payment page
Chapter 15, Die drei Leute vom Labor
Summary
Alberto and Levi try to keep track of what has happened to their group since they arrived. Of the original ninety-six, only twenty-one remain. The Chemical Kommando has been reduced to hauling heavy sacks of caustic chemicals that burn their skin. They feel their strength sapping. Parts of the camp that were hit by bombs remain in ruin. The Buna is silent. They can hear the rumble and artillery of Soviet troops drawing nearer. Ahead of their advance, the Germans transferred 300 prisoners from the Lodz ghetto, who brought rumors of the Warsaw ghetto battle. The year before, German SS units had massacred the Lublin concentration camp Jews with machine guns. They all wonder when it will be their turn. Prisoners from all the Polish camps arrive, bringing with them scarlet fever, diphtheria, and petechial typhus.
The Germans decide to start production of synthetic rubber on the first of February in 1945. Doktor Pannwitz chooses three Häftlings to work in the laboratory, Brackier, Kandel, and Levi. Alberto bears no envy at being passed over. Levi dares to imagine that he may thus survive the winter in the warm laboratory, build up his health, and avoid selection to the gas chamber but he has learned not to put his hope in anything. Herr Stawinoga supervises them in the lab. Two women also work in the lab, Fräulein Liczba and Frau Meyer. They dress elegantly and fritter away their time smoking and filing their nails. The women are repelled by the three disheveled chemists and Levi feels self-conscious about his appearance.
Levi takes stock of the changes he’s undergone in a year. He once believed in a charmed life, busied himself thinking of abstractions, hiked, read poetry, listened to music, and treasured his future. Death was nothing more than a construct in literature. Now, however, he’s been reduced to something he never conceived, with only enough reserves to just survive the cold, his endless hunger, and all-consuming exhaustion. In the last lines of the chapter Levi admits that “I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.”
Analysis
The chapter title translates as “Three People from the Laboratory,” and this is how Brackier, Kandel, and Levi are called every morning when their Kapo calls them to work. To be referred to as “people” and to receive such a new cushy job, Brackier, Kandel, and Levi are now the envy of all. Levi has gone from hauling heavy bags of caustic chemicals that burned his skin, to working on chemical analysis with notebooks and reference materials. Levi experiences pangs in his conscience about responding to his higher calling to be a man and not a Musselman.
The sudden resurrection of the Buna synthetic rubber project out of rubble has no logic but for the three chemists, the reprieve from physical labor in the frigid outdoors comes none too soon. Levi can feel his weakness worsening day by day. The influx of prisoners from the Lodz ghetto brings news of the ruthlessness of the Germans. The Warsaw resistance rose up against the Germans during the Soviet offensive and took the city before being destroyed by the Germans. The Lublin casualties were 18,000 Jews, gunned down by machine guns. Levi wonders if they will be next. He puts no stock in his current position as a chemist to afford him status.
The two glamorous women in the lab emphasize the incongruity of the three Häftlings in the modern laboratory. The prisoners’ dirty clothes are infested with fleas. Their shaven heads and swollen faces set on long knobby necks make Levi feel extremely self-conscious. In this atmosphere of humiliation, Levi remembers the man he once was. He paints a picture of that unrealistic world he inhabited in the first chapter when he was a free political outlaw, living in the mountains. Levi has always been a man of ideas and matters of life and death were abstractions. He now counts his optimism about the future as foolish. Levi has brought from his past only what he could use to accept his privation. When he says he is not even alive enough to know how to kill himself, he means that he hasn’t the strength to take matters into his own hands to end his suffering.
