If This Is a Man

Levi has become part of the chemical team, and his current job is cleaning an underground gas tank. While the job is toxic, cold, and damp, it is a “luxury job” because it is unsupervised.

Jean is the Pikolo of the Kommando. As Pikolo, he is in charge of cleaning the hut, distributing tools, washing bowls, and tracking labor hours. He is very well liked by the Kommando. While focused on his survival, Jean is friendly, and he takes his relationships with those of lower rank seriously. He has also managed to win the confidence of Alex. He has so far used his power for the good of the members of the Kommando.

Jean secures a route to pick up the soup that allows him and Levi to gain a little more time away from work, and on the way Levi tries to recite the canto of Ulysses, unsure why it seems so important for him to do this.

During the spring of 1944 there is an influx of Hungarians to the camp. By that August, after five months at the camp, Levi and those of his number range are considered senior haftlinge.

Nothing happens as a result of passing the chemical exam, but none of the prisoners are particularly bothered by this, as change in the camp is rarely positive.

By summer 1944, the Buna is being bombed, and the prisoners are forced to repair the damage as they work among rubble and dust. Plans for the synthetic rubber production, supposed to start that August, are postponed. Some are afraid of the bombings, and some approach the bombings with hope, but most of the prisoners are indifferent, “not a conscious resignation, but the opaque torpor of beasts broken in by blows, whom the blows no longer hurt” (138).

During this time of the bombings, Levi meets Lorenzo, a civilian worker. The story of this relationship is specific to “a time and condition now effaced from every present reality” (139). It is simple in some ways; Lorenzo brings Levi a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration for six months in addition to a patched vest, and he writes a postcard for Levi that he sends to Italy and brings the response to Levi.

The prisoners tend to speak of their civilian relationships with an “ostentatious discretion,” not wanting to compromise the civilians helping them, but also proud of their relations and not wanting to create rivals. Levi asserts that the prisoners are “the untouchables” to the civilians, however (141). They will sometimes throw some bread their way, but most assume that their disgusting condition is somehow brought on by themselves. This is not the case with Lorenzo, though, and Levi believes that he is alive today because of Lorenzo:

not so much for his material aid, as for his constantly reminding 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, not extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving (142).

Unlike “the personages in these pages [who] are not men,” 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). 

One day in October the season suddenly turns to winter. Levi and many of his fellow prisoners have already lived through a winter, so “we know what it means;” seven out of 10 people in the camp will die, “and whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day” (143). Energy has to be put into staying warm. Bread will have to be spent so that gloves can be acquired. Eating must happen in the hut, where everyone will be assigned an area the size of a hand; it is forbidden to eat resting against the bunks. Hands will get sores and getting a bandage means waiting for hours in terrible weather outside.

The suffering of the winter is so bad that “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 the Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric fence” (144).

In addition to the suffering intrinsic to winter is the terror of the absent tents under which thousands were “housed” during the summer in the open space of the Lager. With the cold weather coming, the tents have been taken down, and there are over two thousand additional men crowded in the huts. The “old” prisoners, of which Levi is now a member, understand that the Germans will do something to reduce the population. The Poles are the first to speak of the “selections” (Selekcja), where prisoners are chosen to be killed, but they have guarded their knowledge, and by the time everyone knows the selections are coming, the limited opportunities of evading them have already been taken. Hardly anyone reacts with despair or resignation, though, as the fight against the cold and hunger takes up almost all thinking. For those who cannot find a way out, they show each other their naked bodies, reassuring one another that they look healthier and younger than they actually do and thus will not be selected to be killed.

Lying to himself sustains Levi through the “great selection” of October 1944, so that “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” (147).

One Sunday everyone knows “mysteriously” that the selection will be that day. All kinds of information is arriving, and the prisoners try to determine the specifics of the selection. It seems like an ordinary day for a while, but the bell that means reveille at dawn rings during the day, which means “Blocksperre,” or enclosure in huts, where no one can avoid the selection. Everyone is forced to strip and given their ID card, and they wait, many falling asleep, crammed into one room. Each prisoner is forced to run outside in the cold to be assessed, with their ID card taken by one man and then given to a man on the right or left, which determines whether that prisoner will be killed or not. The selection does not always make sense (according to Nazi “logic”), and mistakes are made. Levi sees two healthy prisoners selected to be killed while he is not selected, and he is convinced that these are all mistakes. Those selected receive a double ration until they leave to be killed, a period of a few to many days.

Kuhn, who has escaped selection, prays in gratitude as his 20-year-old bunkmate stares at the ceiling with the knowledge that he has been selected. Levi thinks that “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer” (152).

It is November, and it has been raining for 10 days. Levi dreams of having a dry rag to place between his wet skin and wet clothing. Nonetheless, he thinks:

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 infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live (153).

The prisoners work with Kraus, who is Hungarian, does not know any German, and most importantly, works too much and with too much effort, not having yet learned the “underground art of economizing on everything, on breath, on movements, even thoughts” (155). They tell Kraus to slow down because they are working together in a chain, and he is setting the rhythm for the work.

The day is over, and it is assembly time, and “from all sides the mud puppets creep out, stretch their cramped limbs, carry the tools back to the huts” (155). For some reason Levi tells Kraus, in slow and bad German, that he had a dream of being at home with his family and Kraus coming to the door with a four-pound, warm loaf of bread. Levi invites him in to the meet his family, and he gives him food and drink and a nice bed to sleep in, and it is warm and dry.

Kraus seems a good person, but he will not survive long, and Levi does not understand what he says animatedly in response to Levi.

Alberto and Levi try to determine how much time has passed since various events. They also try to determine the number of survivors. Ninety-six people arrived in their convoy of 174,000, and only 21 are left. How many will survive this winter?

The weather moves into winter and snow, and there have been no air raids for weeks. The advantages of being in the Chemical Kommando are non-existent; in fact, others have received coats, when they have not, and none of them have yet become part of Pannwitz’s lab. “Everything speaks of a final decay and ruin” (160), and the prisoners feel that they share a part in the totality. The Buna is quiet, and at certain times the front can be heard approaching. Prisoners are arriving from ghettoes, and they hear how the Germans killed everyone in Lublin camp over a year ago with machine guns and by setting all the huts on fire.

An announcement out of nowhere is made that three prisoners have been selected for Pannwitz’s lab, and Levi is one. Alberto is happy for him; they have formed an alliance, so he will profit from Levi’s move and has no interest in pursuing something as seemingly stable as lab work. The Buna has largely been destroyed, with most of the equipment ruined or damaged, but Levi has been promoted and “has the right to a new shirt and underpants […] no one can boast of understanding the Germans” (163).

The lab is “surprisingly” like other laboratories. It even smells of Levi’s university organic chemistry lab, violently bringing back the memory of his fourth year of university and the warm, comfortable Italian air of May. The lab is 65 degrees, and Levi has a drawer. There is soap, petrol, and other material out in the open, and it will be easy to take some of this into the hut. No one banks on any of this continuing, though; Levi knows to appreciate the moment and expect nothing for the future. The Russians are coming, even though the Germans have now set February 1945 as the date for synthetic rubber production to begin.

His comrades envy him, “and they are right. Why should I not be contented?” (166). But once again he “finds at his side the comrade of all his peaceful moments,” “the old ferocious longing to feel myself a man” (166). There are female civilians in the lab who make Levi aware of how dirty he and the other prisoners are and of the smell of the camps that each of them carries with them. They have fleas and are constantly scratching. They have to go to the bathroom constantly. The girls “seem outside this world” (167). The girls smoke, and instead of cleaning, eat and file their nails. They break glasses, an action that then gets blamed on the prisoners. Levi hears them talk about plans for Christmas and complain about how uncomfortable travel is, with one of the girls proclaiming how quickly the year has gone by.