Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Survival in Auschwitz, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dehumanization and Resistance
Adaptability, Chance, and Survival
Moral Relativity
Racial Hierarchy
Oppression, Power, and Cruelty
Summary
Analysis
The Häftlinge try to will the coming winter away, but it is unavoidable. The onset of winter means many things. They will eat less, since bread must be used to buy gloves. They will sleep less, since night hours will be spent mending gloves. Seven out of 10 prisoners will die before the spring arrives. More ominously still, the Lager is overpopulated by 2,000 prisoners. Now that winter is coming, everyone will be indoors as often as possible. Such crowding is unsustainable, and the Germans prefer their numbers balanced and machines in proper working order—a selection is coming. Thousands will be sent to the gas chambers.
Winter, like everything else in the Lager, is stripped down to its barest essentials and made particularly dangerous by the cruelty of the Germans and lack of shelter and equipment for the Jewish prisoners. The Germans’ balancing of prisoner populations like an accountant handles numbers on a spreadsheet once again highlights how much the Germans have dehumanized the Jewish people in their own minds. They are not dealing with human lives, only tallies of numbers that need adjusting.
Themes
The Germans try to suppress news of selections, but most often the camp senses its coming beforehand. Most methods of avoidance have already been monopolized by the Poles, since they always hear new information first. For those without connections or the bread capital to quickly organize one, there is little to be done to prepare for selection other than to examine oneself in the washroom with the others and offer each other the mutual assurance that they look healthy and will be passed over. Even for an old man who will certainly be chosen, Levi offers confident reassurance. For himself as many others, Levi is so powerless to affect that outcome that he releases himself from fear, experiencing the “great selection of October 1944 with inconceivable tranquility.” The general daily hardships consume all available thought.
Levi’s resignation to fate, which results in his “inconceivable tranquility” is both useful and tragic. On one hand, it allows him to pass through what seems an inhumanly cruel ordeal with relative calm. On the other hand, such resignation indicates that Levi is so detached that he no longer knows how to fear for his life. Beyond the basic instinct to survive, Levi does not seem capable of fighting. Although his mind is still working and active, his spirit has, in a way, already been defeated by the daily pains and struggling of surviving until the next meal.
Themes
On a Sunday afternoon, the order is given for all prisoners to be enclosed in their huts while an SS officer makes his way from hut to hut. In Levi’s hut, the prisoners lie naked in their bunks for over an hour before their inspection. When the SS man arrives, each prisoner in turn runs naked a few yards to meet him, hands the officer a slip of paper with his number on it, and leaves. In less than a second each, with hardly a glance, the SS officer grants life or death to each prisoner by handing his number to the man on his right or the man on his left. A block of 200 prisoners is sorted this way in three or four minutes. The entire camp of 10,000 prisoners is sorted within the afternoon.
The arbitrary, haphazard nature of the selection exemplifies how much of one’s survival in the camp is reliant on chance. Although without learning to adapt and to organize, one will certainly not last more than a few months, all the organizing in the world cannot protect a prisoner from simple bad luck. This suggests that along with adaptability, luck and chance play almost as critical of a role in an individual’s ability to survive a cruel and lethal environment.
Themes
Once the number bearing papers have been sorted, the prisoners are allowed to return and get dressed. It seems that the man in front of Levi, though healthy and robust, was condemned, and Levi was spared. But mistakes are often made, and Levi and Alberto surmise that perhaps their cards were mixed up. In any case, Levi will live, as will Alberto. The condemned are given additional rations that evening and for the few days until they are taken to the crematorium.
The potential mix-up between Levi’s card and the man in front of him painfully reinforces the dominant role that luck and chance play in one’s survival. However, considering that Levi was treated in Ka-Be and is thus considered an “economically useful Jew” it is possible that he was spared from selection based upon his technical skills.
Themes
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On a neighboring bunk, a Jewish prisoner named Kuhn tactlessly and enthusiastically thanks God for benevolently sparing his life, even though his bunkmate lying next to him has been condemned. Levi reflects, “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayers.”
Levi’s anger at the tactlessness of another man once again demonstrates that, despite his resignation towards his own fate, he still possesses the notably human trait of sympathy, meaning he is resisting dehumanization to some degree.
Themes
