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Chapter 14, Kraus
Summary
It is a cold and rainy November day. Levi digs a hole with three other men: Kraus, Clausner, and Gounan. Clausner breaks up the ground with a pickaxe, Kraus shovels the ground up to Levi, and Levi passes it to Gounan who piles it for others to shuttle away in wheelbarrows. Kraus works vigorously, setting too fast a pace for the rest of them. He naively believes in getting ahead with hard work, whereas he should be guarding against exhaustion, an insidious underminer of health. Levi has slim hope for Kraus, the earnest Hungarian, surviving very long as he is too trusting of the Germans and not observant enough. On the walk back from the work site, Levi falls into step with Kraus and tells him in German about a dream he had. In the dream, it was summer in Italy. Levi sits around a table with his family, the table laden with food. Kraus comes to the door, dressed as a free man, with his hair grown out and looking healthy, holding a large, warm loaf of bread. Kraus is soaking wet as is Levi. Levi invites Kraus in to meet his family and they eat and drink, both of them soon dried off in the warm home. Levi gives Kraus a good bed to sleep in.
When Levi finishes describing his dream, Kraus responds in Hungarian, and Levi can only understand his own name spoken and Kraus’s body language, which indicates Kraus is making solemn promises. Upon seeing Kraus’s emotional reaction, Levi reflects that he never had the dream, it was all made up on the spot, and Kraus is nothing to him beyond a transitory moment like the hunger, the cold, and the rain.
Analysis
The rain makes Levi philosophical. He ruminates on the human reflex to find something positive in bad circumstances, such as “Well, it may be cold outside, but at least there’s no wind.” When the day ends, he thinks how it will disappear into a void, already forgotten. The concept of tomorrow may as well be nonexistent. As the group walks back to camp from the work site, Levi is paired with Kraus. Levi now can judge whether a man is a survivor by looking in his eyes. He concludes the Hungarian Kraus is doomed.
Kraus has joined their work squad and brought his work ethic with him into the camp, believing in a merit system where hard work earns advancement. Kraus clings to his notions of normalcy, has no facility with other languages, and he has no street sense about the camp or his fellow inmates. He cannot keep step with the cadence that their Kapo calls out or even walk in a straight line. Kraus tries to converse with Levi in German and Levi sees that Kraus is not up to the task of keeping step and talking at the same time. Levi tells Kraus a story partly to try to focus Kraus on the job at hand, marching in step. The story he invents on the fly foretells their return to civilization, to plenty of food, a warm home, and family. He tells Kraus a false, comforting story because he can. It’s become second nature to fantasize about home. Levi inserts Kraus into the fantasy not because he cares about keeping Kraus’s hope up but because he wants to keep his own despair at bay.
