Survival in Auschwitz

by Primo Levi

The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into a tumult, across which flashed the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space, as painful as the thrusts of a sword.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

By the wretched light of the last candle, with the rhythm of the wheels, with every human sound now silenced, we awaited what was to happen.

Now, in the hour of decision, we said to each other things that are never said among the living.

her parents had succeeded in washing her during the journey in the packed car in a tub with tepid water which the degenerate German engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging us all to death.

This is no order, no regulation: it is obvious that it is a small private initiative of our Charon. The matter stirs us to anger and laughter and brings relief.

He is crazy, he is mixing them all together, ninety-six pairs, they will be all mixed up.

the odd thoughts that creep up. the normalcy that creeps into everything

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.

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, its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

If we were logical, we would resign ourselves to the evidence that our fate is beyond human knowledge, that every conjecture is arbitrary and demonstrably devoid of foundation.

But men are rarely logical when their own fate is at stake; on every occasion, they prefer the extreme positions.

Some, bestially, urinate while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyér, of the holy grey slab which seems gigantic in your neighbor’s hand, and in your own hand so small as to make you cry.

great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.

Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings.

I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as if I had never in all my life undergone an affront worse than this. The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have finished his demonstration in this language which I do not understand and which sounds terrible. He turns to me, and in near-German, charitably, tells me the conclusion: “Du Jude, kaputt. Du schnell Krematorium fertig.” (You Jew, finished. You soon ready for crematorium.)

The pecking order the casual cruelty ugh

cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but on this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind.

We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that this music is infernal.

of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.

At the departure and the return march the SS are never lacking. Who could deny them their right to watch this choreography of their creation, the dance of dead men, squad after squad, leaving the fog to enter the fog? What more concrete proof of their victory?

one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is.

In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace, we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and

My sleep is very light, it is a veil, if I want I can tear

Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?

but as soon as we close our eyes, once again we feel our brain start up, beyond our control; it knocks and hums, incapable of rest, it fabricates phantasms and terrible symbols, and without rest projects and shapes their images, as a grey fog, on to the screen of our dreams.

sunk in the ephemeral and negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain.

And at last, like a celestial meteor, superhuman and impersonal like a sign from heaven, the midday siren explodes, granting a brief respite to our anonymous and concord tiredness and hunger.

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and many think and talk about its nature. But for us the question is simpler.

For human nature is such that grief and pain—even simultaneously suffered—do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we became aware of our hunger; and repeating the same error, we now say: “If it was not for the hunger!...”

Everyone knows that it is the nurses themselves who send back on the market, at low prices, the clothes and shoes of the dead and of the selected who leave naked for Birkenau;

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 necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.

for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: “to he that has, will be given; to he that has not, will be taken away.”

way. All the mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time,

exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned,

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.

His plan was a long-term one, which is all the more notable as conceived in an environment dominated by a mentality of the provisional;

with his arms reaching up to the heavens like some little prophetic monster,

From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him, but an instrument in his hands.

“Ne pas chercher à comprendre.”

We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs.

Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.

everywhere.

This chapter is about the sense of hope one can get for the prospext of another hunk of bread, of safer working conditions that may allow one to survive a day longer. This guy is a chemist and is afraid of passing the test, falls into the remembered excitement of lecturing. Human nature, some parts of it. Will emwrge at the slightest provocatio

Frenkl the spy passes. Quicken our pace, one never knows, he does evil for evil’s sake.

The open sea: Pikolo has travelled by sea, and knows what it means: it is when the horizon closes in on itself, free, straight ahead and simple, and there is nothing but the smell of the sea; sweet things, ferociously far away.

“Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance Your mettle was not made; you were made men, To follow after knowledge and excellence.”

More generally, experience had shown us many times the vanity of every conjecture: why worry oneself trying to read into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the minimum influence?

At Buna the German civilians raged with the fury of the secure man who wakes up from a long dream of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to understand it.

The smell makes me start back as if from the blow of a whip: the weak aromatic smell of organic chemistry laboratories. For a moment the large semi-dark room at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in Italy comes back to me with brutal violence and immediately vanishes.

we know how these matters go; all this is the gift of fortune, to be enjoyed as intensely as possible and at once; for there is no certainty about tomorrow.