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Chapter 3, Initiation
Summary
Levi finds himself shuttled between huts before settling in Block 30. He bombards his bunkmate, Diena, with anxious questions about how to get soup and where he will be sent to work. Voices around the hut shout a German word that he understands to be telling him to be quiet, and the experience underscores the communication problems that he finds stressful. So many different languages are spoken in the hut that Levi considers it “a perpetual Babel,” referring to the Biblical story in which God eliminates the one universal language to make it harder for humans to work together. The next morning starts as usual with the frenetic rush to the bread line for the daily ration. Levi reflects that bread represents a commodity the prisoners can use to barter.
After the bread line, prisoners have ten minutes to visit the washroom where slogans declare the importance of cleanliness and posters depict the correct method of washing, stripped to the waist. The lack of clean water makes this impossible, and Levi debates abandoning the ludicrous hygiene ritual. He watches his friend Steinlauf, shirtless, vigorously scrub his torso without soap. Steinlauf asks him why he isn’t washing. Levi lists several reasons why it makes no sense to wash under the present circumstances when Steinlauf interrupts him and makes the case that civilization hangs on such rites of dignity and propriety. Choosing to wash means choosing to live and not die. Levi listens because Steinlauf is a credible source, a decorated sergeant with the Austro-Hungarian army, and a man of goodwill. However, Levi questions the advice, debating whether it is better to create a personal code or to avoid having one.
Analysis
As Levi tries to integrate into life at the labor camp, he has many understandable anxieties. Communication issues and language barriers confound the solutions to vital practical problems such as hunger and work duties. He compares the environment with its confluence of languages to the tower of Babel. In the story, God resists men’s belief in their united power by changing everyone’s speech into a different language so that one cannot understand the other. In this context, bread also represents a medium of exchange. Like money, it is the one possession that has the same worth to everyone.
Levi also comes to terms with the value of the rituals of hygiene that the camp requires. The idea of washing in polluted water seems to be another German farce. In his debate with Steinlauf, Levi represents pure pragmatism. The pantomime of washing serves no purpose and the time could be better spent doing anything else. Steinlauf represents the importance of rituals to preserve one’s own survival. Participating in the rite of washing, though not productive of cleanliness, means refusing to accede to the forces of death. Levi has trouble accepting this moral imperative on its face because of his sense of fatalism. Feeling damned is a new existential state, and he hesitates committing to a course of action.
