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The Value of Life
The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty ‘pieces’ and that all was in order.
The quote appears in Chapter 1, “The Journey,” as the German SS organizes the Jews detained in Modena, Italy, for deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Germans just held roll-call of the Jews and the officer in charge asks, “Wieviel Stück?”, which means, “How many pieces?” referring to the people. Here, Levi explains the corporal’s response to the question. The corporal summarizes their number not as people but as things. The dehumanization of the Jews allows respectable people, such as the military tasked with protecting citizens, to become executioners. The Nazis developed a detailed marketing strategy with its own euphemisms that whitewashed their calculated purging of “undesirables” from the Aryan nation. This campaign of disinformation hid Hitler’s Final Solution from the international community and from their own consciences. Levi commits the count to memory. This is the first of many counts he uses to track deaths. To Levi, each number represents a human being whose life was lost.
Among the forty-five people in my wagon only four saw their homes again, and it was by far the most fortunate wagon.
The quote is spoken by Levi in Chapter 1, “The Journey,” which documents the deportation of 650 Italian Jews from Modena, Italy, to Auschwitz, Poland. From Levi’s boxcar in which forty-five people are crammed, he looks out through the slats of the wooden sides. He watches as they pass Italian cities and towns. At Brenner Pass, the prisoners all stand up to silently mark their exit from Italy into Austria, leaving their homeland behind. Levi imagines the return trip, with doors open, his heart at peace, the Italian city names appearing on the landscape. With a heavy heart, he wonders how many of them would not be returning. He answers his own question with the statistic provided here, that less than ten percent survived to return home. Levi knows that quantifications of the scale of the Nazi’s genocide overwhelm the reader’s comprehension. He provides instead a snapshot that brings home the loss in terms everyone can understand.
‘Show me your number: you are 174517. This numbering began eighteen months ago and applies to Auschwitz and the dependent camps. There are now ten thousand of us here at Buna-Monowitz; perhaps thirty thousand between Auschwitz and Birkenau. Wo sind die Andere? Where are the others?’
‘Perhaps transferred to other camps?’ I suggest.
In Chapter 4, “Ka-Be,” a patient in the Ka-Be infirmary, Schmulek, attempts to convince Levi that the crematoriums really do exist. Levi has only been in Auschwitz two weeks and questions if gas chambers and crematoriums are just a rumor. Prisoners at the Buna camp would not have been able to see the entrance to the extermination camp or the smoking chimneys as the location of the killing center is in Birkenau, a part of the Auschwitz complex at some distance from their installation. Here, Schmulek challenges Levi to use the evidence in plain sight. Roll-call is a required daily ritual for everyone as the prisoners march back from work sites. Levi’s number tattooed on his arm is 174517. Of the 174,516 internees who have preceded him, only 40,000 remain. Schmulek asks Levi to do the math: Where are the others? When Levi suggests an alternate explanation, that they have been moved, Schmulek comments that Levi does not want to understand.
The Fragility of Identity
It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand.
In Chapter 2, “On the Bottom,” Levi takes stock of the prisoners’ transformation. The intake process into the camp stripped the men of every possession that constitutes their identity, from the clothes they wear to the shoes they walk in, to the hair and beards on their heads. The attributes that distinguish one from another have been removed in a humiliation designed to render them faceless and helpless. The men have been rendered voiceless, with no case to plead because no recourse exists to come to their aid. With these words, Levi says that language is incapable of expressing this destruction of a human being. He often in the course of his memoir decries the limitations of language to depict the extremes of their suffering. For this reason, Levi enlists the men’s own stories and the richness of metaphor to convey the horrors of loss of identity.
He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.
In Chapter 4, “Ka-Be,” Levi introduces a young man known only by the last three digits of his number, 018. In German, “zero eighteen” translates to “null achtzehn.” The Nazis strip all aspects of identity down to nothing, including the tattooing of their number into their arms, indelibly making that anonymity part of them. The prisoners use their names among themselves, the monikers a useful store of information about individuality and nationality. In denying Null Achtzehn his name, the prisoners express contempt for a creature they mistrust. The man has ceased to function as a human being should, with a minimum will to live. Not only does Null Achtzehn acquiesce to the enslavement, but he also invests all his energy in hard labor. He works himself to the point of exhaustion and is prone to collapse unexpectedly. Null Achtzehn is a walking danger to himself and others, an automaton under the complete control of the SS.
Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer.
In Chapter 9, “The Drowned and the Saved,” Levi lays out his findings for what is required to survive in Auschwitz. He reduces the evidence to two categories of identity. The preponderance of the concentration camp inmates is what the veterans of the camp call the Muselmänner. A Musselman is weak and inept. These men are dismissed as doomed to selection for the gas chamber. Here, Levi develops a different description that alludes to the choices they make. He calls them “the drowned” because they fail to do what is necessary to stay afloat. As the path of least resistance, most of the prison populace fall into this faceless mass, lacking the initiative, energy, or vision to swim. Levi points to their silence, their withdrawal from human relationships, as evidence that their essential individuality has been snuffed out.
The Importance of Stories
It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent . . . Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?
In Chapter 5, “Our Nights,” Levi recounts his recurring dream. In his dream, he is with his sister and many other unidentifiable people. He describes to the group the sensory details of his daily life in the camp: the whistle of the train delivering goods to Buna; the narrow hard bed he sleeps on; the constant hunger; the lice-control procedures; and a blow to the head from a Kapo. In his dream, as Levi tells these stories, he feels delighted to be home among family and friends, but the realization dawns on him that they don’t care about his stories. In the dream, Levi’s sister stands up, looks at him, and leaves the room without a word. Later, when Levi asks Alberto about the dream, Alberto tells him everyone has the same dream. The refusal to listen conveys indifference and lack of empathy, the greatest fear for those suffering the trauma of abandonment.
We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?
In Chapter 6, “The Work,” Levi talks with his new bunkmate, Resnyk, on the walk to their worksite. Resnyk, a Pole, tells him the story of how he came to live in Paris for twenty years before being captured and sent to Auschwitz. Levi comments that Resnyk’s story of adversity and sorrow moved him. Levi finds that all the prisoners have unique stories full of tragedy. As Levi explains here, the prisoners all share their stories in the evenings, people from every corner of Europe but also from Africa. Levi compares their life stories to biblical accounts of people in the hands of God. These moral lessons present simple truths worked out in daily lives and Levi sees the same meaningfulness in the scope of their stories. With these words, Levi shows his belief that their lives have spiritual significance.
We could speak of everything. I grew enthusiastic at Arthur’s account of how one passed the Sunday at Provenchères in the Vosges, and Charles almost cried when I told him the story of the armistice in Italy, of the turbid and desperate beginning of the Partisan resistance, of the man who betrayed us and of our capture in the mountains.
In the final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days,” on the evening of January 25, Levi and the other camp survivors hold their collective breath for the liberation by the Russians. For some days they’ve heard the sounds of their approach in artillery rounds and the rumble of tanks, but a great silence descends on the camp. They tire of hoping. Levi, Charles, and Arthur stand around the stove and share stories in French of their lives before the camp. Here, Levi explains how telling their stories of French vacation spots, national celebrations, political activism, and personal betrayal revive their spirits. Levi says they felt themselves become men again. Being agents of their own stories reminds them of the power of personal liberty to chart one’s own course and accept the consequences of one’s actions. Sharing those stories of joys and adversity fuels the ability to move on. All around Levi, Charles, and Arthur in the darkness, their eight fellow invalids listen, hanging on their every word, although they do not know the language.
