by Primo Levi
Another military legacy was the ritual of “making the bed.” Granted, this expression is largely euphemistic. When there were bunk beds, each bed consisted of a thin mattress stuffed with wood shavings, two blankets, and a horsehair pillow, and generally two people slept there. The beds had to be made immediately after waking, and simultaneously throughout the barrack. So the occupants of the lower bunks had to straighten out their mattress and blankets standing between the feet of the occupants of the upper bunks, who were perched precariously on the wooden edges, intent on the same task. All the beds had to be made within one or two minutes, since the bread distribution began right afterward. They were frantic moments: the air filled with dust until it was opaque, along with nervous tension and insults traded in every language, because “making the bed” (Bettenbauen was the technical term) was a sacred operation, and had to be executed according to ironclad rules. The mattress, stinking of mold and spotted with suspicious stains, had to be plumped: for this purpose there were two slits in the cover through which to insert your hands. One of the two blankets had to be tucked in around the mattress, while the other had to be smoothed out over the pillow at a sharp angle and with straight edges. Once the operation was complete, everything was supposed to look like a flat rectangle, with the smaller rectangle of the pillow lying on top.
The camp SS and consequently all the barrack chiefs invested the Bettenbauen with a primary and indecipherable importance: maybe it was the symbol of order and discipline. Those who made their bed poorly, or forgot to do so, received harsh public punishment. In addition, each barrack had a pair of officials known as the Bettnachzieher (“bed inspectors”: a term that I don’t believe exists in standard German, and which Goethe would not have understood) whose duty was to inspect every single bed, and then make sure they were all lined up in a row. For that purpose, they had a piece of string as long as the barrack that they held over the made beds, correcting possible deviations to the centimeter. This maniacal neatness seemed absurd and grotesque rather than torturous. The carefully smoothed mattress had no consistency at all, and in the evening, beneath the weight of the bodies, it flattened immediately into the battens that held it. In fact, we slept on wood.
You get the impression that within the much broader borders of Hitler’s Germany, the military code and military etiquette were supposed to replace traditional “bourgeois” rules everywhere. By 1934 the dull violence of the “drill” had begun to invade the schools and was turned against the German people themselves. Newspapers of the time, which had maintained a degree of freedom and of criticism, report the exhausting marches forced on teenage boys and girls as part of pre-military training: up to fifty kilometers a day, wearing a knapsack, and no mercy for stragglers. Any parent or doctor who dared to protest was threatened with political sanctions.
The tattoo, an invention specific to Auschwitz, is another matter. Starting in early 1942, in Auschwitz and the Lagers under its command (there were around forty in 1944), the prisoners’ serial numbers were not only sewn on their clothes but also tattooed on their left forearm. The only prisoners exempt from this rule were non-Jewish Germans. The operation was carried out with methodical speed by specialized “scribes,” upon registration of new arrivals, whether they were coming from freedom, from other camps, or from the ghettos. In deference to the characteristic German talent for classification, a strict procedure was quickly outlined: the men were to be tattooed on the outer arm, the women on the inner. The numbers of Gypsies were to be preceded by a Z (for Zigeuner), while those of Jews, starting in May 1944 (before the mass arrival of Hungarian Jews), were to be preceded by an A, which was soon replaced by a B. Until September 1944, there were no children in Auschwitz: they were killed with gas upon arrival. After this date, entire Polish families began to arrive, families who had been arrested at random during the Warsaw uprising: all of them were tattooed, including newborns.
The procedure was relatively painless and lasted less than a minute. Its symbolic meaning was clear to everyone: this is an indelible sign that you will never get out of here alive; this is the mark branded on slaves and on livestock being sent to the slaughter, which is what you have become. You no longer have a name; this is your new name. The violence of the tattoo was gratuitous, an end in itself, a pure insult: wasn’t it enough to have three cloth numbers sewn on your pants, jacket, and winter coat? No, something more was needed, a nonverbal message, so the innocent would feel their sentence inscribed in their flesh. The tattoo also constituted a return to barbarism that was particularly upsetting to Orthodox Jews, since it is precisely in order to distinguish the Jews from the barbarians that tattooing is forbidden by Mosaic law (Leviticus 19:28).
Some forty years later, my tattoo has become a part of my body. I am neither proud of it nor ashamed, neither show it off nor conceal it. To anyone who asks out of pure curiosity, I am reluctant to show it. To anyone who expresses skepticism, I show it quickly and irately. I am puzzled by the fact that young people often ask me why I don’t have it removed: why should I? There are not many of us in the world who bear this testimony.
It is necessary to do (useful?) violence to oneself to be persuaded to speak of the destiny of the most defenseless. I will try, once again, to follow a logic that is not my own. For an orthodox Nazi, it must have been obvious, clear-cut, self-evident that all Jews had to be killed: it was dogma, a postulate. Including children, of course, and also, especially, pregnant women, to prevent the birth of future enemies. But why, in their furious raids, in every city and village of their immense empire, did they violate the doors of the dying? Why did they go to the trouble of dragging them on to the trains, of carrying them off to die far away, after a senseless journey, in Poland, on the threshold of the gas chambers? In my convoy there were two ninety-year-old women near death, who had been removed from the infirmary at Fòssoli. One died in transit, assisted in vain by her daughters. Wouldn’t it have been simpler, “cheaper,” to let them die, or perhaps kill them, in their beds rather than insert their agony into the collective agony of the train? It is hard to escape the conclusion that, in the Third Reich, the best option, the option imposed from above, was the one involving the maximum affliction, the maximum squandering of physical and moral suffering. The “enemy” was supposed not only to die but to die in agony.
Much has been written about work in the Lagers. I have described it elsewhere myself. Unpaid labor—slave labor—was one of the three main purposes of the concentration-camp system. The other two were the elimination of political adversaries and the extermination of the so-called inferior races. Parenthetically, the key difference between the Soviet and the Nazi concentration-camp systems was that in the Soviet camps the first aim was paramount and the third did not exist.
In the first Lagers, which were built roughly at the same time as Hitler’s rise to power, labor was purely punitive and practically useless for productive purposes. The only reason to send malnourished people off to shovel peat or split rocks was to sow terror. Besides, according to Nazi and Fascist rhetoric “work is ennobling”—a sentiment inherited from bourgeois rhetoric—and therefore the ignoble adversaries of the regime are unfit to work in the customary sense of the term. Their work has to be distressful: it leaves no room for professionalism but is, rather, the work of a beast of burden—pulling, pushing, carrying heavy loads—back bent to the ground. This was another form of useless violence: useful perhaps only for crushing resistance in the present and punishing resistance from the past. The women of Ravensbrück have described endless days spent during the quarantine period (before assignment to work squads in the factories) shoveling sand from the dunes: in a circle, under the July sun, every deportee had to shift the sand from her pile to the pile of her neighbor to the right, in a pointless and endless circle, since the sand ended up back where it had come from.
But this mythical, Dantesque torment of the body and the spirit was probably not devised to prevent the formation of pockets of self-defense or active
resistance: the SS soldiers in the Lagers were obtuse brutes rather than cunning demons. They had been schooled in violence. Violence ran in their veins, it was normal, a given. It oozed from their faces, their gestures, and their language. To humiliate “the enemy,” to make him suffer, was one of their daily chores. They didn’t have to think about it and they had no ulterior motives: violence was the motive. I do not mean to imply that they were made of a perverse human substance that was different from our own (there were sadists and psychopaths among them, but they were few). Put simply, for several years they had been subjected to a schooling that turned the reigning morality upside down. In a totalitarian regime, education, propaganda, and information encounter no obstacles: they have an unlimited power that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has been born and lives in a pluralistic system.
Unlike the purely punitive labors I have just described, work could occasionally become a form of self-defense. Such was the case for the few people in the camps who managed to be placed in their own trades: tailors, cobblers, carpenters, smiths, masons. The regaining of their customary activity also restored their human dignity to some extent. But for many others as well, it was a mental activity, an escape from the thought of death, a way of living from day to day. Besides, it is common experience that everyday cares, no matter how painful or annoying, help distract the mind from graver but more distant threats.
I have often noticed a curious phenomenon in some of my fellow prisoners (and at times in myself): the desire for a “job well done” is so deeply rooted that they feel compelled to “do well” even enemy jobs that are harmful to their families, their friends, and their side, and especially since it requires a conscious effort for them to do a job “badly” instead. Sabotage of Nazi work, in addition to being dangerous, also required overcoming an atavistic inner resistance. The mason from Fossano who saved my life, and whom I have described in If This Is a Man and in Lilith, detested Germany, the Germans, their food, their speech, and their war, but when they put him to work building defensive walls against the bombings, he built them straight and solid, with well-fitted bricks and all the mortar necessary. He did so not in obedience to orders but out of pride in his craft. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn describes an almost identical situation. Ivan, the protagonist, sentenced to ten years of hard labor for a crime he did not commit, gets satisfaction from building a state-of-the-art wall and seeing it come out perfectly straight. “Eight years in a camp couldn’t change his nature. He worried about anything he could make use of, about every scrap of work he could do—nothing must be wasted without good reason.” Anyone who has seen the celebrated film The Bridge on the River Kwai will remember the absurd zeal with which the English officer imprisoned by the Japanese goes about building an audacious wooden bridge for them. He is horrified when he realizes that the English saboteurs have mined it with explosives. The love of a job well done is a highly ambiguous virtue, as we can see. It kept Michelangelo going until his last days, but then there was Stangl, the diligent butcher of Treblinka, who replied to an interviewer with irritation: “Everything I did of my own free will I had to do as well as I could. That’s the way I am.” Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, was proud of the same virtue when he described the creative labors that led to his invention of the gas chamber.
I would also like to mention, as an extreme example of violence that is both stupid and symbolic, the evil use that was made (not sporadically but methodically) of the human body as an object, belonging to no one, that could be disposed of arbitrarily. Much has already been written about the medical experiments conducted in Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and elsewhere, and some of the perpetrators, who were often not real doctors but acted as if they were, have also been punished (but not Josef Mengele, the greatest and the worst of them all). These experiments ranged from testing new medicines on unknowing prisoners to senseless and scientifically useless torture, such as the acts committed at Dachau on Himmler’s orders for the benefit of the Luftwaffe. Here the selected individuals, who were sometimes overfed beforehand to restore them to physiological normalcy, were subjected to long baths in freezing-cold water or placed inside decompression chambers that simulated the rarefaction of air at twenty thousand meters (a height that none of the airplanes in those years could reach!) to establish the altitude at which human blood starts to boil: a fact that can be obtained in any laboratory at minimum cost and without victims, or even deduced from ordinary charts. It is important to remember such abominations today, when legitimate questions are being raised about the limits on subjecting lab animals to painful scientific experiments. This typical and apparently pointless but highly symbolic cruelty was extended, precisely because it was symbolic, to human remains after death: remains that every civilization, since the most remote prehistory, has respected, honored, and sometimes feared. The treatment they received in the Lagers implied that these remains were not human but, rather, brute, indifferent matter, useful at best only for industrial purposes. These many decades later, it is still horrifying and appalling to see the display at the Auschwitz museum of hair sheared from women destined for the gas chambers or the Lager, exhibited in a jumble and by the ton. Over time it has faded and wasted away, but it continues to whisper its silent accusation to the visitor. The Germans had run out of time to send it to its destination: this unusual merchandise was bought by German textile manufacturers who used it to make ticking and other industrial fabrics. It’s unlikely that the users did not know what material it was. It’s equally unlikely that the vendors, namely the SS authorities in the camps, made any money from it: their contempt prevailed over the profit motive.
Human ashes from the crematoriums, tons every day, were easily recognizable since they often contained teeth or vertebrae, but they were still used for various purposes: as landfill for marshy terrain, as cavity-wall insulation in wooden structures, and as phosphate fertilizer. They were notoriously used instead of gravel to pave the pathways of the SS village next to the camp. I couldn’t say whether this was out of sheer callousness or because, given its origins, it was material to be crushed underfoot.
• • •
I have no illusions about having exhausted the question, or having proved that useless cruelty was the exclusive legacy of the Third Reich and the necessary consequence of its ideological premises. What we know of the Cambodia of Pol Pot, for instance, suggests other explanations, but Cambodia is far from Europe and I know too little about it to be able to discuss it. This was certainly one of the essential features of Hitlerism, and not only inside the camps. The best commentary, in my view, is summarized in these two lines from Gitta Sereny’s long interview with Franz Stangl, the former commander of Treblinka:
“Why?” I asked Stangl, “if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies,” he said. “To make it possible for them to do what they did.”
In other words, before dying, the victim had to be degraded to alleviate the killer’s sense of guilt. This explanation is not without logic, but it cries out to the heavens: it is the only use of useless violence.
6
The Intellectual in Auschwitz
To enter into an argument with the deceased is embarrassing and unfair, especially when the absent party is a potential friend and a privileged interlocutor; but it can also be forced upon you. I am speaking of Hans Mayer, alias Jean Améry, philosopher, victim, and theoretician of suicide, whom I have already mentioned on page 2421. Stretched between these two names is a life that knew neither peace nor the quest for peace. He was born in Vienna in 1912 into a family that was primarily Jewish but had been assimilated and integrated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although no one had converted to Christianity in any formal sense, the family used to celebrate Christmas at home around a tree decked with ornaments. When small household accidents occurred his mother used to invoke the names of Jesus, Mar
y, and Joseph, and the memorial photograph of his father, who had died on the front in the First World War, depicted not a wise bearded Jew but an official wearing the uniform of the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger, the Austro-Hungarian infantry. Until the age of nineteen, Hans had never even heard that there was such a thing as a Yiddish language.
He takes his degree in literature and philosophy at Vienna, but not without some conflicts with the nascent National Socialist Party: while to him being Jewish is of no importance, to the Nazis the only thing that counts is blood, not his opinions and tendencies, and his is impure enough to make him an enemy of Pan-Germanism. A Nazi fist breaks a tooth, and the young intellectual is proud of the gap in his smile, as if it were a scar left by a student brawl. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 place him at the crossroads of destiny, and the young Hans, skeptical and pessimistic by nature, has no illusions. He is lucid enough (Luzidität will always be one of his favorite words) to understand precociously that every Jew in German hands is “a dead man on leave, someone to be murdered.”
He does not consider himself a Jew. He knows neither the Hebrew language nor Jewish culture. The word “Zionist” is of little concern to him, and religiously he’s agnostic. Nor does he feel he can construct an identity that does not belong to him; it would be a falsification, a masquerade. Anyone not born within the Jewish tradition is not a Jew and would have a hard time becoming one: by definition a tradition is something inherited; it is a product of centuries, not something that can be fabricated after the fact. But in order to live you need an identity or, rather, dignity. For him the two concepts coincide, he who loses one loses the other and suffers a spiritual death; left defenseless, he is exposed to physical death as well. Now he and other German Jews who, like him, believe in German culture are denied German identity. In the vicious pages of Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer, Nazi propaganda depicts the Jew as a hairy, fat, bowlegged, hook-nosed, jug-eared parasite whose only use is to harm other people. The Jew is self-evidently not German. On the contrary, his presence alone contaminates public baths and even park benches.