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Chapter 17, The Story of Ten Days
Summary
Levi documents the momentous events from January 11, 1945, when he is placed in the infectious disease ward in Ka-Be with scarlet fever, to the liberation of the camp by the Russians. In his ward, he meets two recently arrived French prisoners, Arthur and Charles, also suffering from scarlet fever. On January 17, the Greek barber Askenazi confides to Levi some cryptic news: tomorrow, all friends will be gone, emphasizing the word “all.” A Greek doctor comes into the ward to tell them to prepare to leave the camp if they are healthy enough for a twelve-mile walk. Others too ill for the march will stay in Ka-Be. Two young Hungarian patients react to the news with panic, and Levi nearly follows them before talking with Kosman, a journalist, whose calm demeanor convinces him to stay. That evening, Alberto comes by his window and the inseparable friends say their goodbyes.
On January 18, Levi wakes to find that all the healthy prisoners left during the night, their number about twenty thousand. The last distribution of soup takes place in the hospital. The central heating plant has been abandoned, and the temperature starts to drop. At about 11PM bombardments begin, setting ablaze huts in the hospital complex but sparing their building, making the patients think of providential deliverance.
On January 19, Levi, Charles, and Arthur leave Ka-Be to find food and a portable stove. Other patients have already ransacked the surrounding buildings. They find potatoes in the kitchen and a cast-iron stove in the Prominenzblock. They install the stove in their ward. The grateful patients, led by twenty-three-year-old Towarowski, each share a slice of their bread with the three who went out to scavenge supplies on their behalf. At that moment, Levi knows that they all have turned a corner and are on their way back to being men and not Häftlings. After a potato dinner, Levi and Arthur talk into the night and feel at peace, like God must have felt after creation.
On January 20, Levi and Arthur forage in the silent camp and bring back water, cabbages, turnips, and salt. Levi explores the hospital and finds a truck battery, which provides light to their room. Through their window they watch the Wehrmacht soldiers fleeing the Russian offensive.
On January 21, Arthur organizes the patients into a work crew, peeling potatoes. Maxime, a Parisian tailor, barters for two pints of soup, delivering two sets of outerwear made from blankets. At night, they hear the sounds of artillery fire and the whistle of shells over their heads.
On January 22, Charles and Levi venture into the SS camp and finish the remains of the guards’ dinner and beer, left in haste. They take medicines, newspapers, magazines, and down comforters, and narrowly avoid a band of SS men who execute a group of Frenchmen who had taken up residence in the SS dining hall.
On January 23, following a rumor, Levi and Charles head to a spot on the perimeter of the camp where the barbed wire had been beaten down. They step through and Charles exclaims that they are free. They find trenches of potatoes that had been protected from the cold.
On January 24, Levi briefly savors the concept of their liberty. No one’s condition was improving, and some were quietly dying in their bunks.
On January 25, one of their company, a Hungarian chemist named Sómogyi, begins to decline. In his delirium, he answers yes to some unknown entity with every breath. Levi, Charles, and Arthur share stories of their home countries.
On January 26, air battles take place above them. Sómogyi throws himself out of his bunk with the last of his life’s essence and is dead when he hits the floor.
On January 27, as Charles and Levi bring out Sómogyi’s body, the Russians arrive. Levi’s epitaph documents the fate of the infectious disease group. With the exception of Schenk, Alcalai, Arthur, Charles, and Levi, all die in the temporary Russian hospital they set up in Auschwitz. Charles and Levi continue to correspond.
Analysis
The final chapter represents the denouement of the book. As the Germans prepare to evacuate the Auschwitz camp, Levi reflects on his sense of detachment, unlike the emotion that his former self would have felt about the developments. Levi recognizes Alberto’s elation borne on the winds of change bringing optimism and energy. Yet those left behind feel vulnerable and helpless to affect their outcomes. When the young Hungarian patients panic, Levi’s fear comes to the fore. As Levi describes the men’s flight into the night, he writes their epitaph from the vantage point of hindsight: They will be shot within a few hours, like three-fourths of those on the 36-mile march from Auschwitz to the city of Wodzislaw in the western part of Poland. In Wodzislaw, the prisoners were put on unheated freight trains and deported to concentration camps in Germany. Levi comments that those left behind feel helpless and vulnerable.
The bombardments that leave their building unscathed while all around them others are destroyed or burning, raise thoughts of divine providence acting on their behalf. In the sleepless night, Levi begins to plan for survival and the next day organizes a work party with Charles and Arthur. They see other skeletal patients pillaging the camp like an infestation of insects, while the three efficiently collaborate to secure a stove, fuel, and food. When the ward patients honor their benefactors by giving them part of their precious bread, Levi concludes they have transcended the Lager. No longer every man for himself, the gratitude serves notice that their humanity has returned. Those with the energy begin to take part in food preparation, peeling potatoes from their bunks. The infectious ward has banded together. Levi names the men that he feels are under his care, for posterity. He begins to look forward to living and decides they must take sanitary precautions not to cross-contaminate each other with their illnesses.
The sick men all need more than potatoes and turnips to mend, and in the absence of protein and medicine, the illnesses claim more and more lives. The healthier patients carry the bodies to a trench that now overflows with corpses. The Germans administered death impersonally, with poison gas that snuffed out lives in an instant. Sómogyi’s death happens in the company of his fellow patients whom he has served and has been served by. His body painfully shuts down of its own accord over two days’ time, and with the final spasms, he falls out of his bunk, dead. Levi sees the Germans’ victory over civilization in all the deaths as well as the walking skeletons the remainder has become. The patients no longer remove corpses from their bunks but sleep alongside them. That men can tolerate such psychological abjection signifies to Levi that they no longer are men.
The arrival of the Russians coincides with the removal of Sómogyi’s corpse to the trench. Levi finishes his narrative with a postscript about the men in the infectious ward with whom he shared the last ten days before their liberation of the camp. His caretaking of them rehabilitated him, a seemingly brief yet immense comment on what truly feeds and gives life to the soul. The book ends with the camaraderie Levi foresees with Charles as they live out their lives in freedom.
