BOOK

Survival In Auschwitz:  The Nazi Assault On Humanity

 

Levi, Primo.  Survival In Auschwitz:  The Nazi Assault On Humanity.  New York:  Simon and Schuster (A Touchstone Book), 1996.  187 Pages.  ISBN: 0684826801.

 

REVIEW

 

Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz is a work of literary beauty.  Levi was a gifted writer who was able to bring his reader with him to a horrible place where men committed deeds of inhumanity that were simply unthinkable before the Holocaust era.  The subtitle, “The Nazi Assault On Humanity”, is very appropriate for this book, as that is the angle Levi takes in his discourse on his imprisonment in the subcamp Buna.  It is not the pain meted out on his person, nor the anguish he felt mentally of the day-to-day pressures.  It is not even the rollercoaster of emotions he must have felt; Levi tells of the entire mental/emotional combination that attacked him to his very core as a human being.

 

Levi makes this statement in his Preface:

 

As an account of atrocities, therefore, this book of mine adds nothing to what is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing question of the death camps.  It has not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind (9).

 

This is the great success of Levi’s work – he doesn’t try to tell more of what we already know (and I say that not with any intention of diminishing the experiences and/or pain of other survivors who have chosen to express their suffering in writing), but instead allows us a glimpse into the commonplace aspects of life in Auschwitz in addition to its obvious brutalities.  Certainly those elements are present, but as part of a larger tapestry.

 

Primo Levi gives his readers a level of observation beyond the superficial.  He is able to see into the souls of his fellow prisoners, the Haftlings of which he writes.  We get to know some of his fellows, and feel the angst of their existence, always with a sense that their life-clocks are about to stop, that the Haftlings on the slippery slope that was life in that particular camp could descend further into Hell at any moment.  Levi tells of their will to survive, even when transformed from real man to prisoner, and paints vivid pictures of what they did to stay vertical another day.  We can almost see the workings of the black markets, and we obtain a real sense of what in that camp had value – both monetary and moral.  Trying to achieve at meaningless work, to decode Nazi instructions and desires, and the knowledge one had that he or she had actually forgotten how to live on the outside but instead existed under a newer, perverse set of social mores are the themes of Levi’s account.  Lives are lost, people are suddenly never seen again, characters come and go, but always there is Levi to observe and recount.  His impressions become our own, but we wonder if we would have had the same will to live.  Hopelessness as well as hopefulness are intermingled, and we see what a man does to get by.

 

Levi’s rise back to life is chronicled in the last chapter in the book, “The Story Of Ten Days”.  He writes regarding those prisoners abandoned by the SS as the Red Army approached:

 

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working.  And so it was agreed.

Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable.  The law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour’, and left no room for gratitude.  It really meant that the Lager was dead.

It was the first human gesture that occurred among us.  I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Haftlinge to men again (160-161).

 

Unknown to the unaware, impossible for the uninvolved to comprehend, yet not much easier to digest for the student of the Shoah, Levi has made an attempt toward grasping the moral abyss of a world never intended for human occupation.  His is a narrative that enhances the grim details others have already set down.

 

PASSAGE/QUOTE FOR CLASSROOM USAGE

 

I use Chapter 9 (87-100) for a classroom activity.  Please see the Study Questions/Discussion Guide section of not only this review, but of David Faber’s Because of Romek.

 

RATIONALE FOR USAGE/UNIT RELEVANCE

 

Levi’s book will work for you in a discussion not only of survivors and their legacy of tales from the Shoah, but possibly even better in a unit on the camps, Auschwitz specifically.  Levi portrays the camp in all of its brutality, but mostly on a level that differs from the depiction of David Faber or other authors who have written on the sadism and hopelessness that filled their experience.  Levi’s words paint us word pictures of survival, of group dynamics, of the human spirit as it resisted breaking.  Levi gives us, as he calls one of his chapters, portraits of “the drowned and the saved”.

 

CLASSROOM METHOD OF USAGE

 

As mentioned before, acquiring both this book as well as a copy of David Faber’s Because of Romek is essential to the completion of the reading/research/discussion assignment that follows.

 

STUDY QUESTIONS/DISCUSSION GUIDE

 

Assuming students have access to Chapter 9 from Levi’s book as well as Chapter 15 from Faber’s book, have students complete the following activity.  Group work would be encouraged for this, as discussion of the issues will be helpful.

 

Reading Guide*

(Please write the page number and paragraph number next to each note)

[Information from other parts of the book is provided to you]

 

Auschwitz	Faber	Reference	Levi	Reference
Arrival Date	November 5, 1943	128/11;212, 2nd note	End of Feb, 1944	14/3
Tattoo number	#161051	129/8	#174517	27/3
Age at entry	~17	Deduced	24	13/1
Work detail	Sonderkommando	135/4	Chemical Kommando	101/1
Subsection	Birkenau	130/1	Monowitz (Buna)	25/3
Execution forms	Murder by kapo	131/3	Gas chambers	90/1
	Gas vans	131/15	Killed by circumstances	88-89/3
	Gas chambers	131/15
	Burning alive in ditch	134/1
Key figures	Dr. Josef Mengele	131/16	None mentioned	---
	Col. Adolf Eichmann	136/5
Key events	Women’s orchestra	132/7	Camp enclosed in barbed wire	87/3
	Men looking like “musselmanner”	132/1	Men looking like “musselmanner”	88/2
	Collective responsibility for stealing	133/13	Kommando work where one can profit	88-89/3
	Collective responsibility for not using latrine	134/5	Jews in 1944 Auschwitz – of #’s less than 150000, only doctors, tailors, cooks, cobblers, musicians, young attractive gays, and friends/compatriots of camp authorities were still alive	89/1
	Baby put alive into oven	135/14	No one could survive more than 3 months under “normal” work, rations, and discipline	90/1
	Handing Zyklon B to Eichmann to administer to gas chambers	136/2	The need to learn German, and the do’s and don’ts of the camp	90/1
	Suicides on electric fences	134/2	Thought that Aryan prisoners might have been chosen from German prisons to be camp supts. Over Jews	91/4
	People struck with cables, rubber hoses, bats	127/3	Floggings	93/2
	Selections	128/7	Organizing goods for extra rations	93/1, 94/1, 99/1
Time in Auschwitz	3-4 months (11/43- 3 or 4/44)	Deduced	Liberated January 27, 1945 (~11 months)	172/7

 

*Answers have been included in blue ink.

 

Questions – After reading each selection, answer the following questions (points per response are in parentheses):

 

1. What seems to be the focal point of Faber’s writing of his time in Auschwitz (2)?
2. In one sentence, summarize Faber’s arrival to Auschwitz (1).
3. Levi seems to have a different focus in his selection regarding arrival to Auschwitz.  Can you give two comparisons and make two contrasts to Faber (4)?

 

Levi gives this account of being tattooed with his camp number:

 

Haftling*:  I have learnt that I am Haftling.  My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die. 

            The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid:  they placed us all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle.  It seems that this is the real, true initiation:  only by ‘showing one’s number’ can one get bread and soup.  Several days passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-distribution weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language.  And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

 

* prisoner (Levi 27-28)

 

4.      What is the most important impact on each man (1)?

5.      To become a number and not a name, what would you give up?  That is, what do you think your name or being represents when heard or seen by others (4)?

6.      How do their accounts differ (1)?

7.      Levi speaks of death, but Faber dwells constantly on events that brought him within inches of the Grim Reaper on several occasions.  Differentiate between each author’s sense of the immediacy of death… that is, while it is important to any man, these two writers give us a separate impression of their mortality (2).

8.      Whether in the Chemical Kommando or a Sonderkommando unit, both men were forced into slave labor for the will of the Nazis.  In your opinion, are there certain kinds of work less moral than others?  Can you speak to the end results being the same, or do you sense that there are degrees inherent in the sins of this work?  Be sure to fully express your opinions (5).

9.      Both authors write of the Muselmanner.  From the two writings, assemble a portrait in word pictures of a Muselmanner (4).

10.  Levi paints descriptions of several Haftlings that were known to him.  How would these men fit into Faber’s portrayal of prisoners in Auschwitz (2)?

11.  Can the differences in the authors’ experiences be attributed to the fact that they were in different parts of Auschwitz?  How much of a factor do you think each man’s age at the time of their experience had on their reporting (4)?