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From International Socialist Review, Vol.21 No.3, Summer 1960, p.94.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
If This Be Man
by Primo Levi
Orion Press, New York. 1959. 206 pp. $3.50.
Capitalism, in its death agony, seeks scapegoats upon whom it vents its insoluble frustrations. Hitler’s persecution of Jews and Marxists is a prime example of the barbaric level to which modern “civilizations” can descend.
Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of his experience in a German concentration camp is a well-written, carefully detailed and honest account of life “on the bottom.” He presents a graphic picture of the social codes that result from the grim, desperate struggle for mere survival.
Levi was a Jewish Italian partisan who was captured by the Fascists in 1943 and turned over to the Nazis. With a trainload of other Italian Jews he was shipped to the Buna camp in East Germany.
The prisoners degenerated as the pressures of constant hunger, cold, hard labor and savage, inflexible discipline took their toll. The means of sustenance were a portion of gray bread in the morning and a bowl of soup in the evening. They also were the means of exchange in the vast barter system that pervaded the camp, where a piece of thread, a spoon or an extra shirt meant a significant increase in wealth. Each prisoner became the merciless competitor of all the others as he jockeyed in line to get his bowl of soup from the bottom, rather than from the top, of the vat.
The inmates lived and worked under an impossibly complicated system of rules, every infraction of which was cause for a beating. Favoritism and special privilege played the same role as anywhere in capitalist society. It seemed to operate, Levi writes, under the ferocious law “to he that has, will be given; to he that has not, will be taken away.”
Hanging over their heads was the eternal threat of “selection.” The sick, the weakened or those just unlucky were chosen as candidates for the ever-waiting gas chamber. It was the hope to avoid “selection” that drove men to their last gasp in dragging their heavy burdens in the snow and rain; to march for miles on infernal wooden shoes; and to tolerate the hunger and the beatings.
Even the approach of the Russians, signifying the end of the war for them, held little hope any more. They had been driven too low. Levi recounts how they were drawn up on the parade ground to witness the hanging of a prisoner. At the final moment the victim found the defiant courage to shout, “Comrades, I am the last one!” The author asks, “Did they respond?” No, their minds were more intent on the evening bowl of soup. Only after the hunger cravings were eased were they oppressed by shame.
When the Germans evacuated the camp, Levi was in the infirmary with a case of scarlet fever. All those incapable of marching were left behind. For the next ten days, before the Russians arrived, the camp disintegrated under the desperate struggles of the dying to hang on. Yet in this same period, the beginnings of cooperation among the sick started the prisoners along the road to normal human relationships. Those that survived began the long road up.
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