SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ: IF THIS IS A MAN by Primo Levi (1959, 153 pages, memoir)

Here is an extraordinary memoir that chronicles the 11 months that Jewish-Italian chemist Primo Levi spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz until its liberation. Levi, being a scientist, is more clinical than Elie Wiesel in describing the horrors of life in a Nazi-created hell.

Here Levi describes the scene as he (at age 25) and over 600 other Jews in a detention camp in Mussolini’s Italy prepare for their next-day’s journey into the hands of the Nazis. These are people packing for a train-ride to death:

…The mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed their 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 [food] to eat today?

Two weeks later, here is the scene of the unloading, upon the train’s arrival at the ramps of Auschwitz:

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 96 men and 29 women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau [two sub-camps at Auschwitz], and that of all the others, more than 500 in number, not one was living two days later. We also know that not even this tenuous principle of 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.

Survival in Auschwitz is much more than a relaying of incidents. Levi also thinks on a deeper level about the events:

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…. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it [perfect happiness or perfect unhappiness], and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty….

In Auschwitz, Levi benefited from his skills in chemistry: He was eventually placed to work in a laboratory at the industrial giant I.G. Farben, a chemical conglomerate that used massive amounts of slave labor from the Nazi concentration camps and that also manufactured the Zyklon-B gas used in the Nazis' gassing chambers. Levi worked in the production of synthetic rubber.  This placement may well have saved Levi's life, since it allowed him to avoid the back-breaking hard labor that most inmates had to suffer through.

The book closes with the description of the 10 days between the Nazis’ abandonment of Auschwitz and the arrival of the Russian troops. For me this is perhaps the most fascinating part of the book, because it’s the first time I’ve read a first-person account of that strange period of purgatory in the life-cycle of a Nazi concentration camp. Here Levi comments on the moment when he and his fellow survivors first realized that every last Nazi was finally gone from the camp:

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.