Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi: A Study Guide

Introduction to Auschwitz and Primo Levi

Auschwitz, Poland was a concentration camp built 150 miles outside Warsaw in May 1940. The commandant was Rudolf Höss, and the camp was staffed by SS Death's Head units. Primo Levi, a 24-year-old man, had been a prisoner there since early 1944. He had studied chemistry at university and graduated in 1941. He then moved to northern Italy to join the resistance against Benito Mussolini but was captured in December 1943 and sent to Auschwitz.

Levi describes the journey as a four-day train trip crammed into boxcars with nothing to eat or drink, followed by a midnight arrival and the first of many summary interrogations — each of which led to either a slavish existence or swift death. Clothes were taken, hair was shaved, and prisoners stood naked and cold, already starving. And this was only the beginning.

Life Inside the Lager: Hierarchy and Survival

The camp, or lager, was a society with certain unforgiving laws, many of which were derived not from the guards but from the prisoners themselves. The camp was divided between those who would drown — the muselmann — and those who might survive. A man had to be cunning: if one simply followed the rules, one died. It was you against everyone else. You had to keep a constant eye on your clothes, bowl, and spoon, or another prisoner would steal them. There was no pity for one's fellows. Pity led to death. Apart from the indispensable ingredient of luck, survival depended on one's ability to learn how to cope with an artificially created Hobbesian state of nature — an incessant war of all against all.

Levi recalls that beginning from the first day, when prisoners entered the camp of Monowitz, there was a thorough search. Everyone was asked their age and level of education and skill. This was, in his own words, one of his fortunes. He declared that he was a chemist, without knowing that prisoners were assigned to a chemical products factory. Later, this brought him certain advantages — in the final two months of his imprisonment he worked inside a laboratory.

Levi writes of the fate of those who did not adapt:

"To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the Muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they follow the same slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves. They are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion." (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 82)

Daily Conditions at Monowitz

Monowitz, with 10,000 prisoners, was part of an enormous industrial chemical enterprise. The purpose was to construct a new chemical products factory over an area of approximately six square kilometers. The construction was in its advanced stages, and all prisoners of war — British, French, and Russian — were put to work on it. Some 40,000 individuals in total labored there, of whom 10,000 were Jews, representing the lowest group in the camp hierarchy.

Levi captured the human cost of this system in a single devastating image: "If I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen." (Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 82)