by Primo Levi
In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civilian authorities, is sanctioned and encouraged by the SS; theft in the camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilians a normal operation of exchange; theft among Häftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal severity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil,” “just” and “unjust”; let each judge, on the basis of the picture outlined and 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 described so far and will continue to describe is the ambiguous life of the Lager. In our time many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good that any memory of this exceptional human state be retained.
To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. Indeed, we are convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not always positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing. We would like to consider how the Lager was also, and preeminently, a gigantic biological and social experiment.
Let thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture, and customs, be enclosed within barbed wire, and there be subjected to a regular, controlled life, which is identical for all and inadequate for all needs. No one could have set up a more rigorous experiment to determine what is inherent and what acquired in the behavior of the human animal faced with 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 “Häftling” 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 need and physical privation, many habits and social instincts are reduced to silence.
But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: what comes to light is 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 cowardly and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are much less distinct; they seem less innate, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediate gradations.
This division is much less evident in ordinary life, for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. Normally a man is not alone and, in his rise or fall, is bound to the destiny of his neighbors, 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 usually in possession of such spiritual, physical, and even financial resources that the probability of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, is relatively small. And then one must add the definite cushioning effect exercised by the law, and by the moral sense that constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a poor man from becoming too poor or a powerful one too powerful.
But things are different in the Lager: here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null Achtzehn totters, he will find no one to extend a hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one’s interest that there be one more Muselmann5 dragging himself to work every day. And if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new expedient for avoiding the hardest work, a new art that 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 he who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival.
In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a fierce law that states: “To he who has, it will be given; from he who has not, it 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, and is recognized by all. The bosses, too, willingly maintain contact with the adaptable, with those who are strong and astute, sometimes even in a comradely way, because they hope, perhaps later, to derive some benefit. But it’s not worth speaking to the Muselmänner, the men who are disintegrating, because you know already that they will complain and will tell you about what they used to eat at home. It’s even less worthwhile to make friends with them, because they have no important connections in the camp, they do not get any extra rations, they do not work in profitable Kommandos, and they do not know any secret method of organizing. And, in any case, it’s clear that they are only passing through here, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field and a checked-off number in a register. Although engulfed and swept along unceasingly by the innumerable crowd of those like them, they suffer and drag themselves on in an opaque inner solitude, and in solitude they die or disappear, leaving no 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 situation was different), kleine Nummer, low numbers under 150000, only a few hundred were still alive; not one was an ordinary Häftling, vegetating in the ordinary Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There remained only doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp; the notably pitiless, vigorous, and inhuman individuals installed (as the result of investiture by the SS leadership, which, by its choices, showed itself to possess a Satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapo, Blockältester, etc.; and, finally, those who, without holding particular offices, always managed, by their astuteness and energy, to organize successfully, gaining in this way, besides material advantages and reputation, indulgence and esteem on the part of the powerful people in the camp. Anyone who does not know how to become an Organisator, Kombinator, Prominent (the eloquence of these words!) soon becomes a Muselmann. In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; in the concentration camp, the third way does not exist.
The easiest thing is to succumb: one has only to carry out all the orders one receives, eat only the ration, stick to the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience proved that very rarely could one survive more than three months in this way. All the Muselmänner who go to the gas chambers have the same story, or, more exactly, have no story; they have followed the slope to the bottom, naturally, like streams running down to the sea. Once they entered the camp, they were overwhelmed, either through basic incapacity, or through misfortune, or through some banal incident, before they could adapt; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German and to untangle the fiendish knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already breaking down, and nothing can save them from selection or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always the same, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death—in the face of it they have no fear, because they are too tired to understand.
They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could encompass all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image, which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, head bowed and shoulders bent, on whose face and in whose eyes no trace of thought can be seen.
If the drowned have no story, and there is only a single, broad path to perdition, the paths to salvation are man
y, rugged and unimaginable.
The main path, as we have stated, is Prominenz. Prominenten is the name for the camp officials, from the Häftling overseer (Lagerältester) to the Kapos, the cooks, the nurses, the night guards, even the barrack sweepers, and the Scheissminister and Bademeister (superintendents of the latrines and the showers). We are more particularly interested in the Jewish Prominents, because, while the others were automatically appointed to positions upon entering the camp, by virtue of their natural supremacy, the Jews had to plot and struggle hard to gain them.
The Jewish Prominents form a sad and notable human phenomenon. Present, past, and atavistic sufferings converge with the tradition and cultivation of hostility toward the stranger to make of them monsters of asociality and insensitivity.
They are a typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if a position of privilege, a degree of comfort, and a reasonable probability of survival are offered to a few individuals in a state of slavery, in exchange for the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, someone will certainly accept. He will be removed from the common law and will become untouchable; hence the more power he is granted, the more hateful and hated he will be. When he is given 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, which remains unfulfilled toward the oppressors, will spill over, unreasonably, onto the oppressed; and he will be satisfied only when he has heaped onto his underlings the abuse received from above.
We are aware that this is very distant from the picture that is usually given of the oppressed, who are united, if not in resistance, at least in suffering. We do not deny that this can happen when oppression does not go beyond a certain limit, or perhaps when the oppressor, through inexperience or magnanimity, tolerates or encourages it. But we would observe that in our time, in all countries that have been invaded by a foreign people, an analogous condition of rivalry and hatred among the subjugated has been established; and this, like many other human characteristics, could be grasped in the Lager with crude force.
There is less to say about the non-Jewish Prominents, although they were by far the more numerous (no “Aryan” Häftling was without a post, however modest). That they were stupid and bestial seems natural once one knows that the majority were common criminals, chosen from the German prisons precisely for the purpose of being employed as supervisors in the camps for Jews; and we maintain that it was a very apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the wretched human specimens whom we saw at work were an average sample, not just of Germans in general but even of German prisoners in particular. It is more difficult to explain how in Auschwitz the German, Polish, and Russian political Prominents rivaled the ordinary convicts in brutality. But it is well-known that in Germany the label of political crime was 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 harsh conditions, which, however, differed in many aspects from those described here.
But, besides the officials in the strict sense of the word, there was a vast category of prisoners, not initially favored by fate, who struggled to survive purely by their own strength. One had to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against 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 willpower. Or else to strangle all dignity and kill all conscience, to enter the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain peoples and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways devised and put into practice by us in order not to die: as many as there are human characters. All implied a grueling struggle of one against all, and many a not inconsiderable sum of aberrations and compromises. To survive without renouncing any part of their own moral world—apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune—was conceded only to a very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints.
We will try to show in how many ways one might reach salvation by telling 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 his fellow men, beginning with the pogrom that drove 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 been accustomed to thinking of himself merely as a sack that needs periodic refilling. Schepschel is not very robust, or very courageous, or very wicked; he is not even particularly astute, and has never found an arrangement that allows him a little respite, but is reduced to small, occasional expedients, kombinacje, as they are called here.
Every now and again he steals a broom in Buna and sells it to the Blockältester. When he manages to set aside a little bread-capital, he rents the tools of the cobbler in the Block, a compatriot of his, and works on his own account for a few hours; he knows how to make suspenders with braided electrical wire; Sigi told me that he has seen him during the midday break singing and dancing in front of the barrack of the Slovak workers, who sometimes reward him with the remains of their soup.
This said, one might be inclined to think of Schepschel with indulgent sympathy, as a poor wretch whose spirit by now harbors 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 arose 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 favor in the eyes of the Blockältester and furthering his candidacy for the position of vat washer.
The story of the engineer Alfred L. shows among other things how empty is the myth of original equality among men.
In his own country L. was the manager of an extremely important factory that made chemical products, and his name was (and is) familiar in industrial circles throughout Europe. He was a robust man of about fifty; I don’t know how he had been arrested, but he entered the camp like everyone else: naked, alone, and unknown. When I knew him, he was very emaciated, yet his face still preserved the features of a disciplined and methodical energy; at the time, his privileges were limited to the daily cleaning of the Polish workers’ soup vat; this job, which he had somehow obtained as his exclusive monopoly, yielded him half a bowlful of soup per day. Certainly it was not enough to satisfy his hunger; nevertheless, no one had ever heard him complain. Rather, the few words that he let slip implied vast secret resources, a solid and fruitful “organization.”
This was confirmed by his appearance. 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 bimonthly change (we would like to point out here that to wash a shirt meant finding soap, finding time, finding space in the overcrowded washhouse; training oneself to keep a careful watch on the wet shirt, without losing sight of it for a moment, and to put it on, naturally still wet, at the time for silence, when the lights are turned out); he owned a pair of wooden shoes for going to the shower, and even his striped garments were singularly suited to his physique, and were clean and new. L. had acquired in essence the full appearance of a Prominent, considerably before becoming one; only a long time afterward did I find out that he had been able to earn all this show of prosperity with incredible tenacity, paying for each of his acquisitions and services with bread from his own ration, thus imposing on himself a regime of additional privations.
His plan was a long-term one, which is all the more remarkable as it was conceived in an environment dominated by a mentality of the provisional; and L. carried it out with strict inner discipline, and without pity for himself or—with greater reas
on—for comrades who crossed his path. L. knew that it’s a short step from being judged powerful to effectively becoming so, and that everywhere, and especially amid the general leveling of the Lager, a respectable appearance is the best guarantee of being respected. He took great care not to be confused with the mass; he worked with ostentatious commitment, occasionally even admonishing lazy comrades in a persuasive and apologetic tone of voice; he avoided the daily struggle for the best place in line for the soup, and was prepared to take the first, notoriously very liquid portion, every day, so as to be noticed by the Blockältester for his discipline. To complete this detachment, in his relations with his comrades he always behaved 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 tidy clothing and his emaciated but clean-shaven face amid the herd of his sordid and slovenly colleagues to convince both Kapo and Arbeitsdienst immediately that he was one of the genuinely saved, a potential Prominent; and so (to he who has, it shall be given) he was, of course, promoted to “specialist,” named technical head of the Kommando, and taken on by the management of Buna as an analyst in the laboratory of the Styrene Department. He was subsequently appointed to examine all the new additions to the Chemical Kommando staff, in order to judge their professional ability. He always did this with extreme rigor, especially in regard to those in whom he scented possible future rivals.
I do not know how his story continued; but it seems to me very likely that he managed to escape death, and today is still living his cold life as a determined and joyless master.