If This Be Man

Night came, and it was such a night one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die.

All took leave of life in the manner that most suited them. Some prayed, some drank to excess, others became intoxicated by a final unseemly lust. But the mothers stayed up to prepare food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out to dry in the wind. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the pillows, and the hundred other small things that mothers remember and children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not feed him today?…

Dawn came upon us like a betrayal, as if the new sun were an ally of the men who had decided to destroy us. The different emotions that were roused in us, of conscious resignation, of futile rebellion, of religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now, after a sleepless night, converged in a collective, uncontrolled panic. The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason dissolved into an unrestrained tumult, across which flashed, as painful as the thrusts of a sword, the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space. Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain…

Imagine now a man who has been deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, of literally everything, in short, that he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, for he who loses everything can easily lose himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided, with no sense of human affinity—in the most fortunate case, judged purely on the basis of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double meaning of the term “extermination camp,” and it will be clear what we seek to express with the phrase “lying on the bottom…

Häftling: I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the mark tattooed on our left arm until we die.

Here we received the first blows: and the thing was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, in either body or spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?…

We are at Monowitz, near Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia, a region inhabited by both Poles and Germans. This camp is a work camp, in German it’s called Arbeitslager; all the prisoners (there are about ten thousand) work in a factory that produces a type of rubber called Buna, so the camp itself is called Buna…

Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as certain scenes in dreams. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple policemen. It was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask for his luggage: they replied, “Luggage later.” Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said, “Together again later.” Many mothers did not want to be separated from their children: they said, “Good, good, stay with child.” They had the calm assurance of people merely doing their normal, everyday duty. But Renzo delayed an instant too long as he said goodbye to Francesca, his fiancée, and with a single blow, right in his face, they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday duty…

There are few men who know how to go to their death with dignity, and often they are not those you would expect. Few know how to remain silent and respect the silence of others. Our restless sleep was often interrupted by noisy and futile disputes, by curses, by kicks and punches delivered blindly to ward off some troublesome and inevitable contact. Then someone would light the mournful little flame of a candle, to reveal the obscure swarming of a confused and indistinguishable human mass, sluggish and aching, rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately collapsing again in exhaustion…

Excerpt From
If This a Man
Primo Levi