The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Of course, it would be unjust to attribute this acquiescence to a specifically Jewish characteristic: the ranks of the Sonderkommandos also included non-Jewish prisoners, Germans and Poles, but with “more dignified” assignments as Kapos; and Russian prisoners of war, whom the Nazis considered only one rung above the Jews. There were not many, because at Auschwitz there were not many Russians (for the most part, they were exterminated immediately after capture, machine-gunned on the edge of enormous common graves), but they did not behave differently from the Jews.

  The Sonderkommandos, as bearers of a horrendous secret, were kept strictly separate from the other prisoners and from the outside world. Nevertheless, as anyone who has been through similar experiences knows, there are always cracks in barriers. News, no matter how incomplete and distorted it may be, has an enormous power of penetration, and some piece of it always trickles through. Vague and incomplete rumors about the squads were already circulating among us during our imprisonment, and they were later confirmed by the sources mentioned above. The intrinsic horror of this human condition, however, has imposed a kind of restraint on all testimony. So it is still difficult today to construct an image of what it meant to be forced to do this job for months. Some people have testified that a great deal of alcohol was made available to those poor wretches, and that they were in a permanent state of total brutishness and prostration. One of them asserted, “To do this job, either you go crazy on the first day or you get used to it.” Another, instead, “Of course, I could have killed myself or let myself be killed, but I wanted to live, to avenge myself and to bear witness. You mustn’t think we’re monsters: we’re like you, only much more unhappy.”

  These statements, and the countless others that they must have made or shared with one another but that have not come down to us, cannot be taken literally. From men who have known this extreme destitution one cannot expect a deposition in the legal sense of the term but, rather, something between a complaint, a curse, atonement, and the impulse to justify, to rehabilitate oneself. What should be expected is a liberating outburst rather than truth with the face of Medusa.

  Envisioning and organizing the squads was National Socialism’s most diabolical crime. Behind the pragmatic considerations (economizing on able-bodied men, forcing others to do the most atrocious jobs), more subtle ones can be detected. Through this institution, the attempt was made to shift the burden of guilt to others, that is, to the victims, so that not even the awareness that they were innocent was left to bring them relief. It is neither easy nor pleasant to plumb the depths of this evil, but I think it has to be done, because what was perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, and could involve us or our children. There is a temptation to turn away and to distract the mind: it is a temptation that must be resisted. In fact, the existence of the Sonderkommandos had a meaning and contained a message: “We, the Lord’s people, are your destroyers, but you are no better than us; if we want to, and we do, we are capable of destroying not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed our own.”

  Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian doctor, was one of the few survivors of the last Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was a well-known anatomical pathologist, an expert on autopsies. The chief physician of the SS at Birkenau, the same Josef Mengele who died not many years ago, escaping justice, procured his services, giving him favorable treatment and considering him almost a colleague. Nyiszli was supposed to dedicate himself specifically to the study of twins: in fact, Birkenau was the only place in the world where it was possible to examine the corpses of twins who had been killed simultaneously. In addition to this special assignment, which, incidentally, he does not appear to have opposed very resolutely, Nyiszli was the physician for the Sonderkommando, with which he lived in close contact. He relates an episode that I find telling.

  The SS, as I have said, chose the candidates for the squads carefully from the Lagers and the arriving trains, and did not hesitate to slaughter on the spot anyone who refused or who proved to be unfit for the assignment. They behaved in the same contemptuous and detached way toward the new recruits as they did toward all the inmates, especially the Jews. It had been inculcated in them that the Jews were despicable creatures who were enemies of Germany and therefore did not deserve to live; in the best case, they could be forced to work until they died from exhaustion. The behavior of the SS toward the veterans of the Squad was different: they tended to see them almost as colleagues, by now as inhuman as they were, yoked to the same wagon, bound by the same foul chain of forced complicity. Nyiszli tells the story of having witnessed, during a break in his “work,” a soccer match between a team of SS crematorium guards and a team from the Sonderkommando. The spectators were other SS officers and the rest of the Squad, taking sides, making bets, applauding, cheering the players on, as if the game were being played on a village field rather than at the gates of hell.

  Nothing of this kind ever took place, nor would it have been conceivable, with other categories of prisoners; but with them, the “crematorium crows,” the SS soldiers could take the field as equals, or almost. Behind this armistice one can see a Satanic smile: it has been consummated, we have succeeded, you are no longer the other race, the anti-race, the primary enemy of the Thousand Year Reich; you are no longer the people who reject idols. We have embraced you, corrupted you, dragged you to the bottom with us. Now you are like us, you who are so proud: smeared with the blood of your people, like us. Like us and like Cain, you have murdered your brother. Come, now we can play together.

  Nyiszli relates another episode that should give us pause. The travelers on a newly arrived train have been crammed into the gas chamber and killed, and the Squad is performing its ghoulish daily chores, sorting the pile of bodies, washing them down with hoses, and transporting them to the crematorium, when on the floor they find a young girl who is still alive. The event is exceptional, unique. Maybe the human bodies formed a barrier around her and sequestered a pocket of air that remained breathable. The men are in a quandary. Death is their job around the clock, a habit, since “either you go crazy the first day or you get used to it.” But the girl is alive. They hide her, warm her, bring her beef broth, ask her questions. She is sixteen years old. She has lost her sense of time and space. She doesn’t know where she is, and she endured without understanding the procedure of the sealed boxcar, the brutal preliminary selection, the stripping of clothes, and entrance into the chamber from which no one had ever come out alive. She did not understand, but she did see, so she has to die, and the men of the Squad know this, just as they know that they, too, will have to die, and for the same reason. But these slaves, brutalized by alcohol and daily slaughter, are transformed. Before them is not the anonymous mass, the river of frightened, stunned people getting off the trains: before them is a person.

  This episode is reminiscent of the scene in Manzoni’s The Betrothed when even the “vile gravedigger” shows “unusual respect” and hesitation before a singular case, the refusal by the mother of Cecilia, a little girl who has died of the plague, to allow her daughter’s body to be thrown into the wagon and jumbled up with the other corpses. Such events astonish us because they contradict the image we harbor of man in harmony with himself, coherent, monolithic; and they should not astonish us, because man is not like that. Against all logic, compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual at the same time; anyway, compassion is not logical. There is no proportionality between the compassion we feel and the dimensions of the sorrow that gives rise to compassion. A single Anne Frank arouses more emotion than the myriad others who suffered like her but whose images have remained in the shadows. Maybe things are this way out of necessity; if we had to and could suffer the suffering of everybody, we would be unable to live. Maybe saints are the only ones who have been granted the terrible gift of compassion toward the many. What remains for the gravediggers, the Sonderkommandos, and all of us, in the best of cases, is the occasional feeling of compassion toward th
e individual, the Mitmensch, our fellow man: the flesh-and-blood human being who stands before us, within reach of our providentially myopic senses.

  A doctor is summoned and revives the girl with an injection. No, the gas had not achieved its effect, yes, she will be able to survive, but where and how? At that moment Muhsfeld, one of the SS officers assigned to the machinery of death, arrives. The doctor takes him aside and explains the situation. Muhsfeld hesitates, then makes his decision. The girl has to die. If she were older the situation would be different, it would make more sense. Maybe she could be persuaded to keep quiet about what has happened to her, but she is only sixteen: she can’t be trusted. But he does not kill her by his own hand; he summons a subordinate, who kills her with a shot to the nape of the neck. Now, this Muhsfeld was not a merciful man; his daily ration of slaughter was punctuated by arbitrary and capricious episodes, and he stood out for the refined cruelty of his inventions. He was tried in 1947, sentenced to death, and hanged in Kraków, and this was just. But not even he was a monolith. Had he lived in a different place and time, he probably would have behaved like any other ordinary man.

  In The Brothers Karamazov, Grushenka tells the tale of the scallion. A wicked old woman dies and goes to hell, but her guardian angel, thinking hard, remembers that once, only once, she had done a good deed by giving to a beggar a scallion that she pulled up in her garden. He holds out the scallion to her, and the old woman grabs it and is pulled away from the flames of hell. I have always found this tale repugnant: what human monster has never in his life given a scallion to another, if only to his children, his wife, or his dog? That single instant of compassion, immediately erased, is not enough, of course, to absolve Muhsfeld, but it is enough to place him, if only at the far end, within the gray area, that zone of ambiguity that emanates from regimes founded on terror and obsequiousness.

  It is not hard to judge Muhsfeld, and I don’t think the court that sentenced him had any doubts. By contrast, our need and our ability to judge falter before the Sonderkommandos. Questions arise immediately, convulsive questions that are hard to answer in a way that reassures us about human nature. Why did they accept this job? Why didn’t they rebel? Why didn’t they prefer death?

  To some extent, the facts at our disposal allow us to attempt a response. Not everyone did accept. Some rebelled, knowing they would die. We have accurate reports of at least one case: in July of 1944, a group of four hundred Jews from Corfu were inducted into the Squad; to a man, they rejected the assignment and were immediately sent to the gas chamber. The memories of various other single mutinies remain, all of which were instantly punished by an atrocious death (Filip Müller, one of the very few survivors of the Sonderkommandos, tells of a comrade whom the SS threw into the oven while he was still alive). There were also many cases of suicide at the moment of induction or immediately afterward. Finally, we should remember that it was the Sonderkommando that organized, in October 1944, the only, desperate attempt at revolt in the history of the Auschwitz Lager.

  The reports of the uprising that have come down to us are neither complete nor concordant. We know that the rebels (assigned to two of the five crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau), who were poorly armed and had no contacts with the Polish partisans on the outside of the camps or with the underground defense organization on the inside, blew up crematorium No. 3 and battled the SS. The fight ended quickly. Some of the insurgents managed to cut the barbed wire and flee to the outside world, but they were captured soon afterward. None of them survived. Some four hundred and fifty were killed immediately by the SS; of the SS, three were killed and twelve wounded.

  The ones we do know about, the miserable manual laborers of the slaughter, are therefore the others, the ones who occasionally preferred a few weeks more of life (and what a life) to instant death, but in no case did they force themselves, nor were they forced, to kill with their own hands. I repeat: I believe that no one has the authority to judge them, not those who experienced the Lager and, especially, not those who did not. I would invite anyone who dares to attempt judgment to undertake, with sincerity, a conceptual experiment: imagine, if you can, spending months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, by exhaustion, by forced proximity to others, and by humiliation; seeing your loved ones die around you, one after the other; being cut off from the world, unable to either send or receive news; in the end being loaded onto a train, eighty or a hundred per boxcar; traveling toward the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and finally finding yourself cast within the walls of an indecipherable hell. At this point you are offered a chance for survival: you are given a proposal, or rather an order, to perform a gruesome but unspecified job. This, it seems to me, is the true Befehlnotstand, the “state of coercion following an order”: not the excuse invoked systematically and impudently by the Nazis at their trials and, later (in their footsteps), by war criminals from many other countries. The first situation is a rigid ultimatum: immediate obedience or death. The second, instead, occurs within the power center, and could be (and often was) resolved by corrective action, a stalled promotion, a moderate punishment, or, in the worst cases, by a transfer to the war front.

  The experiment I have proposed is not pleasant. Vercors tried to portray it in his novella Les armes de la nuit (The Weapons of the Night), which talks about the “death of the soul,” and which, reread today, seems to me intolerably contaminated by aestheticism and literary prurience. Yet its theme is still undoubtedly the death of the soul. No one can know how long and what torments his soul can resist before crumpling or breaking. Every human being has reserves of strength whose measure he does not know; they may be large, small, or nonexistent, but the only means of assessing them is severe adversity. Even without invoking the extreme case of the Sonderkommandos, we survivors commonly find that when we talk about our experiences our listeners say, “In your place, I wouldn’t have lasted a day.” This statement has no precise meaning; you are never in someone else’s place. Each individual is an object so complex that it is useless to try to predict behavior, especially in extreme situations; we cannot even predict our own behavior. This is why I ask that the history of the “crematorium crows” be pondered with compassion and rigor, but that any judgment of them be suspended.

  The same impotentia judicandi leaves us paralyzed before the case of Chaim Rumkowski. His story is not strictly a story of the camps, although it does end there. It is a story of the ghetto, but it speaks so eloquently to the fundamental theme of human ambiguity fatally provoked by oppression that it seems to fit our argument almost too well. I will repeat the story here, although I have already told it elsewhere.7

  When I returned home from Auschwitz, in one of my pockets I found an odd aluminum coin, scratched and corroded, that I have saved to this day. On one side it bears the Jewish star (the shield of David), the date, 1943, and the word getto, which is pronounced ghetto in German. On the other side are the inscriptions quittung über 10 mark and der älteste der juden in litzmannstadt, which mean “10-Mark Voucher” and “The Elder of the Jews in Litzmannstadt”: in other words, it was the currency used inside the ghetto. I had forgotten its existence for many years until, around 1974, I was able to reconstruct its fascinating and sinister story.

  In honor of the German general who had defeated the Russians in the First World War, the Nazis had rechristened the Polish city of Lodz Litzmannstadt. In the final months of 1944, the last survivors of the Lodz Ghetto were deported to Auschwitz, where I must have found the by then worthless coin on the ground.

  In 1939, Lodz had 750,000 inhabitants, and it was the most industrialized Polish city, as well as the most “modern” and the ugliest. Like Manchester and Biella (Italy), it lived on textiles, and was shaped by the presence of myriad factories, large and small, most of which were already antiquated then. The Nazis, as they had in every city of a certain importance in occupied Eastern Europe, immediately established a ghetto, thereby reviving—with the addition of their modern feroci
ty—an administrative system from the Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation. The Lodz Ghetto, which was created in February 1940, was chronologically the first ghetto and in population the second (after Warsaw). It eventually held more than 160,000 Jews and was liquidated only in the fall of 1944. It was thus the longest-lived of the Nazi ghettos, and that can be ascribed to two reasons: its economic importance and the provocative personality of its president.

  His name was Chaim Rumkowski: a failed minor industrialist, he settled in Lodz in 1917 after various travels and vicissitudes. In 1940, he was almost sixty years old and a childless widower. He enjoyed a certain status and had a reputation as a leader of Jewish charitable organizations and as an energetic, rough, and authoritarian character. The position of president (or elder) of a ghetto was intrinsically grotesque, but it was still a position; it represented a form of social recognition, provided advancement, and came with rights and privileges—in short, authority. Well, Rumkowski was a man who loved authority with a passion. It’s not known how he came to be appointed: maybe it was a joke in the sinister Nazi style (Rumkowski was, or appeared to be, a fool with an air of respectability, and thus the perfect dupe); or maybe he plotted to be selected, so great, apparently, was his will to power. It has been demonstrated that the four years of his presidency, or, rather, of his dictatorship, were a surprising tangle of megalomaniac dreams, barbaric vitality, and genuine diplomatic and organizational skill. He quickly came to see himself as an absolute but enlightened monarch, and he was obviously encouraged in that direction by his German masters, who, although they were playing with him, appreciated his talent for administration and orderliness. They granted him authorization to mint currency, both metal (like my coin) and paper, on watermarked stock that was provided to him officially. This currency was used to pay the ghetto’s exhausted workers. They could spend it at the shops to procure their food rations, which amounted to an average of 800 calories a day. (I note, in passing, that at least 2000 calories a day are required to survive in a state of absolute repose.)