Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz: Luck, Skill, and Humanity

Introduction: Luck as a Condition of Survival

In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi's most important observation was that staying alive depended not only on skill and cunning but also on a large measure of good luck. In his case, one example of good fortune was being born in Italy, where Jews were not deported until after the German occupation in 1943. Whatever the faults of the fascist Mussolini regime — and they were many — it refused to cooperate with the deportation of Jews from its territory, even though it deprived them of many basic civil rights. Had Levi lived in Germany, Holland, occupied Poland, or the Baltic States, his chances of survival would have been far lower.

He was also fortunate in having a basic knowledge of chemistry that the Germans found useful, since the I.G. Farben Company controlled Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and required chemists and technicians for its laboratories. This allowed him access to extra food, a work environment without beatings and torture, and freedom from the heavy physical labor that would have drained his strength. As Levi noted, prisoners who failed to find some such niche in Auschwitz would only survive for two or three months.

At the very end, contracting scarlet fever as the camp was being evacuated in 1945 was also a blessing in disguise, since he was left behind instead of joining the forced march back to Germany in winter conditions. Even had he survived that march, he would have ended up spending five more months in other concentration camps with no guarantee of finding a relatively safe and privileged position as he had in Auschwitz. Those five months would have placed him at continuous risk of dying from disease, overwork, hunger, beatings by guards, or the final death marches at the end of the war. Although he nearly died in the Auschwitz infirmary before the Russians arrived, once he survived those last ten days he was safe from the Nazis and able to return home.

Survival was all that could have been accomplished under the circumstances, and this was a major victory given that the entire system the Nazis had put in place was designed only to destroy Jewish prisoners completely. Levi was lucky in many respects, but also skilled and cunning enough to realize early on that if he simply worked, obeyed the rules, and ate only what the S.S. fed him, he would not remain alive for very long.

Arrival and Dehumanization

Like most of the prisoners and even the S.S. staff, Levi had no real conception of Auschwitz before he arrived, because nothing quite like it had ever existed before in history. More than even a concentration camp or a death camp, it had evolved into a planned, industrial city for genocide. Levi had never heard of it when he was deported there in February 1944, and he had no way of knowing that the Nazis, "owing to the growing shortage of labor," had decided to temporarily lengthen the lives of some of their slave laborers instead of simply exterminating them all through work as originally planned (Levi 9). He had heard of the Nazi ideas about the superiority of so-called "Aryans" and their hostility toward Jews, but he did not know that their racist ideology had been carried to its logical conclusion.

As the prisoners were being loaded onto transports to Germany — 650 people crowded into twelve boxcars — Levi received his first hint of how the Nazis truly viewed this "cargo." When an officer asked a corporal for the roll-call count, the term he used was "how many pieces?," as if the prisoners were some type of commodity or spare parts (Levi 16). This was the moment he began to realize that not only had the victims been totally dehumanized, but many of those charged with destroying them were actually bored by what they had come to regard as a routine task.

Once processed into the camp, Levi soon learned the fate of those not selected for temporary survival. Old people, children, the sick, and the disabled were not considered useful, and the majority of Jews who arrived were gassed and cremated the same day. Those deemed fit for work learned quickly, and Levi described his own existence in stark terms: "I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind" (Levi 37). At first the Italian prisoners gathered in one corner of the barracks to talk about home, but they soon gave it up as so many were dying. They became thinner and weaker by the day, until they no longer recognized one another.

Learning the Rules of Auschwitz

At first the new rules of the camp environment confused and disoriented Levi, as did the gruff, parade-ground German spoken by guards and prisoners alike. In the beginning he asked too many questions about what the place was and what was happening, annoying the other prisoners until he heard "a sleepy and angry shout: 'Ruhe, Ruhe!'" (Shut up). He observed that at Auschwitz "one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard before" (Levi 38). All these nationalities had been thrown together in one place, their overriding concern reduced to food and survival.

Bread, soup, cigarettes, and other commodities served as the currency of the camp. Those who did not learn to manipulate this system — through stealing, procuring, and "organizing" — had little chance of staying alive. Ethics and morality were thoroughly expedient and situational: the S.S. would look the other way at theft from civilian worksites if they also profited from it, but would punish the same theft severely within the camp, unless they were receiving a share of the proceeds.

Levi learned to steal and to avoid being robbed, skills as essential to survival as any physical endurance. The camp operated according to a brutal internal logic that had to be understood and navigated, not resisted head-on. Those who failed to grasp this reality quickly found themselves among the most vulnerable.

Works Cited

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Touchstone, 1996.