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Chapter 13, October 1944
Summary
October heralds the beginning of winter, a terrifying time of death from the elements. Levi gives the statistic that seven out of ten people die between October and April from the stress of the cold added to hunger and exhaustion. Additionally, the spring’s influx of prisoners results in overcrowded conditions in the blocks. The Lager hums with the rumors and then the certainty of imminent selections for the gas chambers. No one reacts with resignation or despair. Instead, some strategize escapes while the rest reassure themselves and others that they will be spared. Chajim comforts Levi with words of reassurance. Levi likewise comforts a prisoner named Wertheimer.
The selection happens on a Sunday when the morning reveille bell sounds, the signal for everyone to go to their huts. There, their block supervisor locks the doors, hands everyone their identification card which has their number, name, profession, age, and nationality, and orders them to undress down to their shoes. He and his helpers then drive the mass of naked inmates into the Quartermaster’s office. From there, they run a gauntlet outside, approaching an SS officer, handing him their card, then passing him and entering the dormitory door beyond. The officer assesses them as they approach and as they pass, looking at them front and back, before giving their card to a man on their right or left.
Levi and the others soon discern that those whose cards the SS officer handed to the left-hand man were the selections for extermination. Levi’s card was given to the right-hand man, while the card of the man in front of him, the younger and healthier René, went to the left-hand man. Levi thinks that their cards were mixed up. Sattler, a robust Transylvanian who only just arrived at the camp twenty days earlier, was also sorted to the right. Levi hears a man named Kuhn thanking God that he was spared after hearing that the man next to him, Beppo, was selected for the gas chamber. Furious with not only Kuhn’s insensitivity but also his failure to repudiate the whole selection process, Levi concludes that God should disdain such a prayer.
Analysis
Winters in the region of the Auschwitz concentration camps average freezing temperatures. The inmates are not equipped to work in those temperatures, with only a shirt, cloth trousers, and a cloth jacket. They have to spend bread rations on gloves. Levi comments that a new vocabulary is required for the world to understand the hunger, cold, and exhaustion they experience. The conventional use of those terms does not convey the extremes.
The selections mean culling the prison population to send a percentage of people to die in the gas chambers. The criterion for selection is the inability to continue to work. The old, the ill, and the weak are candidates for selection. Levi attributes the absence of resignation or despair to their low morale. Nevertheless, the men find in themselves the loving-kindness to offer reassurance to each other that they will be spared. Levi in hindsight says that he rode out the waiting period serenely, but he attributes his surviving the selection to chance. As evidence was the mix-up he guesses happened between his card and René’s. That one man dies instead of another is immaterial to the desired outcome for the Germans, which is a reduction of the population numbers.
Between the suspicion of the impending selection and its official deployment, the men go about their work, absorbed with getting enough food, surviving the cold, and doing their work so as to not get beaten. While waiting for their block’s turn, some men doze in their bunks. Levi’s depiction of the events has an air of unreality. The level of planning and order, consistent with the way Germans always do things, belies the horror. The herding of the naked men through the cold for a brief inspection that will decide their fate speaks of the complete dehumanization of the German mentality. Any moral compass is gone from their decision-making. That the inmates cooperate is a measure of how fearful they have become. Kuhn’s praying aloud in thanksgiving for avoiding selection assumes divine providence intervened on his behalf. He doesn’t understand that the Germans hold all the cards and his survival was the luck of the draw. Levi thinks Kuhn should be on his knees begging forgiveness for the abomination that his fellow humans have perpetrated.
