57 pages • 1 hour read
Primo LeviIf This Is a Man
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Selection
“Selection” refers to the process of choosing prisoners who will be killed by the SS. Those who are selected are usually gassed. The majority of prisoners sent to Auschwitz were selected upon arrival and immediately killed. About 20% were deemed good candidates for slave labor, and they were sent to the work camps.
Selections were not limited to the initial arrival at Auschwitz, and the prisoners anticipate selection in the fall of 1944 in Buna. The selections require the prisoners to strip, both as a means of humiliation and also as a means of assessing their bodies’ capacity for labor. They prepare for the selection by assuring one another that they are all physically sound enough to avoid selection. Levi believes that he was not selected while he was in Buna because a mistake was made. This potential mistake makes the selection process all the more terrifying, if this is possible, because there is no way, even following the “logic” of the SS, to understand it. Sometimes there are so many prisoners arriving in Auschwitz on transport trains that the SS do not bother to select who is most exploitable, and whole compartments of people, sight unseen, are sent to the gas chambers.
The Lager (Arbeitslager)
The prisoners refer to the Buna work camp at Auschwitz as “The Lager.” The lager is a physical space—“a square of about 600 yards in length”(27)—surrounded by barbed wire, with the inner wire carrying an electric current. It contains sixty wooden huts, also called blocks. The Lager also contains a kitchen, experimental farm, infirmary, and latrines. Prisoners are sorted hierarchically, with different groups assigned to different huts. The Jewish prisoners are the lowest ranking prisoners in the Lager.
While the Lager is a physical place, it is also a way of being. After the SS leave the Lager, and Levi and two fellow prisoners find and haul a stove into Ka-Be, a prisoner suggests that, as a thank you, they be given an extra piece of bread by the other prisoners using the stove. This act is impossible under the “law of the Lager,” which “left no room for gratitude” (190) and turned prisoners against one another. This is a turning point when Levi realizes that “the Lager is dead” (190).
Buna is the term the prisoners use to refer to the Monowitz-Auschwitz work camp. The camp is named after the synthetic rubber (or acrylonitrile buradiene rubber) known as buna. The IB Farben corporation was trying to produce this synthetic rubber as a way around the blockade of natural rubber from Africa to Germany. Rubber was needed for tank tires and other military equipment.
IB Farben is one of several corporations that received tax incentives to build a work camp from which it could draw enslaved labor, coordinating with the SS.
The Drowned/Muselmann and the Saved
Levi argues that there are two categories of prisoner existence in the Lager: a prisoner either becomes one of the drowned or one of the saved.
The drowned are those who are destroyed by the camps, made indifferent to their own lives and thus “empty.” Null Achtzehn is drowned. Another term for the drowned, referenced by Levi and used by many early Holocaust writers, is muselmann. The other category of existence is the saved. The saved are survivors, full of the life force that is concerned with their own survival. The saved are resourceful, finding ways to secure extra rations of food; they do not put their heads down and obey, which results in death.
Levi characterizes the drowned as a blob of humanity, an “anonymous mass” (103) out of which no distinct story can be told. The saved, however, all have their unique paths to their salvation, or survival, each with an individual story to be told. The drowned experience an existential living death as a result of the Lager’s cruelty. Levi declares a narrative death for them, too, that may be presumptive.
Both categories of existence—drowned and saved—apply to the minority of prisoners who are not killed immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz and are, instead, sent to the work camps. Levi insists that it is the very rare person who can survive the camps without compromising their moral world. The reader witnesses courage in The Last One and genuine goodness in Lorenzo, but the courage of The Last One gets him killed, and Lorenzo is a civilian, not having to survive the Lager.
Levi may himself exceed the categories he creates in his last 10 days in the camp, when he exudes genuine goodness and courage in his care of his fellow prisoners in a space that is physically the Lager but where the spirit of the Lager is dying.
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