The events of Survival in Auschwitz are not all told in chronological order, but described as reflections on various aspects of life in the labor camp.
Primo Levi, a 24-year-old Italian Jewish man, is arrested by Italy’s newly-arisen Fascist Republic. Believing that he is in greater danger as a political dissident, Levi announces himself to be a Jew and is quickly sent to an internment camp. A few weeks later, German SS officers arrive in the camp, and all of the Jewish prisoners in the camp are loaded onto trains and sent to Poland. After days without food or water and in horribly cramped compartments, the Jewish prisoners are unloaded at Auschwitz. Most of them are immediately sent to be exterminated in the crematoriums, though a small number of healthy men, including Levi, are sent to be laborers at a rubber factory called the Buna.
When Levi arrives at the Buna, he and his fellows are stripped naked and forced to stand in the cold. Their clothing and possessions are taken from them, and after a shower and more standing naked, they are each reissued raggedy clothing and a pair of wooden shoes. An identification number is tattooed on each man’s wrist, which he shows each day to receive his daily rations.
Within a month, Levi adapts to his new hellish environment, learning the rules of the labor camp: everything will be stolen unless it is protected; hunger and pain are constant companions; don’t think of the past or future, only of the present and its immediate needs. Although Levi was a chemist as a civilian, he is assigned to a manual labor unit, which is difficult for him due to his small stature. However, when a clumsy laborer drops a metal tool on his foot and gashes it open, Levi spends three weeks in the camp’s infirmary, which is a welcome respite from the hard labor. The night after he rejoins the healthy prisoners, Levi dreams that he is with his sister and trying to tell her all that happened to him, but she is not interested in listening, which pains him greatly.
Since rations and resources are so meager, an underground economy thrives in the camp, functioning on the base unit of one ration of bread. The value of a bread ration compared to the various items that can be bought or sold—shirts, additional food, string, gloves, or anything useful for survival—fluctuates depending on supply and demand. Prisoners undertaking complex investment schemes, and their underground economy operates quite like a normal economy, except that every item is necessarily stolen or contraband. In light of this, when theft is a necessity for survival, Levi suggests to the reader that morality within the camp looks entirely different from morality in civil society.
Levi also describes how a prisoner’s ability to “organize,” or to procure additional resources or protections for oneself through the underground market or good relationships with camp officials, determines their chance of survival. The majority of prisoners simply accept what little food they are given and follow orders until their bodies fail them and they die of illness or exhaustion, usually within three months. Levi refers to these men as “the drowned,” since their lives have been swallowed up by the lethality of the labor camp. However, for “the saved,” those rarer few who quickly adapt to the camp and learn how to find extra resources or earn the goodwill and protection of powerful people, survival for several months or even years is possible. Though, everyone’s fate still depends heavily on chance.
Three months into Levi’s detention in the labor camp, word spreads that a Kommando, or working unit, of chemists will be established, and he decides to volunteer. Although Levi’s chemical knowledge is tested by a German scientist and the man seems impressed, nothing comes of it for several more months and Levi still works in hard labor. In this same period, during the spring of 1944, the Russian air force begins bombing the Germans, often hitting Auschwitz and the neighboring camps, making life considerably more unpredictable and dangerous. However, during this time Levi also establishes a connection with an Italian civilian named Lorenzo who begins smuggling food and extra clothing to him, merely out of his own uncommon decency. For Levi, Lorenzo’s gifts are more than mere additional resources, but a reminder that a world that is good and beautiful exists beyond the walls of the labor camp.
In October, the prisoners fear the coming winter since it means that most of them will die in the harsh coming months. The camp, which is now overcrowded with prisoners, will need to have its population quickly reduced so that everyone can fit indoors at night. One afternoon, the Germans have a “selection” in which they sort the 12,000 prisoners in the camp, sending thousands of them to be killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau, the neighboring death camp. The decision on who is killed and who is spared is arbitrary, made by an SS officer who glances at each man for less than a second and judges him fit to live or condemned to die. Levi survives, as does his best friend Alberto, though many others they know are taken to be killed.
In November, as winter is setting in, it is announced one morning that three men have finally been selected to work indoors in the chemists’ laboratory, one of whom is Levi. This is a great victory not only for Levi, but also for Alberto, since the two now share all of their resources and Levi will now have access to more items to steal and sell. Work in the laboratory is pleasant and warm, though for Levi, the strange familiarity and humanness of working at a desk with precise tools brings the painful realization that he has been reduced to nothing more than a beast of burden for all these months. There are beautiful young German women working in the laboratory as well—the first women any of the prisoners have seen in many months. The women are repulsed by the Jewish prisoners’ smell and gaunt appearance, though, which only brings them additional pain.
Even so, with additional resources available and less strenuous, dangerous work, Levi grows stronger and he and Alberto become skilled organizers, running various investment and theft schemes to procure large amounts of food and better clothing. One day around Christmastime, while they are feeling victorious, they both see a Jewish prisoner who had participated in a violent rebellion in Birkenau executed for his crimes. As the man dies, Levi realizes with shame that the condemned was the last of the Jews with any strength to truly fight their oppressors. Despite he and Alberto’s own success in organizing, they feel defeated and ashamed, realizing that the Germans have succeeded in crushing their spirits.
In January of 1945, Levi contracts scarlet fever and is quarantined in the infection ward of the infirmary for 40 days of isolation and rest. Within his first few days there, officials announce that the camp is being evacuated because the Russian army is nearly upon them. The prisoners who are healthy enough to walk will be marched away with the German guards, while those who are ill will be left to fend for themselves. Alberto joins the healthy prisoners and Germans, and “vanishes” into the night. Levi never sees him again, implying that he likely perished along the journey. Levi remains in the camp, weak with fever though stronger than most, with ten other ill men who share the same hut and hundreds of others left in the infirmary. With the help of two hard-working Frenchmen, Levi and most of the people in their hut survive the next te10n days, foraging for food, a woodstove, and fuel. The majority of the other men left in the camp die of starvation, illness, or exposure to the cold. After 10 days, the Russian army arrives and converts Auschwitz into a temporary hospital, caring for the survivors as best they can. Half of the people from Levi’s group die in the Russians’ care, though he and the Frenchmen survive. Levi and his collaborators return home, and he maintains a long and enduring friendship with one of them.
