they continued with irregular pauses and

renewals throughout the summer and the autumn until

the definitive crisis.

136

The Events of the Summer

The monstruously unanimous labour of gestation of the Buna

stopped brusquely, and at once degenerated into a disconnected, frantic and paroxysmal confusion.

The day on which the production of synthetic rubber should have begun, which seemed imminent in August, was gradually postponed until the Germans no longer

spoke about it.

Constructive work stopped; the power of the countless

multitudes of slaves was directed elsewhere, and day by

day showed itself more riotous and passively hostile.

At every raid there was new damage to be repaired; the delicate machinery assembled with care just before

had to be dismantled again and evacuated; air-raid

shelters and walls had to be hurriedly erected to show

themselves at the next test as ironically uneffective as

sand castles.

We had thought that anything would be preferable to the monotony of the identical and inexorably long

days, to the systematic and ordered squalor of the Buna

at work; but we were forced to change our minds when the Buna began to fall in pieces around us, as if struck

by a curse in which we ourselves felt involved. We had to sweat amidst the dust and smoking ruins, and

tremble like beasts, flattened against the earth by the

anger of the aeroplanes; broken by exhaustion and

parched with thirst, we returned in the long, windy

evenings of the Polish summer to find the camp upside

down, no water to drink or wash in, no soup for

our empty bellies, no light by which to defend our

piece of bread against someone else's hunger, or find

our shoes and clothes in the morning in the dark,

shrieking hole of the Block.

At Buna the German civilians raged with the fury of the secure man who wakes up from a long dream of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to

137

If This is a Man

understand it. The Reichsdeutsche of the Lager as well,

politicals included, felt the ties of blood and soil in the

hour of danger. This new fact reduced the complications of hatreds and incomprehensions to their elementary

terms and redivided the camp: the politicals, together with the green triangles and the SS, saw, or thought

they saw, in all our faces the mochery of revenge and

the vicious joy of the vendetta. They found themselves

in unanimous agreement on this, and their ferocity redoubled. No German could now forget that we were on the other side: on the side of the terrible sowers

who furrowed the German sky as masters, high above

every defence, and twisted the living metal of their

constructions, carrying slaughter every day into their very

homes, into the hitherto unviolated homes of the German

people.

As for us, we were too destroyed to be really afraid.

The few who could still judge and feel rightly, drew

new strength and hope from the bombardments; those

whom hunger had not yet reduced to a definitive inertia often

profited from the moments of general panic to

undertake doubly rash expeditions (since, besides the

direct risk of the raid, theft carried out in conditions

of emergency was punished by hanging) to the factory kitchens or the stores. But the greater number bore

the new danger and the new discomforts with unchanged indifference: it was not a conscious

resignation, but the

opaque torpor of beasts broken in by blows, whom the blows no longer hurt.

Entry to the reinforced shelters was forbidden us.

When the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves, stunned and limping, through the corrosive fumes of the

smoke bombs to the vast waste areas, sordid and sterile, closed within the boundary of the Buna; there we lay inert, piled up on top of each other like dead men,

138

The Events of the Summer

but still aware of the momentary pleasure of our bodies

resting. We looked with indifferent eyes at the smoke and flames breaking out around us : in moments of quiet, full of the distant menacing roar that every European

knows, we picked from the ground the stunted chicory leaves and dandelions, trampled on a hundred times,

and chewed them slowly in silence.

When the alarm was over, we returned from all

parts to our

posts, a silent innumerable flock, accustomed

to the anger of men and things; and continued that work

of ours, as hated as ever, now even more obviously useless and senseless.

In this world shaken every day more deeply by the

omens of its nearing end, amidst new terrors and hopes, with intervals of exasperated slavery,

I happened to meet

Lorenzo.

The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is both

long and short, quiet and enigmatic: is is the story of

a time and condition now effaced from every present

reality, and so I do not think it can be understood except

in the manner in which we nowadays understand events

of legends or of the remotest history.

In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian

civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the

remainder of his ration every day for six months; he

gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all

this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because

he was good and simple and did not think that one

did good for a reward.

All this should not sound little. My case was not the only one; as has already been said, there

were

others of us who had contacts of various kinds with

civilians, and derived from them the means to survive;

139

If This is a Man

but they were relationships of a different nature. Our

comrades spoke of them in the same ambiguous manner,

full of overtones, in which men of the world speak of

their feminine relationships:

that is, of adventures of

which one can justly be proud and for which one wants

to be envied, but which, even for the most pagan

consciences, always remain on the margins of the

permissible and the honest; so that it is incorrect and

improper to boast about them. It is in this way that

the Haftlinge speak of their civilian "protectors" and

"friends"; with an ostentatious discretion, without stating

names, so as not to compromise them, and especially and above all so as not to create undesirable rivals.

The most consummate, the professional seducers like

Henri, do not in fact speak of them; they surround

their successes with an aura of equivocal mystery, and

they limit themselves to hints and allusions, calculated

to arouse in their audience a confused and disquieting

legend that they enjoy the good graces of boundlessly

powerful and generous civilians. This in view of a

deliberate aim: the reputation

of good luck, as we have

said elsewhere, shows itself of fundamental utility to

whosoever knows how to surround himself by it.

The reputation of being a seducer, of being "orga-

nized," excites at the time envy, scorn, contempt and

admiration. Whoever allows himself to be seen eating

"organized" food is judged quite severely; he shows a

serious lack of modesty and tact, besides an open

stupidity. It would be equally stupid and impertinent

to ask "who gave it to you? where did you find it?

how did you manage it?" Only the High Numbers,

foolish, useless and helpless, who know nothing of the

rules of the Lager, ask such questions; one does not

reply to these

questions, or one

replies "Verschwinde,

Mensch!," "Hau' ab? "Uciekaj," "Schiess in den

140

The Events of the Summer

"Va chief \

in short, with one of those countless

equivalents of "Go to hell" in which camp jargon is

so rich.

There are also those who specialize

in complex and

patient campaigns of spying to identify who is the civilian or group of civilians to whom so-and-so turns, and then

try in various ways to supplant him. Intermin-

able controversies of priority break out, made all the

more bitter for the loser by the knowledge that a

"tried" civilian is almost always more profitable, and

above all safer than a civilian making his first contact

with us. He is a civilian who is worth much more for obvious sentimental and technical reasons: he already knows the

principles of the "organization," its regulations

and dangers, and even more he has shown himself

capable of overcoming the caste barrier.

In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians.

They think, more or less explicitly with all the

nuances lying between contempt and commiseration

that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some

mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and

which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises;

they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair,

without honour and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a

light of rebellion, or of peace, or

of faith. They know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged and starving, and mistaking the effect for the cause,

they judge us worthy of our abasement. 1

This naturally does not stop many of them throwing

1 Who conld tell one of our faces from the other? For them we are "Kazett," a singular neuter word.

141

If This is a Man

us a piece

of bread or a potato

now and again, or

giving us their bowls, after the distribution of the

"Zivilsuppe" in the work-yards, to scrape and give back

washed. They do it to get rid of some importunate starved look, or through a momentary impulse of

humanity, or through simple curiosity to see us running from all sides to

figfit each other for the

scrap, bestially

and without restraint, until the strongest one gobbles ti

up, whereupon all the others limp away, frustrated.

Now nothing of this sort occurred between me and Lorenzo. However little sense there may be in trying to

specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to

Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his

material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me

by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of

being good, that there still existed a just world outside

our own, something and someone still pure and whole,

not corrupt,

not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror;

something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth

surviving.

The personages

in these pages are not men. Their

humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it,

under an offence received or inflicted on someone else.

The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down

to the indifferent slave Haftlinge, all the grades of the

mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternize in a uniform internal desolation.

But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and

uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I

myself was a man.

142

October 1944

We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to all the warm hours, at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for

a little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening the sun went down irrevocably behind a confusion of

dirty clouds, chimney stacks and wires, and today it is

winter.

We know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that

in the course of these months, from October till April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die

will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from

the morning before dawn until the distribution of

the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles

continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our

arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours

of sleep

to repair

them when they become unstitched.

As it will no longer be possible to eat in the open, we

will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet,

everyone will be assigned an area of floor as large as

143

If This is a Man

a hand, as it is forbidden to rest against the bunks.

Wounds will open on everyone's hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours

on one's feet in the snow and wind.

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. If the Lagers

had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have

been born; and only this language could express what

it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the

temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, under-

pants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one's body nothing

but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing

nearer.

In the same way in which one sees a hope end,

winter arrived this morning. We realized it when we left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the

dark cold air had the smell of snow. In roll-call square,

in the grey of dawn, when we assembled for work,

no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we thought that if at the same time last year they had

told us that we would have seen another winter in

Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric

wire-fence; and that even now we would go if we were

logical, were it not for this last senseless crazy residue

of unavoidable hope.

Because "winter" means yet another thing.

Last spring

the Germans had constructed two huge

tents in an open space in the Lager. For the whole of

the good season each of them had catered for over a

thousand men: now the tents had been taken down,

144

October 1944

and an excess two thousand guests crowded our huts.

We old prisoners knew that the Germans did not like these irregularities and that something would soon happen to reduce our number.

One feels the selections arriving. "Selekcja": the

hybrid Latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many

times, interpolated in foreign conversations; at first we

cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention,

and in the end it persecutes us.

This morning the Poles had said "Selekcja." The

Poles are the first to find out the news, and they generally

try not to let it

spread around, because to know something

which the others still do not know can always be useful.

By the time that everyone realizes that a selection is

imminent, the few possibilities of evading it (corrupting some doctor or some prominent with bread or tobacco;

leaving the hut for Ka-Be or vice-versa at the right moment so as to cross with the commission) are already their monopoly.

In the days which follow, the atmosphere of the

Lager and the yard is filled with "Selekcja": nobody

knows anything definite, but all speak about it, even

the Polish, Italian, French civilian workers whom we

secretly see in the yard. Yet the result is hardly a wave

of despondency: our collective morale is too inarticulate

and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold

and work leaves little margin for thought, even for

this thought. Everybody reacts in his own way, but

hardly anyone with those attitudes which would seem

the most plausible

as the most realistic, that is with

resignation or despair.

All those able to find a way out, try to take it; but

they are the minority because it is very difficult to escape

from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these

things with great skill and diligence.

145

If This is a Man

Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks

defence elsewhere. In the latrines, in the washroom,

we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: "You are all

right, it

will certainly not be your turn this time,... du hist kein

Muselmann... more probably mine..." and they undo

their braces in turn and pull up their shirts.

Nobody refuses this charity to another: nobody is

so sure of his own lot to be able to condemn others. I brazenly lied to old Wertheimer; I told him that if

they questioned him, he should reply that he was forty

five, and he should not forget to have a shave the

evening before, even if it cost him a quarter-ration of

bread; apart from that he need have no fears, and in

any case it was by no means certain that it was a

selection for the gaschamber; had he not heard the

Blockaltester say that those chosen would go to Jaworszno to a convalescent camp?

It is absurd of Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose veins, he hardly even notices

the hunger any more. But he lies down on his bed, serene and

quiet, and

replies to someone who asks him

with my own words; they are the command-words in the camp these days: I myself repeated them just as

apart from details Chajim told them to me, Chajim,

who has been in Lager for three years, and being strong and robust is wonderfully sure of himself; and I believed

them.

On this slender basis I also lived through the great selection of October 1944 with inconceivable

tranquillity.

I was tranquil

because I managed to lie to myself

sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended

above all on chance and does not prove that my faith was well-founded.

Monsieur Pinkert is also, a priori, condemned: it is

146

October 1944

enough to look at his eyes. He calls me over with a

sign, and with a confidential air tells me that he has been

informed he cannot tell me the sourse of information

that this time there is really something new: the

Holy See, by means of the International Red Cross... in

short, he personally guarantees both for himself and for

me, in the most absolute manner, that every danger is

ruled out; as a civilian he was, as is well known, attach^

to the Belgian embassy at Warsaw.

Thus in various ways, even those days of vigil, which

in the telling seem as if they ought to have passed every

limit of human torment, went by not very differently from other days.

The discipline

in both the Lager and Buna is in no

way relaxed: the work, cold and hunger are sufficient

to fill up every thinking moment.

Today is working Sunday, Arbeitssonntag: we work

until one p.m., then we return to camp for the shower, shave and general control for skin diseases and lice.

And in the yards, everyone knew mysteriously that the

selection would be today. The news arrived, as always, surrounded by a halo

of contradictory or suspect details: the selection in the

infirmary took place this morning; the percentage was

seven per cent of the whole camp, thirty, fifty per cent

of the patients.

At Birkenau, the crematorium chimney

has been smoking for ten days. Room has to be made

for an enormous convoy arriving from the Poznan ghetto.

The young tell the young that all the old ones will be

chosen. The healthy tell the healthy that only the ill

will be chosen. Specialists

will be excluded. German

Jews will be excluded. Low Numbers will be excluded.

You will be chosen. I will be excluded.

At one p.m. exactly the yard empties in orderly

147

If This is a Man

fashion, and for two hours the grey unending army

files past

the two control stations where, as on every day, we are counted and recounted, and past the military band which for two hours without

interruption plays, as

on every day, those marches to which we must synchronize our

steps at our entrance and our exit.

It seems like every day, the kitchen chimney smokes

as usual, the distribution of the soup is already beginning.

But then the bell is heard, and at that moment we

realize that we have arrived.

Because this bell always sounds at dawn, when it

means the reveille; but if it sounds during the day, it

means "Blocksperre" enclosure in huts, and this happens when there is a selection to

prevent anyone avoiding

it, or when those selected leave for the gas, to prevent

anyone seeing them leave.

Our Blockaltester knows his business. He has made sure that we have all entered, he has had the door

locked, he has given everyone his card with his number,

name, profession, age and nationality and he has ordered

everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. We

wait like this, naked, with the card in our hands, for the

commission to reach our hut. We are hut 48, but one can never tell if they are going to begin at hut 1 or

hut 60. At any rate, we can rest quietly at least for an

hour, and there is no reason why we should not get under the blankets on the bunk and keep warm.

Many are already drowsing when a barrage of orders, oaths and blows proclaim the imminent arrival of the

commission. The Blockaltester and his helpers, starting

at the end of the dormitory, drive the crowd of frightened, naked people in front of them and cram them in the

Tagesraum which is the Quartermaster's office. The

148

October 1944

Tagesraum is a room seven yards by four: when the

drive is over, a warm and compact human mass is

jammed into the Tagesraum, perfectly filling all the

corners, exercizing such a pressure on the wooden walls

as to make them creak.

Now we are all in the Tagesraum, and besides there

being no time, there is not even any room in which to

be afraid. The feeling of the warm flesh pressing all

around is unusual and not unpleasant. One has to take

care to hold up one's nose so as to breathe, and not to

crumple or lose the card in one's hand.

The Blockdltester has closed the connecting-door and

has opened the other two which lead from the dormitory and the Tagesraum outside. Here, in front of the two

doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern.

On his right is the Blockaltester, on his left, the

quartermaster of the hut. Each one of us, as he comes

naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few

steps between the two doors, give

the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory door. The SS man, in the fraction of a second between two

successive crossings, with a glance at one's back and

front, judges everyone's fate, and in turn gives the card

to the man on his right or his left, and this is the life or death of each of us. In three or four minutes a hut

of two hundred men is "done," as is the whole camp of twelve thousand men in the course of the afternoon.

Jammed in the charnel-house of the Tagesraum, I

gradually felt the human pressure around me slacken, and in a short time it was my turn. Like everyone, I

passed by with a brisk and elastic step, trying to

hold my head high, my chest forward and my muscles contracted and

conspicous. With the corner of my eye

I tried to look behind my shoulders, and my card seemed to end on the

right.

149

If This is a Man

As we gradually come back into the dormitory we are

allowed to dress ourselves. Nobody yet knows with

certainty his own fate, it has first of all to be established

whether the condemned cards were those on the right or on the left. By now there is no longer any point in

sparing each other's feelings with superstitious scruples.

Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most wasted-

away, the most "muselmann"; if their cards went to the

left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned.

Even before the selection is over, everybody knows

that the left was effectively the "schlechte Seite? the

bad side. There have naturally been some irregularities :

Rene, for example, so young and robust, ended on the

left; perhaps it was because he has glasses, perhaps because he walks a little stooped like a myope, but

more probably because of a simple mistake: Rene passed the commission immediately in front of me and there

could have been a mistake with our cards. I think

about it, discuss it with Alberto, and we agree that the

hypothesis is probable; I do not know what I will think

tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.

It must equally have been a mistake about Sattler, a

huge Transylvanian peasant who was still at home only

twenty days ago; Sattler does not understand German,

he has understood nothing of what has taken place, and stands in a corner mending his shirt. Must I go and tell him that his shirt will be of no more use?

There is nothing surprising about these mistakes:

the examination is too quick and summary, and in any

case, the important thing for the Lager is not that the

most useless prisoners be eliminated, but that free posts be quickly created, according to a certain percentage

previously fixed.

150

October 1944

The selection is now over in our hut, but it continues in the others, so that we are still locked in. But as the

soup-pots have arrived in the meantime, the Blockaltester

decides to proceed with the distribution at once. A

double ration will be given to those selected. I have

never discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable

initiative of the Blockaltester, or an explicit disposition of the SS, but in fact, in the interval of two or three days

(sometimes even much longer) between the selection

and the departure, the victims at Monowitz-Auschwitz

enjoyed this privilege.

Ziegler holds out his bowl, collects his normal ration

and then waits there expectantly. "What do you want?"

asks the Blockaltester'. according to him, Ziegler is

entitled to no supplement, and he drives him away, but Ziegler returns and humbly persists. He was on the left, everybody saw it, let the Blockaltester check

the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When he is given it, he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.

Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his

spoon so as not to waste the last drops of the

soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the

end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from

my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn

praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the

Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after

tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the

light without saying anything and without even

thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand

151

If This is a Man

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.

152

Kraus

When it rains we would like to cry.

It is November,

it has been raining for ten days now and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of

wood gives out a smell of mushrooms.

If I could walk ten steps

to the left I would be

under shelter in the shed; a sack to cover my shoulders would be sufficient, or even the prospect of a fire where

I could dry myself; or even a dry rag to put between

my shirt and my back. Between one movement of the shovel and another I think about

it, and I really believe

that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

By now it would be impossible to be wetter; I will

just have to pay attention to move as little as possible, and above all not to make new movements, to prevent some other

part of my skin coming into unnecessary

contact with my soaking, icy clothes. It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how

in some way one always has the impression of being

fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinite-

simal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and

allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or

153

If This is a Man

else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know

that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of

soup, so that even today you find the strength to

reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have

the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but

suffering and tedium as sometimes happens, when

you really seem to lie on the bottom, well, even

in that case, at any moment you want you could always

go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

We have been stuck in the mud since the morning, legs akimbo, with our feet sinking ever deeper in the

selfsame holes in the glutinous soil. We sway on our haunches at every swing of the shovel. I am half-way down the

pit, Kraus and Clausner are at the bottom,

Gounan is above me at surface level. Only Gounan can look around, and every now and again he warns Kraus

curtly of the need to quicken the pace or even

to rest, according to who is passing by in the road. Clausner uses the

pickaxe, Kraus lifts the earth up to me on his shovel, and I gradually pass it up to Gounan who

piles it up on one side. Others form

a shuttle service with wheelbarrows and carry the earth

somewhere, of no interest to us. Our world today is

this hole of mud.

Kraus misses his stroke, a lump of mud flies up and

splatters over my knees. It is not the first time it has

happened, I warn him to be careful, but without much

hope: he is Hungarian, he understands German badly and does not know a word of French. He is tall and thin, wears glasses and has a curious, small, twisted face; when he laughs he looks like a child, and he often

laughs. He works too much and too vigorously: he

154

Kraus

has not yet learnt our underground art of economizing on

everything, on breath, movements, even thoughts. He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because one does not normally die of blows, but one

does of exhaustion, and badly, and when one grows aware

of it, it is already too late. He still thinks... oh no,

poor Kraus, his is not reasoning, it is only the stupid

honesty of a small employee, he brought it along with

him, and he seems to think that his present situation

is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work,

as well as being of advantage, because according to what

everyone says, the more one works the more one earns

and eats.

"Regardez-moi fa!... Pas si vite, idiot T Gounan swears at him from above; then he remembers to translate

it in German: "Langsman, du bidder Einer, langsman, verstanden!" Kraus can kill himself through exhaustion

if he wants to, but not today, because we are working in a chain and the rhythm of the work is set by him.

There goes the siren of the carbide factory, now

the English prisoners are leaving; it is half past four.

Then the Ukrainian girls

will leave and it will be five

o'clock and we will be able to straighten our backs, and only the return march, the roll-call and the lice-

control will separate us from our rest.

It is assembly time, "Antreten" from all sides; from

all sides the mud puppets creep out, stretch their cramped limbs, carry the tools back to the huts. We extract our feet from the ditch cautiously so as not to let our

shoes be sucked off, and leave, dripping and swaying, to line up for the return march. "Z# dreien" in threes.

I tried to place myself

near to Alberto as we had worked

separately today and we both wanted to ask each other how it had gone; but someone hit me in the stomach and I finished behind him, right next to Kraus.

155

If This is a Man

Now we leave. The Kapo marks time in a hard voice: "Links, links, links" \ at first, our feet hurt, then we

slowly grow warm and our nerves relax. We have bored our way through all the minutes of the day, this very

day which seemed invincible and eternal this morning; now it lies dead and is immediately forgotten; already it is no longer a day, it has left no trace in anybody's

memory. We know that tomorrow will be like today: perhaps it will rain a little more or a little less, or

perhaps instead of digging soil we will go and unload

bricks at the Carbide factory. Or the war might even

finish tomorrow, or we might all be killed or transferred

to another camp, or one of those great changes might take

place which, ever since the Lager has been the Lager, have been infaticably foretold as imminent and certain.

But who can seriously think about tomorrow?

Memory is a curious instrument: ever since I have

been in the camp, two lines written by a friend of mine

a long time ago have been running through my mind:

"... Until one day

there will be no more sense in saying: tomorrow."

It is like that here. Do you know how one says "never" in camp slang? "Morgen fmh" tomorrow

morning.

It is now the hour of "links, links, links und links "

the hour in which one must not lose step.

Kraus is

clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because

he is incapable of walking in line: and now he is

beginning to gesticulate and chew a miserable German,

listen, listen, he wants to apologize for the spadeful of mud, he has not yet understood where we are, I must

say Hungarians are really a most singular people. To keep step and carry on a complicated conversation

156

Kraus

in German is too much. This time it is I to warn him

that he has lost step;

I look at him and I see his eyes behind the drops of water on his glasses, and they are

the eyes of the man Kraus.

Then an important thing happened, and it is worth

telling now, perhaps for the same reason that it happened then. I began to make a long speech to Kraus: in

bad German, but slowly, separating the words, making sure after each sentence that he had understood.

I told him that I had dreamt that I was at home,

the home where I was born, with my family, sitting with my legs under the table, and on the table great deal, a very great deal to eat. And it was summer and it was

in Italy at Naples?... yes, at Naples, this is hardly the

time to quibble. Then all of a sudden the bell rang,

and I got up hurriedly and went to open the door,

and who did I see? I saw him, this very Kraus Pali, with hair grown, clean and well nourished and dressed

as a free man, with a loaf of bread in his hand. Yes, a

loaf of four pounds,

still warm. Then "Servus, Pali, wie

geht'sr* and I felt filled with joy and made him come

in, and I explained to my parents who he was, and that he had come from

Budapest, and why he was so wet; because he was soaking, just like now. And I gave him

food and drink and a good bed to sleep in, and it was

nightime, but there was a wonderful warmth so that

we were all dry in a moment (yes, I was also very wet). What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian :

he will not survive very long here, one can see it at the

first glance, it is as logical as a theorem. I am sorry I do not know Hungarian, for his emotion has broken

the dykes, and he is breaking out in a flood of outlandish

Magyar words. I cannot understand anything except

my name, but by the solemn gestures one would say that he is making promises and prophecies.

157

If This is a Man

Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it is not true,

that I have really dreamt nothing about him, that he

is nothing to me except for a brief moment, nothing like

everything is nothing down here, except the hunger inside and the cold and the rain around.

158

Die drei Leute vom Labor

How many months have gone by since we entered the camp? How many since the day I was dismissed from Ka-Be? And since the day of the chemistry examination? And since the October selection?

Alberto and I often ask ourselves these questions, and many others as well. We were ninety-six when we arrived, we, the Italians of convoy 174,000; only

twenty-nine of us survived until October, and of these,

eight went in the selection. We are now twenty-one and the winter has hardly begun. How many of us will be alive at the new year? How many when spring begins?

There have been no air raids now for several weeks; the November rain has turned to snow, and the snow

has covered the ruins. The Germans and Poles go to-

work in rubber jackboots, woollen ear-pads and padded

overalls; the English prisoners have their wonderful

fur-lined jackets. They have distributed no overcoats

in our Lager except to a few of the privileged; we are

a specialized Kommando, which in theory only

159

If This is a Man

works under shelter; so we are left in our summer

outfits.

We are the chemists, "therefore" we work at the

phenylbeta sacks. We cleared out the warehouse after the first air raids in the height of the summer. The

phenylbeta seeped under our clothes and stuck to our

sweating limbs and chafed us like leprosy; the skin

came off our faces in large burnt patches. Then the

air raids temporarily stopped and we carried the sacks

back into the warehouse. Then the warehouse was

hit and we took the sacks into the cellar of the styrene

department. Now the warehouse has been repaired and once again we have to pile up the sacks there. The

caustic smell of the phenylbeta impregnates our only

suit, and follows us day and night like our shadows.

So far, the advantages of being in the Chemical

Kommando have been limited to the following: the

others have received overcoats while we have not; the

others carry 100 pound cement sacks, while we carry 125 pound phenylbeta sacks. How can we still think about the chemistry examination and our illusions of

that time? At least four times during the summer we

have heard speak of Doktor Pannwitz's laboratory in

Bau 939, and the rumour spread that the analysts for the Polymerization Department would be chosen

among us.

But now it is time to stop,

it is all over now. This

is the last act: the winter has begun, and with it our

last battle. There is no longer any reason to doubt

that it will be the last. Any time during the day when

we happen to listen to the voice of our bodies, or ask

our limbs, the answer is always the same: our strength

will not last out. Everything around us speaks of a

final decay and ruin. Half of Bau 939 is a heap of

twisted metal and smashed concrete; large deformed blue

160

Die drei Leute vom Labor

icicles hang like pillars from the enormous tubings where

the overheated steam used to roar. The Buna is silent

now, and when the wind is propitious, if one listens

hard, one can hear the continuous dull underground

rumbling of the front which is getting nearer. Three

hundred prisoners have arrived in the Lager from the Lodz

ghetto, transferred by the Germans before the Russian

advance : they told us rumours about the legendary battle

of the Warsaw ghetto, and they described how the

Germans had liquidated the Lublin camp over a year ago :

four machine-guns in the corners and the huts set on

fire; the civilized world will never know about it. When

will it be our turn?

This morning the Kapo divided up the squads as

usual. The Magnesium Chloride ten to the Magnesium Chloride: and they leave, dragging their feet, as slowly

as possible,

because the Magnesium Chloride is an

extremely unpleasant job; you stand all day up to your

ankles in cold, briny water, which soaks into your

shoes, your clothes and your skin. The Kapo grabs hold of a brick and throws it among the group; they

get clumsily out of the way, but do not quicken their

pace. This is almost a custom, it happens every morning,

and does not always mean that the Kapo has a definite

intent to hurt.

The four of the Scheisshaus, to their work: and

the four attached to the building of the new latrine

leave. For when we exceeded the force of fifty

Haftlinge with the arrival of the convoys from Lodz

and Transylvania, the mysterious German bureaucrat who

supervizes these matters authorized us to build a

"Zweiplatziges Kommandoscheisshaus" i.e. a two-seated

closet reserved for our Kommando. We are not unaware of this mark of distinction, which makes ours one of

161

If This is a Man

the few Kommandos of which one can with reason boast

one's membership: but it is evident that we will lose

one of the simplest

of pretexts

to absent ourselves

from work and arrange combinations with civilians.

"Noblesse oblige" says Henii, who has other strings to his bow.

The twelve for the bricks. Meister Dahm's five.

The two for the tanks. How many absent? Three absent. Homolka gone into Ka-Be this morning, the ironsmith

dead yesterday, Francois transferred who knows where

or why. The roll-call is correct; the Kapo notes it down

and is satisfied. There are only us eighteen of the

phenylbeta left, beside the prominents of the Kommando.

And now the unexpected happens. The Kapo says: Do k tor Pannwitz has communi-

cated to the Arbeitsdienst that three Haftlinge have been

chosen for the Laboratory: 169509, Brackier; 175633,

Kandel; 174517, Levi . For a moment my ears ring and the Buna whirls around me. There are three Levis

in Kommando 98, but Hundert Vierundstebzlg Funf Hundert Siebzehn is me, there is no possible doubt. I

am one of the three chosen.

The Kapo looks us up and down with a twisted

smile. A Belgian, a Rumanian and an Italian: three "Franzosen" in short. Is it

possible that three Franzosen

have really been chosen to enter the paradise of the

Laboratory?

Many comrades congratulate us; Alberto first of all, with genuine joy, without a shadow of envy. Alberto

holds nothing against my fortune, he is really very

pleased, both because of our friendship and because he

will also gain from it. In fact, by now we two are

bound by a tight bond of alliance, by which every

"organized" scrap is divided into two

strictly equal parts.

He has no reason to envy me, as he neither hoped

162

Die drei Leute vom Labor

nor desired to enter the Laboratory. The blood in his

veins is too free for this untamed friend of mine to

think of relaxing in a system; his instinct leads him

elsewhere, to other solutions, towards the unforeseen, the

impromptu, the new. Without hesitating, Alberto prefers the uncertainties and battles of the "free profession" to a good employment.

I have a ticket from the Arbeitsdiemt in my pocket, on which it is written that Haftling 174517, as a special- ized worker, has right to a new shirt and underpants and must be shaved every Wednesday.

The ravaged Buna lies under the first snows, silent

and stiff like an enormous corpse; every day the sirens

of the Flieget'alarm wail; the Russians are fifty miles

away. The electric power station has stopped, the

methanol rectification columns no longer exist, three

of the four acetylene gasometers have been blown up. Prisoners "reclaimed" from all the camps in east Poland

pour into our Lager haphazardly; the minority are set

to work, the majority leave immediately for Birkenau

and the Chimney. The ration has been still further

reduced. The Ka-Be is overflowing, the E-Haftlinge have brought scarlet fever, diphtheria and petechial

typhus into the camp. But Haftling 174517 has been promoted as a specialist

and has the right to a new shirt and underpants and

has to be shaved every Wednesday. No one can boast of understanding the Germans.

We entered the Laboratory timid, suspicious and bewildered like three wild beasts slinking into a large

city. How clean and

polished the floor is! It is a

laboratory surprisingly like any other laboratory. Three

long work-benches covered with hundreds of familiar

163

If This is a Man

objects. The glass instruments in a corner to drip, the

precision balance, a Heraeus oven, a Hoppler thermostat.

The smell makes me start back as if from the blow of a

whip: the weak aromatic smell of organic chemistry laboratories. For a moment the large semidark room

at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in

Italy comes back to me with brutal violence and

immediately vanishes.

Herr Stawinoga gives us our work-places. Stawinoga is a German Pole, still young, with an energetic, but

sad and tired face. He is also Do k tor: not of chemistry, but (ne pas chercher a comprendre) of comparative

philology; all the same, he is head of the laboratory.

He does not speak to us willingly, but does not seem

ill-disposed. He calls us "Monsieur" which is ridiculous

and disconcerting.

The temperature in the laboratory is wonderful; the

thermometer reads 65 F. We agree that they can make us wash the glass instruments, sweep the floor,

carry the hydrogen flasks, anything so as to remain

here, and so solve the problem of the winter for us.

And then, on a second examination, even the problem of

hunger should not be difficult to solve. Will they

really want to search us at the exit every day? And

even if they want to, will they do it every time that

we ask to go the latrine? Obviously not. And there is

soap, petrol, alcohol here. I will stitch a secret pocket

inside my jacket, and combine with the Englishman who works in the

repairs-yard and trades in

petrol.

We will see how strict the supervision is: but by now I have spent a year in the Lager and I know that if one

wants to steal and seriously sets one's mind to it, no

supervision and no searchings can prevent it.

So it would seem that fate, by a new unsuspected

path, has arranged that we three, the object of envy

164

Die drei Leute vom Labor

of all the ten thousand condemned, suffer neither hunger

nor cold this winter. This means a strong probability of not falling seriously ill, of not being frozen, of

overcoming the selections. In these conditions, those

less expert than us about things in the Lager might even

be tempted by the hope of survival and by the thought

of liberty. But we are not, we know how these matters

go; all this is the gift of fortune, to be enjoyed as

intensely as possible and at once; for there is no

certainty about tomorrow. At the first glass I break,

the first error in measurement, the first time my attention

is distracted, I will go back to waste away in the snow

and the wind until I am ready for the Chimney. And

besides, who knows what will happen when the Russians

come?

Because the Russians will come. The ground trembles

day and night under our feet; the muffled dull rumbling

of their artillery now bursts uninterrupted into the novel

silence of the Buna. One breathes a tense air, an air

of resolution. The Poles no longer work, the French

again walk with their head high. The English wink

at us and greet us on the aside with a "V" sign; and

not always on the aside.

But the Germans are deaf and blind, enclosed in

an armour of obstinacy and of wilful ignorance. Once

again they have named the date for the beginning of

the production of synthetic rubber: it will be the first

of February 1945. They construct shelters and trenches,

they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they

command, they organize and they kill. What else

could they do? They are Germans. This way of

behaviour is not meditated and deliberate, but follows

from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen.

They could not act differently: if you wound the body

165

If This is a Man

of a dying man, the wound will begin to heal, even

if the whole body dies within a day.

Every morning now, when the squads are divided, the Kapo calls us three of the Laboratory before all the

others, "die dret Leute vom Labor"" In camp, in the

evenings and the mornings, nothing distinguishes me from the flock, but during the day, at work, I am under

shelter and warm, and nobody beats me; I steal and

sell soap and petrol without serious risk, and perhaps I will be given a coupon for a pair of leather shoes.

Even more, can this be called work? To work is to

push wagons, carry sleepers, break stones, dig earth,

press one's bare hands against the iciness of the freezing

iron. But I sit all day, I have a note-book and a pencil and they have even given me a book to refresh my memory about analytical methods. I have a drawer

where I can put my beret and gloves, and when I want

to go out I only have to tell Herr Stawinoga, who never

says no and asks no questions if I delay; he has the air

of suffering

in his flesh for the ruin which surrounds him.

My comrades in the Kommando envy me, and they are right; should I not be contented? But in the morning, I hardly escape

the raging wind and cross the doorstep of the laboratory when I find at my side the comrade of all my peaceful moments, of Ka-Be, of the rest-Sundays

the pain of remembering, the old ferocious longing to feel myself a man, which attacks me like a dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom. Then I take my pencil and notebook and write what I would never dare tell anyone.

Then there are the women. How long is it since I have seen a woman? In Buna we

quite often met

the Polish and Ukrainian women workers, in trousers

and leather jackets, huge and violent like their men.

166

Die drei Leute vom Labor

They were sweaty and dishevelled in the summer, padded out with thick clothes in the winter, and worked with

spades and pickaxes. We did not feel ourselves next

to women.

It is different here. Faced with the girls

of the

laboratory, we three feel ourselves sink into the ground from shame and embarassment. We know what we look like: we see each other and sometimes we happen to see our reflection in a clean window. We are ridiculous and

repugnant. Our cranium is bald on Monday, and

covered by a short brownish mould by Saturday. We haye a swollen and yellow face, marked permanently

by the cuts made by the hasty barber, and often by bruises and numbed sores; our neck is long and knobbly, like that of plucked chickens.

Our clothes are incredibly

dirty, stained by mud, grease and blood; Kandel's breeches

only arrive half-way down his calves, showing his bony,

hairy ankles; my jacket runs off my shoulders as if off

a wooden clothes-hanger. We are full of fleas, and we often scratch ourselves shamelessly; we have to ask

permission to go the latrines with humiliating frequency.

Our wooden shoes are insupportably noisy

and are

plastered with alternate layers of mud and regulation

grease.

Besides which, we are accustomed to our smell,

but the girls

are not and never miss a chance of showing

it. It is not the generic smell of the badly washed, bu the

smell of the Haftling, faint and sweetish, which greeted

us at our arrival in the Lager and which tenaciously

pervades the dormitories, kitchens, washrooms and closets

of the Lager. One acquires it at once and one never

loses it: "so young and already stinking!" is our way

of greeting new arrivals.

To us the girls

seem outside this world. There are

three young German girls, Fraulein Liczba, the Polish

167

If This is a Man

store-keeper, and Frau Meyer, the secretary. They have

smooth, rosy skin, beautiful attractive clothes, clean and

warm, blond hair, long and well-set; they speak with

grace and self-possession, and instead of keeping the

laboratory clean and in order, as they ought to, they smoke in the corners, scandalously eat bread and jam, file their nails, break a lot of glass vessels and then

try to put the blame on us; when they sweep, they sweep our feet. They never speak to us and turn up their noses

when they see us shuffling across the laboratory, squalid and

filthy, awkward and insecure in our shoes. I once

asked Fraulein Liczba for some information, and she

did not reply

but turned with an annoyed face to

Stawinoga and spoke to him quickly. I did not

understand the sentence, but I clearly grasped "Stinkjude"

and my blood froze. Stawinoga told me that for anything to do with the work we should turn

directly to him.

These girls sing,

like girls sing in laboratories all

over the world, and it makes us deeply unhappy. They talk among themselves: they talk about the rationing, about their fiances, about their homes, about the

approaching holidays....

"Are you going home on Sunday? I am not, travelling is so uncomfortable!"

"I am going home for Christmas. Only two weeks

and then it will be Christmas again; it hardly seems real,

this year has gone by so quickly!" ... This year has gone by so quickly. This time last

year I was a free man : an outlaw but free, I had a name

and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile and healthy body. I used to think of many, far-away

things: of my work, of the end of the war, of good and evil, of the nature of things and of the laws which

govern human actions; and also of the mountains, of

singing and loving, of music, of poetry. I had an

168

Die drei Leute vom Labor

enormous, deep-rooted foolish faith in the benevolence

of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary

things to me. My days were both cheerful and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and

positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure.

Today the only thing left of the life of those days is

what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

If I spoke German better I could try to explain all

this to Frau Meyer; but she would certainly not

understand, or if she was so good and intelligent as to

understand, she would be unable to bear my proximity, and would flee from me, as one flees from contact with

an incurable invalid, or from a man condemned to death.

Or perhaps she would give me a coupon for a pint of civilian

soup.

This year has gone by so quickly.

169

The Last One

By now Christmas is approaching. Alberto and I

are walking side by side in the long grey file, bending forwards to resist the wind better. It is night and

it is snowing; it is not easy to keep on one's feet,

and even more difficult to keep up the pace in line;

every now and again someone in front of us stumbles

and falls in the black mud, and one has to be careful

to avoid him and keep one's place in the column.

Since I started work in the Laboratory, Alberto

and I work separately

and we always have many things to tell each other on the return march. They are not

usually things on a high level: about work, or our

comrades, or the bread or the cold. But for a week

now there had been something new: every evening Lorenzo brings us six or eight pints of soup from

the Italian civilian workers. To solve the problem of

transport, we had to

procure what is called a "menaschka"

here, that is, a zinc-pot, made to order, more like a

bucket than a pot. Silberlust,

the tin-smith, made it

for us from two scraps

of a gutter in exchange for three

171

If This is a Man

rations of bread; it was a splendid, sturdy, capacious

pitcher, with the characteristic shape of a neolithic tool.

In the whole camp there are only a few Greeks who

have a menaschka larger than ours. Besides the material

advantages, it carries with it a perceptible improvement in our social standing. A menaschka like ours is a

diploma of nobility, a heraldic emblem: Henri is

becoming our friend and speaks to us on equal terms;

L. has assumed a paternal

and condescending air; as for

Elias, he is perpetually at our side, and although he

spies on us with tenacity to discover the secret of our

"organtsacja" he overwhelms us at the same time with

incomprehensible declarations of solidarity and affection,

and deafens us with a litany of portentous obscenities

and

oaths in Italian and French which he learnt somewhere

and by which he obviously means to honour us.

As for the moral aspect

of the new state of affairs, Alberto and I are forced to agree that there is nothing to be very proud of; but it is so easy to find justifications !

Besides, the very fact that we have new things to talk

about is no negligible gain. We talk about our

plan to buy a second menaschka

to rotate with the first, so as to make only one expedition a day to the remote corner of the yard where Lorenzo is

now working will be sufficient. We speak about Lorenzo and how to reward him; later, if we return, we will of

course do everything we can for him; but of what use is

it to talk about that? He knows as well as us that we can

hardly hope to return. We ought to do something at once; we could try to have his shoes repaired at the

cobbler's shop in our Lager where repairs are free (it seems a

paradox, but officially everything was free in

the extermination camps). Alberto

will try

: he is a friend

of the head-cobbler, perhaps a few pints of soup will

be enough.

172

The Last One

We talk about three new exploits

of ours, and we

agree that for obvious reasons of professional secrecy

it is inadvisable to talk about them at large: it is a

pity, our

personal prestige would be greatly increased.

As for the first, it is my brain-child. I knew that the Blockaltester of Block 44 was short of brooms and

I stole one in the yard; as far as this goes there is nothing

extraordinary. The difficulty was to smuggle the broom

into Lager on the return march, and I solved it in what

I believe to be a completely original way: I took apart the handle and the head of the broom, sawing the former

into two pieces

and carrying the various parts separately

into camp (the two pieces of the handle tied to my thighs inside my trousers) and then reconstructed the whole article. This required a piece of tin-plate, a

hammer and nails to join together the two pieces of

wood. The whole business only took four days.

Contrary to what I feared, the customer not only did

not devalue my broom but showed it as a curiosity to several of his friends, who gave me a regular order for two other brooms "of the same model."

But Alberto had other irons in the fire. In the

first place he had put the finishing touches to

Operation File" and had already carried it out successfully twice.

Alberto goes to the tool-store, asks for a file and chooses

a largish one. The storekeeper writes "one file" next

to his number and Alberto leaves. He goes straight to a safe civilian

(a gem of a rascal from Trieste, as

shrewd as they make them, who helps Alberto more for

love of the art than for interest or philanthropy),

who

has no difficulty

in exchanging the large file on the open market for two small ones of equal or lesser value.

Alberto gives back "one file" to the store and sells

the other.

And he has just crowned his achievements with his

173

If This is a Man

masterpiece, an audacious new combination of singular

elegance. It must first be stated that for some weeks

now Alberto had been entrusted with a special duty:

the yard in the morning he is given a bucket with pliers, screwdrivers and several hundred celluloid labels in

different colours, which he has to fit on to suitable clips in order to tag the numerous and lengthy pipe of hot and

cold water, steam, compressed air, gas, naphtha, vacuum,

etc. which run in all directions throughout the Polymeri- zation Department. It must also be stated (and here

there seems to be no connection: but does not ingenuity

consist in the finding or creating of connections between

apparently extraneous orders of ideas?) that for all us

Haftlinge the shower constitutes a quite unpleasant

occurrence for various reasons (the water is lacking and

is cold or otherwise boiling, there is no changing-room, we have no towels nor

soap, and during our enforced

absence it is easy to be robbed). As the shower is

obligatory, the Blockalteste need a system of control

enabling them to apply sanctions against whoever tries

to evade it: usually a trusted member of the Block is

placed at the door, and like Polyphemus touches everyone

who comes out to feel if he is wet; if he is, he is given a ticket, if he is dry, he is given five blows from a

truncheon. One can only claim one's bread the following

morning by presenting the ticket.

Alberto's attention concentrated on the tickets. In

general they are only wretched pieces of paper which

are given back damp, crumpled and unrecognizable. Al-

berto knows his Germans and the Blockalteste are all

German, or German-trained: they love order, systems,

bureaucracy; even more, although rough and irascible

blockheads, they cherish an infantile delight in glittering,

many-coloured objects.

174

The Last One

Having played the theme, there follows the brillant

development. Alberto systematically withdrew a series

of labels of the same colour; from each one he made

three small disks (I organized the necessary instrument,

a cork-borer, in the Laboratory): when two hundred disks

were ready, enough for a Block, he went to the

Blockaltester and offered him his "Spezialitat"

at the mad

price of ten rations of bread, payment by instalments.

The customer accepted

with enthusiasm, and Alberto now

has at his disposal

a formidable article in fashion which

is guaranteed to be accepted in every hut, one colour per hut: for no Blockaltester wants to be regarded as

niggardly or reactionary. Even more important, he has

no need to be afraid of rivals, as he alone has access to

the primary material. Is it not well thought out?

We talk about these things, stumbling from one

puddle to the other, between the black of the sky and

the mud of the road. We talk and we walk. I carry the two empty bowls, Alberto the happy weight of the

full menaschka. Once again the music from the band,

the ceremony of "Mutzen ab" hats smartly off in front of

the SS; once more Arbeit Macht Fret, and the announce-

ment of the Kapo: "Kommando 98, zwei und sechzig

Haftlinge, Starke stimmt," sixty-two prisoners, number

correct. But the column has not broken up, they

have

made a march as far as the roll-call square. Is there

to be a roll-call? It is not a roll-call. We have seen the crude glare of the searchlight and the well-known

profile of the gallows.

For more than an hour the squads continued to return,

with the hard clatter of their wooden shoes on the

frozen snow. When all the Kommandos had returned, the band suddenly stopped and a raucous German voice

ordered silence. Another German voice rose up in the

175

If This is a Man

sudden quiet,

and spoke for a long time angrily into

the

dark and hostile air. Finally the condemned man was

brought out into the blaze of the searchlight.

All this pomp and ruthless ceremony are not new

to us. I have already watched thirteen hangings since I

entered the camp; but on the other occasions they were

for ordinary crimes, thefts from the kitchen, sabotage,

attempts to

escape. Today it is different.

Last month one of the crematoriums at Birkenau had

been blown up. None of us knows (and perhaps no one

will ever know) exactly how the exploit was carried out :

there was talk of the Sonderkommando, the Special

Kommando attached to the gas chambers and the ovens, which is itself periodically exterminated,

and which is

kept scrupulously segregated from the rest of the camp.

The fact remains that a few hundred men at Birkenau,

helpless and exhausted slaves like ourselves, had found

in themselves the strength to act, to mature the fruits

of their hatred.

The man who is to die in front of us today in some

way took part in the revolt. They say he had contacts

with the rebels of Birkenau, that he carried arms into

our camp, that he was plotting a simultaneous mutiny

among us. He is to die today before our very eyes: and

perhaps the Germans do not understand that this solitary

death, this man's death which has been reserved for

him, will bring him glory, not infamy.

At the end of the German's speech, which nobody

understood, the raucous voice of before again rose up:

"Habt ihr verstanden?" Have you understood?

Who answered "Jawohl?" Everybody and nobody: it was as if our cursed resignation took body by itself,

as if it turned into a collective voice above our heads.

But everyone heard the cry of the doomed man, it

pierced through the old thick barriers of inertia and

176

The Last One

submissiveness, it struck the living core of man in each of us:

"Kamaraden, ich bin der LetzteT (Comrades, I am the last

one!).

I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an

abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur, a sign of assent.

But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and grey,

our heads dropped, and we did not uncover our

heads until the German ordered us to do so. The trap-

door opened, the body wriggled horribly; the band began

playing again and we were once more lined up and

filed past

the quivering body of the dying man.

At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well

finished. The Russians can come now: there are no

longer any strong men among us, the last one is now

hanging above our heads, and as for the others, a few

halters had been enough. The Russians can come now :

they will only find us, the slaves, the worn-out, worthy of the unarmed death which awaits us.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as

to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under

your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to

fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not

even a look of judgement.

Alberto and I went back to the hut, and we could

not look each other in the face. That man must have

been tough, he must have been made of another metal

than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us,

could not bend him.

Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we

know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally

177

If This is a Man

learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue and cold, even if we return home.

We lifted the menaschka on to the bunk and divided it, we satisfied the daily ragings of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.

178

The Story of Ten Days

Already for some months now the distant booming of the Russian guns had been heard at intervals when,

on the January 11, 1945, I fell ill of scarlet fever

and was once more sent into Ka-Be. "Infekttonsab-

teilug ': it meant a small room, really quite clean, with

ten bunks on two levels, a wardrobe, three stools, and

a closet seat with the pail

for corporal needs. All in a

space of three yards by five.

It was difficult to climb to the upper bunks as there

was no ladder; so, when a patient got worse he was

transferred to the lower bunks.

When I was admitted I was the thirteenth in the

room. Four of the others two French political

prisoners and two young Hungarian Jews had scarlet

fever; there were three with diphtheria, two with typhus,

while one suffered from a repellent facial erysipelas. The

other two had more than one illness and were incredibly

wasted away.

I had a high fever. I was lucky enough to have

a bunk entirely to myself: I laid down with relief

179

If This is a Man

knowing that I had the right to forty days* isolation and

therefore of rest, while I felt myself still sufficiently

strong to fear neither the consequences of scarlet fever

nor the selections.

Thanks to my by-now long experience of camp life

I managed to bring with me all my personal belongings :

a belt of interlaced electric wire, the knife-spoon, a

needle with three needlefuls, five buttons, and last of all

eighteen flints which I had stolen from the Laboratory.

From each of these, shaping them patiently with a knife,

it was possible to make three smaller flints, just the right

gauge for a normal cigarette lighter. They were valued

at six or seven rations of bread.

I enjoyed four peaceful days. Outside it was snowing and very cold, but the room was heated. I was given

strong doses of sulpha drugs, I suffered from an intense

feeling of sickness and was hardly able to eat; I did

not want to talk.

The two Frenchmen with scarlet fever were quite

pleasant. They were provincials from the Vosges who

had entered the camp only a few days before with a

large convoy of civilians swept up by the Germans in

their retreat from Lorraine. The elder one was named

Arthur, a peasant, small and thin. The other, his bed-

companion, was Charles, a scool teacher, thirty-two years

old; instead of a shirt he had been given a summer vest,

ridiculously short.

On the fifth day the barber came. He was a Greek

from Salonica: he spoke only the beautiful Spanish of

his people, but understood some words of all the languages

spoken in the camp. He was called Askenazi and had

been in the camp for almost three years. I do not know

how he managed to get the post of Frisor of Ka-Be : he

spoke neither German nor Polish, nor was he in fact

excessively brutal. Before he entered, I heard him

180

The Story of Ten Days

speaking excitedly for a long time in the corridor with

one of the doctors, a compatriot of his. He seemed

to have an unusual look on his face, but as the expressions

of the Levantines are different from ours, I could not

tell whether he was afraid or happy or merely upset. He knew me, or at least knew that I was Italian.

When it was my turn I climbed down laboriously from the bunk. I asked him in Italian if there was

anything new: he stopped shaving me, winked in a

serious and allusive manner, pointed to the window with

his chin, and then made a sweeping gesture with his

hand towards the west.

"Morgen, alle Kamarad weg? He looked at me for a moment with his eyes wide-

open, as if waiting for a reaction, and then he added:

"todos, todos" and returned to his work. He knew about

my flints and shaved me with a certain gentleness. The news excited no direct emotion in me. Already

for many months I had no longer felt any pain, joy

or fear, except in that detached and distant manner

characteristic of the Lager, which might be described as

conditional : if I still had my former sensitivity, I thought, this would be an extremely moving moment.

My ideas were perfectly clear; for a long time now

Alberto and I had foreseen the dangers which would

accompany the evacuation of the camp and the liberation.

As for the rest, Askenazi's news was merely a confirmation

of rumours which had been circulating for some days:

that the Russians were at Censtochowa, sixty miles to

the north; that they were at Zakopaxe, sixty miles to

the south; that at Buna the Germans were already

preparing the sabotage mines.

I looked at the faces of my comrades one by one:

it was clearly useless to discuss it with any of them.

They would have replied: "Well?" and it would all

181

If This is a Man

have finished there. The French were different, they were still fresh.

"Did you hear?" I said to them. "Tomorrow they are going to evacuate the camp."

They overwhelmed me with questions. "Where to? On foot?... The ill ones as well? Those who cannot walk?" They knew that I was an old prisoner and

that I understood German, and deduced that I knew

much more about the matter than I wanted to admit.

I did not know anything more: I told them so but

they continued to ask questions. How stupid of them! But of course, they had only been in the Lager for a week

and had not yet learnt that one did not ask questions. In the afternoon the Greek doctor came. He said

that all patients able to walk would be given shoes and

clothes and would leave the following day with the

healthy ones on a twelve mile march. The others would

remain in Ka-Be with assistants to be chosen from the

patients least ill.

The doctor was unusually cheerful, he seemed drunk.

I knew him : he was a cultured, intelligent man, egoistic and

calculating. He added that everyone, without

distinction, would receive a triple ration of bread, at

which the patients visibly cheered up. We asked him

what would happen to us. He replied that probably the Germans would leave us to our fate: no, he did not

think that they would kill us. He made no effort to hide the fact that he thought otherwise. His very cheerfulness boded ill.

He was already equipped for the march. He had

hardly gone out when the two Hungarian boys began to speak excitedly to each other. They were in an

advanced state of convalescence but extremely wasted

away. It was obvious that they were afraid to stay with the

patients and were deciding to go with the

182

The Story of Ten Days

healthy ones. It was not a question of reasoning : I would

probably also have followed the instinct of the flock if

I had not felt so weak; fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one

try to run

away.

Outside the hut the camp sounded unusually excited.

One of the two Hungarians got up, went out and returned

half an hour later laden with filthy rags.

He must have taken them from the store-house of clothes still to be

disinfected. He and his comrade dressed feverishly,

putting on rag after rag. One could see that they were

in a hurry to have the matter over with before the

fear itself made them hesitate. It was crazy of them

to think of walking even for one hour, weak as they

were, especially in the snow with those broken-down

shoes found at the last moment. I tried to explain, but

they looked at me without replying. Their eyes were like those of terrified cattle.

Just for a moment it flashed through my mind that

they might even be right. They climbed awkwardly out

of the window; I saw them, shapeless bundles, lurching into the night. They did not return, I learnt much

later that, unable to continue, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the beginning of the march.

It was obvious that I, too, needed a pair of shoes.

But it took me an hour to overcome the feeling of

sickness, fever and inertia. I found a pair in the corridor.

(The healthy prisoners had ransacked the deposit of

the patients' shoes and had taken the best ones; those

remaining, with split soles and unpaired, lay all over

the place). Just

then I met Kosman, the Alsatian. As

a civilian he had been a Reuter correspondent

at Clermont

Ferrand; he also was excited and euphoric. He said: "If you return before me, write to the mayor of Metz

that I am about to come back."

183

If This is a Man

Kosman was notorious for his acquaintances among the Prominents, so his optimism seemed a good sign and

I used it to justify my inertia to myself; I hid the shoes

and returned to bed.

Late that night the Greek doctor returned with a

rucksack on his shoulders and a woollen hood. He

threw a French novel on my bed. "Keep it, read it, Italian. You can give it back to me when we meet

again." Even today I hate him for those words. He

knew that we were doomed.

And then finally Alberto came, defying the prohi- bition, to say goodbye to me from the window. We were

inseparable: we were "the two Italians" and foreigners even mistook our names. For six months we had shared

a bunk and every scrap of food "organised" in excess

of the ration; but he had had scarlet fever as a child and

I was unable to infect him. So he left and I remained.

We said goodbye, not many words were needed, we had already discussed our affairs countless times. We did not think we would be separated for very long. He

had found a sturdy pair of leather shoes in a reasonable

condition : he was one of those fellows who immediately find everything they need.

He also was cheerful and confident, as were all those

who were leaving. It was understandable: something

great and new was about to happen; we could finally feel a force aroupd us which was not of Germany; we

could concretely feel the impending collapse of that hated

world of ours. At any rate, the healthy ones who,

despite all their tiredness and hunger, were still able

to move, could feel this. But it is obvious that whoever

is too weak, or naked or barefoot, thinks and feels in

a different way, and what dominated our thoughts was

the paralysing sensation of being totally helpless in the

hands of fate.

184

The Story of Ten Days

All the healthy prisoners (except a few prudent ones

who at the last moment undressed and hid themselves in the

hospital beds) left during the night of January 18,

1945. They must have been about twenty thousand,

coming from different camps. Almost in their entirety

they vanished during the evacuation march : Alberto was

among them. Perhaps someone will write their story one day.

So we remained in our bunks, alone with our illnesses, and with our inertia stronger than fear.

In the whole Ka-Be we numbered perhaps eight hundred. In our room there were eleven of us, each in

his own bunk, except for Charles and Arthur who slept together. The rhythm of the great machine of the Lager was extinguished. For us began the ten days outside

both world and time.

January 18th. During the night of the evacuation the

camp- kitchens continued to function, and on the following

morning the last distribution of soup took place in the

hospital. The central-heating plant had been abandoned; in the huts a little heat still lingered on, but hour by

hour the temperature dropped and it was evident that

we would soon suffer from the cold. Outside it must

have been at least 50F. below zero; most of the patients had only a shirt and some of them not even that.

Nobody knew what our fate would be. Some SS

men had remained, some of the guard towers were still

occupied.

About midday an SS officer made a tour of the huts.

He appointed a chief in each of them, selecting from

among the remaining non-Jews, and ordered a list of

the patients

to be made at once, divided into Jews and

non-Jews. The matter seemed clear. No one was

surprised that the Germans

preserved their national love

185

If This is a Man

of classifications until the very end, nor did any Jew

seriously expect to live until the following day.

The two Frenchmen had not understood and were

frightened. I translated the speech

of the SS man. I was

annoyed that they should be afraid: they had not even

experienced a month of the Lager, they hardly suffered

from hunger yet, they were not even Jews, but they were

afraid.

There was one more distribution of bread. I spent the afternoon reading the book left by the doctor: it

was interesting and I can remember it with curious

accuracy. I also made a visit to the neighbouring ward

in search of blankets; many patients had been sent out

from there and their blankets were free. I brought back

some quite heavy ones.

When Arthur heard that they came from the dysentery ward, he looked disgusted: "Y avait point besom de le

dire' 9

in fact, they were polluted. But I thought that in

any case, knowing what awaited us, we might as well

sleep comfortably.

It was soon night but the electric light remained on.

We saw with tranquil fear that an armed SS man stood at the corner of the hut. I had no desire to talk and

was not afraid except in that external and conditional

manner I have described. I continued reading until late.

There were no clocks, but it must have been about

11 p.

m. when all the lights

went out, even those of

the reflectors on the guard-towers. One could see the

searchlight beams in the distance. A cluster of intense

lights burst out in the sky, remaining immobile, crudely

illuminating the earth. One could hear the roar of the

aeroplanes.

Then the bombardment began. It was nothing new:

I climbed down to the ground, put my bare feet into

my shoes, and waited.

186

The Story of Ten Days

It seemed far away, perhaps over Auschwitz.

But then there was a near explosion, and before one

could think, a second and a third one, loud enough to burst one's ear-drums. Windows were breaking, the

hut shook, the spoon I had fixed in the wall fell down.

Then it seemed all over. Cagnolati, a young peasant also from the Vosges, had apparently never experienced a raid. He had jumped out naked from his bed and was concealed in a corner, screaming. After a few

minutes it was obvious that the camp had been struck.

Two huts were burning fiercely, another two had been

pulverized, but they were all empty. Dozens of patients

arrived, naked and wretched, from a hut threatened by fire: they asked for shelter. It was impossible to take

them in. They insisted, begging and threatening in many

languages. We had to barricade the door. They dragged themselves elsewhere, lit up by the flames, barefoot in

the melting snow. Many trailed behind them streaming

bandages. There seemed no danger to our hut, so long as the wind did not change.

The Germans were no longer there. The towers were

empty.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an

Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of

Providence. But without doubt in that hour the memory of biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity passed

like a wind through all our minds.

It was impossible to sleep; a window was broken and

it was very cold. I was thinking that we would have

to find a stove to set up and get some coal, wood and

food. I knew that it was all essential, but without some

help I would never have had the energy to carry it out.

I spoke about it to the two Frenchmen.

187

If This is a Man

January 19th. The Frenchmen agreed. We got up at dawn, we three. I felt ill and helpless, I was cold

and afraid.

The other patients

looked at us with respectful

curiosity: did we not know that patients were not

allowed to leave Ka-Be? And if the Germans had not

all left? But they said nothing, they were glad that

someone was prepared to make the test.

The Frenchmen had no idea of the topography of

the Lager, but Charles was courageous and robust, while

Arthur was shrewd, with the practical commonsense of

the peasant. We went out into the wind of a freezing

day of fog, poorly wrapped up in blankets.

What we saw resembled nothing that I had ever seen

or heard described.

The Lager, hardly dead, had already begun to

decompose. No more water, or electricity, broken

windows and doors slamming to in the wind, loose iron-

sheets from the roofs screeching, ashes from the fire

drifting high, afar. 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 the frozen soil, like an invasion

of worms. They had ransacked all the empty huts in

search of food and wood; they had violated with senseless

fury the grotesquely adorned rooms of the hated

Blockalteste, forbidden to the ordinary Haftlinge until

the previous day;

no longer in control of their own

bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious

snow, the only source of water remaining in the whole

camp. Around the smoking ruins of the burnt huts, groups

of patients lay stretched out on the ground, soaking up its last warmth. Others had found potatoes somewhere

and were roasting them on the embers of the fire, glaring

188

The Story of Ten Days

around with fierce eyes. A few had had the strength to

light a real fire, and were melting snow in it in any

handy receptacle. We .hurried to the kitchens as fast as we could; but

the potatoes

were already almost finished. We filled two sacks and left them in Arthur's keeping. Among the

ruins of the Prominenzblock Charles and I finally found

what we were searching for : a heavy cast-iron stove, with

the flue still usable. Charles hurried over with a wheel-

barrow and we loaded it on; he then left me with the

task of carrying it to the hut and ran back to the sacks.

There he found Arthur unconscious from the cold.

Charles picked up both sacks and carried them to safety,

then he took care of his friend.

Meanwhile, staggering with difficulty, I was trying to

manoeuvre the heavy wheelbarrow as best as possible. There was the roar of an engine and an SS man entered

the camp on a motorcycle. As always when I saw their

hard faces I froze from terror and hatred. It was too

late to disappear

and I did not want to abandon the

stove. The rules of the Lager stated that one must

stand at attention with head uncovered. I had no hat

and was encumbered by the blanket. I moved a few

steps away from the wheelbarrow and made a sort of

awkward bow. The German moved on without seeing

me, turned behind a hut and left. Only later did I

realize the danger I had run.

I finally reached the entrance of the hut and unloaded

the stove into Charles's hands. I was completely

breathless from the effort, large black spots danced before

my eyes. It was essential to get it working. We all three had

our hands paralysed while the icy metal stuck to the

skin of our fingers, but it was vitally urgent to set it up

to warm ourselves and to boil the potatoes. We had

189

If This is a Man

found wood and coal as well as embers from the burnt

huts.

When the broken window was repaired

and the stove

began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in

everyone, and 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 neighbour," and left

no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager

was dead.

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 Haftlinge to men again. Arthur recovered quite well, but from then on always

avoided exposing himself to the cold; he undertook the

upkeep of the stove, the cooking of the potatoes, the

cleaning of the room and the helping of the patients. Charles and I shared the various tasks outside. There

was still an hour of light : an expedition yielded us a pint of

spirits and a tin of yeast, thrown in the snow by

someone; we made a distribution of potatoes and one

spoonful of yeast per person. I thought vaguely that it

might help against lack of vitamins.

Darkness fell; in the whole camp ours was the only room with a stove, of which we were very proud. Many invalids from other wards crowded around the door,

but Charles's imposing stature held them back. Nobody, neither us nor them, thought that the inevitable prom-

iscuity with our

patients made it extremely dangerous

to stay in our room, and that to fall ill of diphtheria

190

The Story of Ten Days

in those conditions was more surely fatal than jumping off a fourth floor.

I myself was aware of it, but I did not dwell long

on the idea: for too long I had been accustomed to

think of death by illness as a possible event, and in that

case unavoidable, and anyhow beyond any possible intervention on our

part. And it did not even

pass

through my mind that I could have gone to another

room in another hut with less danger of infection. The

stove, our creation, was here, and spread a wonderful

warmth; I had my bed here; and by now a tie united

us, the eleven patients of the

Injekttonsabteilung.

Very occasionally we heard the thundering of artillery, both near and far, and at intervals the crackling of

automatic rifles. In the darkness, lighted only by the

glow of the embers, Arthur and I sat smoking cigarettes made of herbs found in the kitchen, and spoke of

many things, both past and future. In the middle of

this endless plain,

frozen and full of war, we felt at

peace with ourselves and with the world. We were

broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally

accomplished something useful perhaps like God

after the first day of creation.

January 20th. The dawn came and it was my turn

to light

the stove. Besides a general feeling of weakness,

the aching of my joints reminded me all the time that

my scarlet fever was far from over. The thought of

having to plunge into the freezing air to find a light in the

other huts made me shudder with disgust. I remembered

my flints: I sprinkled a piece of paper with spirits, and

patiently scraped a small

pile of black dust on top of

it and then scraped the flint more vigorously with my

knife. And finally, after a few sparks, the small pile

191

If This is a Man

caught fire and the small bluish flame of alcohol rose

from the paper. Arthur climbed down enthusiastically from his bed

and heated three potatoes per person from those boiled

the day before; after which, Charles and I, starved and

shivering violently, left again to explore the decaying

camp. We had enough food (that is, potatoes) for two days

only; as for water, we were forced to melt the snow, an awkward operation in the absence of large pots, which yielded a blackish, muddy liquid which had to be

filtered.

The camp was silent. Other starving spectres like

ourselves wandered around searching, unshaven with

hollow eyes, greyish skeleton bones in rags. Shaky on

their legs, they entered

and left the empty huts carrying

the most varied of objects: axes, buckets, ladles, nails;

anything might be of use, and those looking furthest

ahead were already thinking of profitable commerce with

the Poles of the surrounding countryside.

In the kitchen we found two of them squabbling over the last handfuls of

putrid potatoes. They had

seized each other by their rags, and were fighting with

curiously slow and uncertain movements, cursing in

Yiddish between their frozen lips.

In the courtyard of the storehouse there were two

large piles of cabbages and turnips (those large, insipid

turnips, the basis of our

diet). They were so frozen

that they could only be separated with a pickaxe. Charles

and I took turns, using all our energy at each stroke,

and we carried out about 100 pounds. There was still

more: Charles discovered a packet of salt and ("Une

fameuse trouvaille!") a can of water of perhaps twelve

gallons, frozen in a block.

We loaded everything on to a small cart (formerly

192

The Story of Ten Days

used to distribute the rations for the huts; there were

a great number of them abandoned everywhere), and

we turned back, toiling over the snow.

We contented ourselves that day with boiled potatoes again and slices of turnips roasted on the stove, but

Arthur promised important innovations for the following

day.

In the afternoon I went to the ex-surgery, searching for anything that might prove of use. I had been

preceded: everything had been upset by inexpert looters.

Not a bottle intact, the floor covered by a layer of

rags, excrement and medicaments. A naked, contorted

corpse. But there was something that had escaped my

predecessors: a battery from a lorry. I touched the

poles with a knife a small spark. It was charged.

That evening we had light in our room.

Sitting in bed, I could see a large stretch of the

road through the window. For the past three days the

Wehrmacht in flight passed by in waves. Armoured

cars, tiger tanks camouflaged in white, Germans on

horseback, Germans on bicycle, Germans on foot, armed

and unarmed. During the night, long before the tanks

came into sight, one could hear the grinding of their

tracks.

Charles asked: "a roule encore?"

"<^a roule toujours."

It seemed as if it would never end.

January 21st. Instead it ended. On the dawn of the 21st we saw the

plain deserted and lifeless, white

as far as the eye could see, lying under the flight of the

crows, deathly sad. I would almost have preferred to

see something moving again. The Polish civilians had

also disappeared, hiding

who knows where. Even the

wind seemed to have stopped. I wanted only one thing :

193

If This is a Man

to stay in bed under my blankets and abandon myself to a complete exhaustion

of muscles, nerve and willpower;

waiting as indifferently as a dead man for it to end or

not to end.

But Charles had already lighted the stove, Charles,

our active, trusting, alive friend, and he called me to

work:

"Vas-y, Primo, descends-toi de la-haut; il y a Jules

& attraper par les

oreilles..."

"Jules" was the lavatory bucket, which every morning

had to be taken by its handles, carried outside and

emptied into the cesspool; this was the first task of the

day, and if one remembers that it was impossible to wash

one's hands and that three of us were ill with typhus, it

can be understood that it was not a pleasant job.

We had to inaugurate the cabbages and turnips. While I went to search for wood and Charles collected

the snow for water, Arthur mobilized the patients who

could sit up to help with the peeling. Towarowski,

Sertelet, Alcalai and Schenck answered the call.

Sertelet was also a peasant from the Vosges, twenty

years old; he seemed in good shape, but day by day

his voice assumed an ever more sinister nasal timbre,

reminding us that diphtheria seldom relaxes its hold.

Alcalai was a Jewish glazier from Toulouse; he was

quiet and discreet, and suffered from erysipelas on the

face.

Schenk was a Slovak businessman, Jewish; a typhus

patient, he had a formidable appetite. Likewise Towa-

rowski, a Franco-Polish Jew, stupid and talkative, but

useful to our community through his communicative

optimism.

So while the patients scraped with their knives, each

one seated on his bunk, Charles and I devoted ourselves

to finding a suitable site for the kitchen operations. An

194

The Story of Ten Days

indescribable filth had invaded every part of the camp. All the latrines were

overflowing, as naturally nobody cared any more about their upkeep, and those suffering from dysentery (more than a hundred) had fouled every corner of Ka-Be, filling all the buckets, all the bowls

formerly used for the rations, all the pots. One could

not move an inch without watching one's step; in the

dark it was impossible to move around. Although

suffering from the cold, which remained acute, we

thought with horror of what would happen if it thawed :

the diseases would spread irreparably, the stench would

be suffocating, and even more, with the snow melted

we would remain definitively without water.

After a long search we finally found a small area of floor not

excessively soiled in a spot formerly used

for the laundry. We lit a live fire to save time and complications and disinfected our hands, rubbing them

with chloramine mixed with snow.

The news that a soup was being cooked spread rapidly

through the crowd of the semi-living; a throng of starved

faces gathered at the door. Charles, with ladle uplifted, made a short, vigorous speech, which although in French

needed no translation.

The majority dispersed but one came forward. He was a Parisian, a high-class tailor (he said), suffering from tuberculosis. In exchange for two pints of soup he offered to make us clothes from the many blankets

still to be found in the camp. Maxime showed himself

really able. The following

day Charles and I were in possession of a jacket, trousers

and gloves of a rough fabric of striking colours.

In the evening, after the first soup, distributed with

enthusiasm and devoured with greed, the great silence

of the plain

was broken. From our bunks, too tired

to be really worried, we listened to the bangs of

19S

If This is a Man

mysterious artillery groups apparently hidden on all the

points of the horizon, and to the whistle of the shells

over our heads.

I was thinking that life was beautiful and would

be beautiful again, and that it would really be a pity to let ourselves be overcome now. 1 woke up the patients who were dozing and when I was sure that they were

all listening

I told them, first in French and then in my best German, that they must all begin to think of

returning home now, and that as far as depended on us,

certain things were to be done and others to be avoided.

Each person should carefully look after his own bowl

and spoon; no one should offer his own soup to others;

no one should climb down from his bed except to go to

the latrine; if anyone was in need of anything, he should

only turn to us three. Arthur in particular was given the task of supervizing the discipline and hygiene, and

was to remember that it was better to leave bowls and

spoons dirty rather than wash them with the danger

of changing those of a diphtheria patient with those

of someone suffering from typhus. I had the impression that the patients by now were

too indifferent to everything to pay attention to what I

had said; but I had great faith in Arthur's diligence.

January 22nd. If it is courageous to face a grave

danger with a light heart, Charles and I were courageous

that morning. We extended our explorations to the SS

camp, immediately outside the electric wire-fence.

The camp guards must have left in a great hurry. On the tables we found

plates half-full of a by-now

frozen soup which we devoured with an intense

pleasure,

mugs full of beer, transformed into a yellowish ice, a

chess board with an unfinished game. In the dormitories,

piles of valuable things.

196

The Story of Ten Days

We loaded ourselves with a bottle of vodka, various medicines, newspapers and magazines and four first-rate

eiderdowns, one of which is today in my house in Turin.

Cheerful and irresponsible,

we carried the fruits of our

expedition back to the dormitory, leaving them in

Arthur's care. Only that evening did we learn what

happened perhaps only half an hour later.

Some SS men, perhaps dispersed, but still armed,

penetrated into the abandoned camp. They found that

eighteen Frenchmen had settled in the dining-hall of

the SS-Waffe. They killed them all methodically, with

a shot in the nape of the neck, lining up their twisted

bodies in the snow on the road; then they left. The

eighteen corpses remained exposed until the arrival of

the Russians; nobody had the strength to bury them.

But by now there were beds in all the huts occupied

by corpses as rigid as wood, whom nobody troubled to

remove. The ground was too frozen to dig graves;

many bodies were piled up in a trench, but already

early on the heap showed out of the hole and was

shamefully visible from our window.

Only a wooden wall separated us from the ward

of the dysentery patients, where many were dying and

many dead. The floor was covered by a layer of frozen

excrement. None of the patients

had strength enough to climb out of their blankets to search for food, and

those who had done it at the beginning had not returned

to help

their comrades. In one bed, clasping each other

to resist the cold better, there were two Italians. I often

heard them talking, but as I spoke only French, for a

long time they were not aware of my presence. That

day they heard my name by chance, pronounced with

an Italian accent by Charles, and from then on they

never ceased groaning and imploring.

Naturally I would have liked to have helped them,

197

If This is a Man

given the means and the strength, if for no other reason

than to stop

their crying.

In the evening when all the

work was finished, conquering my tiredness and disgust, I dragged myself gropingly along the dark, filthy corridor

to their ward with a bowl of water and the remainder of

our day's soup. The result was that from then on, through

the thin wall, the whole diarrhoea ward shouted my name day and night with the accents of all the languages of Europe, accompanied by incomprehensible prayers,

without my being able to do anything about it. I felt

like crying,

I could have cursed them.

The night held ugly surprises.

Lakmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor wreck of a man. He was

(or had

been) a Dutch Jew,

seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been in bed for three months; I have no idea how he had

managed to survive the selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time a serious

cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered

with bedsores, so much so that by now he could only lie on his stomach.

Despite all this, he had a ferocious

appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could

understand him.

Perhaps the cause of it all was the cabbage and

turnip soup, of which Lakmaker had wanted two

helpings. In the middle of the night he groaned and

then threw himself from his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but was too weak and fell to the ground,

crying and shouting loudly.

Charles lit the lamp (the battery showed itself

providential) and we were able to ascertain the gravity

of the incident. The boy's bed and the floor were

filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly becoming

insupportable. We had but a minimum supply of water

198

The Story of Ten Days

and neither blankets nor straw mattresses to spare.

And

the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a terrible

source of infection, while he could certainly not be left

all night to groan and shiver in the cold in the middle

of the filth.

Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in

silence. While I held the lamp, he cut all the dirty

patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with

a knife. He lifted Lakmaker from the ground with the

tenderness of a mother, cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and lifted him into

the remade bed in the only position in which the

unfortunate fellow could lie. He scraped the floor with

a scrap

of tinplate,

diluted a little chloramine, and

finally spread disinfectant over everything, including

himself.

I judged his self-sacrifice by the tiredness which I

would have had to overcome in myself to do what he

had done.

January 23rd. Our potatoes were finished. For days

past the rumour had circulated through all the huts

that an enormous trench of potatoes lay somewhere

outside the barbed wire, not far from the camp. Some unknown

pioneer must have carried out

patient

explorations, or else someone knew the spot with

precision. In fact, by the morning of the 23rd a section

of the barbed wire had been beaten down and a double

file of wretches went in and out through the opening.

Charles and I left, into the wind of the leaden plain. We were beyond the broken barrier.

"D/V done, Primo, on est dehorsT

It was exactly like that; for the first time since the

day of my arrest I found myself free, without armed

guards, without wire fences between myself and home.

199

If This is a Man

Perhaps 400 yards from the camp lay the potatoes a treasure. Two extremely long ditches, full of potatoes and covered by alternate layers of soil and straw to

protect them from the cold. Nobody would die of

hunger any more.

But to extract them was by no means easy work. The

cold had made the surface of the earth as hard as iron.

By strenuous work with a pickaxe it was possible to

break the crust and lay bare the deposit; but the majority

preferred to work the holes abandoned by others and

continue to deepen them, passing the potatoes to their

companions standing outside.

An old Hungarian had been surprised there by death. He lay there like hunger personified: head and shoulders under a

pile of earth, belly in the snow, hands stretched

out towards the potatoes. Someone came later and

moved the body about a yard, so freeing the hole.

From then on our food improved. Besides boiled

potatoes and potato soup, we offered our patients potato

pancakes, on Arthur's recipe: rub together raw potatoes

with boiled, soft ones, and roast the mixture on a red-hot

iron-plate. They tasted of soot.

But Sertelet, steadily getting worse, was unable to

enjoy them. Besides speaking with an ever more nasal

tone, that day he was unable to force down any food;

something had closed up in his throat, every mouthful

threatened to suffocate him.

I went to look for a Hungarian doctor left as a

patient in the hut in front. When he heard the word

diphtheria he started back and ordered me to leave.

For pure propaganda purposes I gave everyone nasal

drops of camphorated oil. I assured Sertelet that they

would help him; I even tried to convince myself.

200

The Story of Ten Days

January 24th. Liberty. The breach in the barbed

wire gave us a concrete image of it. To anyone who

stopped to think, it signified no more Germans, no more

selections, no work, no blows, no roll-calls, and perhaps,

later, the return.

But we had to make an effort to convince ourselves

of it, and no one had time to enjoy the thought. All

around lay destruction and death.

The pile

of corpses in front of our window had by

now overflowed out of the ditch. Despite the potatoes

everyone was extremely weak: not a patient in the

camp improved, while many fell ill with pneumonia and diarrhoea; those who were unable to move themselves,

or lacked the energy to do so, lay lethargic in their

bunks, benumbed by the cold, and nobody realized when

they died.

The others were all incredibly tired: after months

and years of the Lager it needs more than potatoes to give

back strength to a man. Charles and I, as soon as we

had dragged the fifty pints of daily soup from the

laundry to our room, threw ourselves panting on the

bunks, while Arthur, with that domesticated air of his,

diligently divided the food, taking care to save the

three rations of "rabiot pour les travailleurs" and a little

of the sediment "pour les italiens d'a cote"

In the second room of the contagious ward, likewise

adjoining ours and occupied mainly by tuberculosis

patients, the situation was quite different. All those

who were able to had gone to other huts. Their weakest

comrades and those who were most seriously ill died one

by one in solitude.

I went in there one morning to try and borrow a

needle. A patient

was wheezing in one of the upper

bunks. He heard me, struggled to sit up, then fell

dangling, head downwards over the edge towards me,

201

If This is a Man

with his chest and arms stiff and his eyes white. The man

in the bunk below automatically stretched up his arms to

support the body and then realized that he was dead.

He slowly withdrew from under the weight and the

body slid to the ground where it remained. Nobody knew

his name.

But in hut 14 something new had happened. It was

occupied by patients recovering from operations, some

of them quite healthy. They organized an expedition to the English prisoner-of-war camp, which it was assumed

had been evacuated. It proved a fruitful expedition.

They returned dressed in khaki with a cart full of

wonders never seen before: margarine, custard powders,

lard, soya-bean flour, whisky.

That evening there was singing in hut 14.

None of us felt strong enough to walk the one mile

to the English camp and return with a load. But

indirectly the fortunate expedition proved of advantage

to many. The unequal division of goods caused a

reflourishing of industry and commerce. Our room,

with its lethal atmosphere, transformed itself into a

factory of candles poured into cardboard moulds, with

wicks soaked in boracic acid. The riches of hut 14

absorbed our entire production, paying us in lard and

flour.

I myself had found the block of beeswax in the

elektro magazin; I remember the expression of disappoint- ment of those who saw me carry it away and the dialogue that followed:

"What do you want to do with that?"

It was inadvisable to reveal a shop secret; I heard

myself replying with the words I had often heard

spoken by the old ones of the camp, expressing their

favourite boast of being hardboiled, "old hands,"

202

The Story of Ten Days

who always knew how to find their feet: "hh verstehe

verschiedene Sache" I know how to do many things...

January 25th. It was Somogyi's turn. He was a

Hungarian chemist, about fifty years old, thin, tall and

taciturn. Like the Dutchman he suffered from typhus and scarlet fever. He had not spoken for perhaps five

days; that day he opened his mouth and said in a firm

voice :

"I have a ration of bread under the sack. Divide

it among you three. I shall not be eating anymore." We could not find anything to say, but for the time

being we did not touch the bread. Half his face had

swollen. As long as he retained consciousness he

remained closed in a harsh silence.

But in the evening and for the whole of the night

and for two days without interruption the silence was

broken by his delirium. Following a last interminable

dream of acceptance and slavery he began to murmur:

"Jawohl" with every breath, regularly and continuously

like a machine, "]awohl," at every collapsing of his

wretched frame, thousands of times, enough to make

one want to shake him, to suffocate him, at least to

make him change the word.

I never understood so clearly as at that moment how

laborious is the death of a man.

Outside the great silence continued. The number

of ravens had increased considerably and everybody knew

why. Only at distant intervals did the dialogue of the

artillery wake up.

We all said to each other that the Russians would arrive soon, at once; we all proclaimed it, we were

all sure of it, but at bottom nobody believed it.

Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager, and

even of believing in one's own reason. In the Lager it is

203

If This is a Man

useless to think, because events happen for the most

part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful,

because it keeps alive a sensitivity which is a source of

pain, and which some

providential natural law dulls

when suffering passes

a certain limit.

Like joy,

fear and pain itself, even expectancy can

be tiring. Having reached January 25th, with all relations

broken already for eight days with that ferocious world

that still remained a world, most of us were too exhausted

even to wait.

In the evening, around the stove, Charles, Arthur and

I felt ourselves become men once again. We could

speak of everything. I grew enthusiastic at Arthur's

account of how one passed the Sunday at Provencheres

in the Vosges, and Charles almost cried when I told

him the story of the armistice in Italy, of the turbid and

desperate beginning of the Partisan resistance, of the

man who betrayed us and of our capture in the mountains.

In the darkness, behind and above us, the eight invalids did not lose a syllable, even those who did not

understand French. Only Somogyi implacably confirmed

his dedication to death.

January 26th. We lay in a world of death and

phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished

around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation,

begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its

conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers

injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all

restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits

for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of

bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of

thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most

vicious sadist.

204

The Story of Ten Days

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those

near to us. This is why the experience of someone who

has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune from it, and we owe each other

mutual gratitude. This is why my friendship with Charles

will prove lasting.

But thousands of feet above us, in the gaps

in the grey clouds, the complicated miracles of aerial

duels began. Above us, bare, helpless and unarmed,

men of our time sought reciprocal death with the most

refined of instruments. A movement of a finger could cause the destruction of the entire camp, could

annihilate

thousands of men; while the sum total of all our efforts

and exertions would not be sufficient to prolong by one

minute the life of even one of us.

The saraband stopped at night and the room was

once again filled with Somogyi's monologue.

In full darkness I found myself suddenly awake.

"L'paw/vieux* was silent; he had finished. With the

last gasp of life, he had thrown himself to the ground:

I heard the thud of his knees, of his hips, of his

shoulders, of his head.

"La mort fa chasse de son lit" Arthur defined it.

We certainly could not carry him out during the

night. There was nothing for it but to go back to

sleep again.

January 21th. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful

wreck of skin and bones, the Somogyi thing.

There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash

ourselves, so that we dare not touch him until we have

cooked and eaten. And besides: "...rien de si degoutant

que les debordements" said Charles justly; the latrine

205

If This is a Man

had to be emptied. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.

The Russians arrived while Charles and I were

carrying Somogyi a little distance outside. He was very light.

We overturned the stretcher on the grey snow. Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having

a beret.

Of the eleven of the Infektionsabteilung Somogyi was the only one to die in the ten days. Sertelet,

Cagnolati, Towarowski, Lakmaker and Dorget (I have

not spoken of him so far; he was a French industrialist

who, after an operation for peritonitis, fell ill of nasal

diphtheria) died some weeks later in the temporary Russian

hospital of Auschwitz. In April, at Katowice,

I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has

reached his family happily and Charles has taken up his teacher's profession again; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day.