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Chapter 7, A Good Day
Summary
Spring arrives and invigorates the men. One prisoner named Ziegler pronounces the worst to be over. The Greek Jews burst into unified song and another man, Felicio, envisions that next year they will be home by their hearths.
As they enter the Buna worksite, Levi thinks of it as a city, powered by the slave labor provided by the surrounding Lagers. He pictures the Carbide Tower which rises in the middle of Buna as a Tower of Babel, built by men of many nations for the Nazi hubris. Levi comments that history will show Buna never produced any synthetic rubber. Even in Buna the sunlight reflects from gasoline-slicked puddles. The men smile at each other. Levi develops a theory of how the dynamic of unhappiness aids survival in the camps.
Hunger is always with them. The men stop to watch a steam-shovel chew up soil, fantasizing about its meal of dirt. A man named Sigi remembers a wedding feast where a guest couldn’t finish his third bowl of soup. Another man Béla waxes nostalgic for his Hungarian meat pies. Levi regrets leaving spaghetti unfinished at the camp in Modena. The newest Hungarian arrival to the camp, Fischer, pulls from his pocket the remaining portion of bread from the morning ration. The veteran prisoners have various theories why they are unable to save some bread for later. Fresh bread has more nutritional value than stale bread. Alberto advances a mathematical theorem that hunger and bread in the pocket are terms of an equation that cancel each other out. A man named David speaks for the majority when he says that no one can steal his bread from his stomach.
The good day gets even better when a prisoner named Templar finds ninety pints of abandoned soup, and the squad of fifteen divides it evenly, six pints each. They each wolf down their portions at increments during the afternoon, prompting the Kapo to observe their eating is more fressen than essen, or “more animal than human.” Meister Nogalla turns a blind eye to their food breaks. The day concludes with a few hours of relief from the misery of their lives, tantamount to the unhappiness of free men.
Analysis
As the sunlight burns off the morning mist from the countryside, color returns to the landscape. The prisoners can see that the meadows are actually green. By comparison, the Buna factory they are working to build appears a wasteland of iron, concrete, and smoke. The Carbide Tower symbolizes the Nazi greed for power as the master race. The German invention of Buna rubber was a chemical and technological breakthrough, the first synthetic rubber that had the capacity to replace the natural resource. Everywhere in the world, economies were in desperate need of rubber. The Germans were sitting on a goldmine. The fact that Buna never produced any synthetic rubber, however, evokes the scriptural moral of the Tower of Babel, in which God frustrated the plans of men.
Touched by the warmth of sunlight, the men smile at each other, thinking they could almost be happy if it weren’t for their constant hunger. Hunger dominates their worldview. Levi realizes that unhappiness appearing to be a monolithic state is a trick of perspective in which the present misery fills up their reality but in actuality hides a series of successive states of discontent stretching out into time. Levi sees this perception of unhappiness as a providential mercy. People can only see one crisis at a time and thus have optimism that when it passes, so too will their unhappiness. Levi shows individuals interacting with each other over their shared misery of hunger. The new internees Sigi and Fischer have not yet learned the conventions of avoiding the subject of food. Sigi’s regret over a past uneaten bowl of bean soup gives rise to Levi’s own memory of wasted food, a mistake he promises to himself never to make again. Fischer’s delaying gratification of his hunger by keeping half his ration for later eating triggers self-reflection in the others that they do not have this ability. Alberto’s witty mathematical equation doesn’t get the wholesale agreement that David’s practical interpretation engenders: Stolen bread is lost forever. Better to eat it while you have the chance.
Templar’s windfall of soup also shows the camaraderie of the squad. They share the extra rations equally, with Templar’s portion coming from the bottom of the bowl where the vegetables have settled as his due. The feeling of well-being reminds them of what it is like to live as free men.
