Eyewitness accounts bring the humanity to history. In a field of facts and figures, it becomes all too easy to reduce historical studies to mere stories. But history is so much more than a story. It is a retelling of the human experience. Every historical figure, every person involved in every event has had their own struggles, ambitions, thoughts, and feelings. The survivors and victims of the Holocaust are no different.
In an environment in which Nazis attempted to rid certain groups of people of their humanity and reduce these humans to work animals, perhaps the most can be revealed about humanity. Following increased persecution of Jewish people by the Nazis, concentration camps were used to incarcerate, separate, and eventually eradicate the Jewish population.
Constructed in 1940, Auschwitz was the largest concentration and extermination camp in Nazi Europe. Auschwitz was comprised of several individual camps; Auschwitz I was a labor camp, Auschwitz-Monowitz housed IG Farben plants, and Auschwitz-Birkenau was a death camp. After these components of the camp were fully constructed in 1942, a select few of the able-bodied inmates were chosen to join the slave labor force and the rest were sent to the gas chambers. Those chosen to work, were stripped of all personal belongings, tattooed and sent into the labor force. Among these slave workers was Primo Levi, who details his experience in his book Survival in Auschwitz.
Levi brings to light the everyday struggles to survive and maintain humanity in Auschwitz, where “they will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”
Stripped of every personal belonging, every item of clothing, even of their name, inmates were introduced to their new way of life, if it can truly be defined as a life, for certainly their living conditions were sub-human. Inmates quickly realized that they “had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so.” They were brought into a “life” where
the personages…are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Haftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.
In this world, this environment of death and despair, yet also one of maintained dignity, Levi highlights the juxtaposition and paradoxy of the life of an inmate at Auschwitz. Levi recounts his time in the work force, at the hospital, and everyday life. Throughout Survival in Auschwitz, Levi highlights the continual theme of survival, but not just the practical “avoiding- death” type of survival, but a “maintaining-humanity” and “improving-quality-of-life” type of survival. Every inmate had to develop these latter survival methods if he wanted to continue living. As Levi says, “whoever does not know how to become an “Organisator”, “Kombinator”, or “Prominent” (The savage eloquence of those words!) soon becomes a “musselman”. In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; it does not exist in the concentration camp.” Because of this reality, all morals were gone once one began life at Auschwitz. Levi recounts sleeping with his meager belongings (his jacket, his bowl, his spoon) in a bundle under his head or holding them between his knees when washing, for if one left these precious items alone for a second, they would easily be stolen. In Auschwitz, everything had worth. A piece of paper could be put in one’s shoe to add padding; portions of rations could be used to purchase a knife or tobacco at the camp black market. Because of this, Levi poses a question to the reader “to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil”, “just” and “unjust”; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.” In Auschwitz, where humanity was robbed from a person, inmates clung to the little bit of humanity that they were allowed in the pointless tasks of polishing their work-ridden shoes, or washing with dirty water and devoid of soap. This tragic human experience cannot be forgotten and lost in numbers. For although the figures, the number of victims, the quantity of property stolen, the amount of lives lost, do add an element of tragedy, the experiences of individual humans, of their stories bring meaning to the numbers.
In the end, history is the human experience. We cannot reduce history to mere numbers and dates, especially when studying tragedies such as the Holocaust. Even Levi admits that “[another inmate] told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel, and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity.” We therefore cannot neglect to study the individuals that comprise the survivors and the victims of the Holocaust. For although these stories are tragic, we must agree with Levi when he says, “we are convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis.” It is because these stories are tragic that we cannot forget them, for they ground the history lesson in reality, reminding us today of the struggle of yesterday.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Stackelberg, Roderick. Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies. New York: Routledge, 2009.
MaryBeth Ames 