57 pages • 1 hour read
Primo LeviIf This Is a Man
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Journey”
The narrator, Primo Levi, begins his memoir of his imprisonment in Auschwitz with his capture by the Fascist Militia on December 13, 1943, when he is 24 years old. He is working with friends in the Italian Alps on anti-Fascist resistance, and they are betrayed to the Fascist militia. He is taken to a detention camp in Fossoli, Italy, in late January 1944.
German SS (an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, the segment of the Nazi Party explicitly responsible for the murder of the Jews) arrive in Fossoli. On February 21 he learns that all Jews being held in Fossoli will be forced to leave the next day. The detainees are warned that for every person who attempts to escape 10 people will be shot.
Levi describes how “all took leave from life in the manner which most suited them” (6). Mothers prepare food and “a hundred other small things” (7) for their children, washing clothes and hanging up their clean laundry on the barbed wire. One group organizes a Jewish mourning ceremony, praying and weeping together all night. The next day “dawn came on us like a betrayer” (7), and they are forced into closed compartments on transport trains.
At first people cry out, desperate for water. The transport trains leave Italy, and by the fourth day no one tries to communicate with anyone outside the train anymore. Levi describes feeling “on the other side” (10).
People speak with one another and say things that “are never said among the living” (10). By the time they arrive at the destination, everyone speaks in whispers, afraid to break the silence.
People are divided into groups, based on age, sex, and ability to work for the SS. Most are deemed unable to work, and they are killed within two days. Two groups of “strange individuals,” who are later determined to be Kapos, arrive to steal their luggage, wearing berets and striped, filthy coats. Those in Levi’s group are loaded onto a truck. While all is incomprehensible, there is a sense of understanding that they, too, will become like the strange men in striped coats: “this is the metamorphosis that awaits us” (13).
Chapter 2 Summary: “On the Bottom”
After being put on a truck, Levi arrives at the now-infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei, (“Work sets you free”) at Auschwitz. Everyone is made to stand in a huge room. After five days of travel, no one has had anything to drink, and hearing the gurgling of the radiators makes everyone “ferocious.” There is a tap for water, but a sign states that it is forbidden to drink the water because it is dirty. They are made to wait for something that can only be terrible; “this is hell” (15). The waiting is “like being already dead” because thinking cannot happen (16).
The men are told to strip and to be sure that their shoes are not stolen, which does not make sense. They are told to put their shoes in a corner, and they do, because they feel “outside” the world. Someone sweeps the shoes outside the room with a broom, and then kapos arrive to shave the men’s hair.
They are then sent to the shower room. Levi discovers that they are in Monowitz, a sub-work camp of the Birkenau-Auschwitz complex, which produces a kind of rubber called Buna, after which the camp is called. A Hungarian dentist who is categorized as a criminal in the camp comes to talk to them, despite not having gotten permission. Levi believes that he comes to talk to them to amuse himself.
Levi is tattooed, Number 174517. Each prisoner must display their number for bread and soup. For a few days he continues to look at his wrist to tell time, only to see the tattooed number there instead of his watch.
Levi comes to realize the meanings of the numbers, “which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism” (22). The numbers indicate time of arrival at the camp and the convoy of which one was a part, and thus nationality. Those with low numbers ranging from 30,000-80,000 receive respect from other prisoners because of the amount of time they have spent in the camps and there are only a few of these prisoners still alive. Anyone with a high number is considered a “freshman,” docile and easily duped, by other prisoners. Levi is so thirsty that he grabs an icicle to drink the melting water, but it is pulled out of his hands by a guard, to whom he asks “Why?” only to be told “there is no why here” (24).
He learns the layout of the Lager, which is a square 600 yards long. It is surrounded by two barbed wire fences, with the inner one carrying a current. It contains 60 wooden huts (or blocks), latrines, brick kitchens, a farm, a brothel, and the infirmary. Certain blocks are reserved for those of higher rank, such as the Aryan German prisoners.
The “ordinary” blocks are divided into two parts, one for the head of the block, who lives there with his friends. The other part is for prisoners and contains around 250 individuals. The huts are comprised of bunks, 148 bunks on three levels, with each bunk a portable plank of wood covered by straw. The bunks, which are shared, are crammed together, like a beehive, and there are three tight corridors between the rows of bunks.
The roll-call square is in the middle of the Lager, where prisoners must form before they are forced to go out for work and when they return. Facing this square is a well-maintained patch of grass, where executions are held.
There are three categories in the Lager: criminals, politicals, and Jews. Criminals wear a green triangle, politicals wear a red triangle, and Jews wear a red and yellow Jewish star. There are few SS men because the green triangles have control, and prisoners from other categories are also often “ready” to assist as Kapos (commanders or overseers).
The new prisoners learn the difference between getting a ladleful of soup from the bottom of the pot and the top. They also learn that everything can be useful and that everything can also be stolen by a fellow prisoner. Any scrap of cloth or paper can be used to provide insulation against the cold or for padding for feet. Wires can be used to repair shoes. There are many rules of the camp, too, that are being learned: prisoners are only allowed to leave the hut with a jacket fully buttoned and never with the collar up, and washing is only allowed when stripped to the waist.
Activities easily done with simple tools, such as trimming fingernails or sewing buttons (each jacket must always have five buttons) become problematic. Shoes are crucial, and if one does not fit, then the only way to replace it is by going to the Ceremony of the Changing of the Shoes, where the only sizing up that occurs is visual, and only one shoe can be exchanged at a time, with only one exchange allowed. Poorly fitting shoes are the norm, and foot swelling and infected sores are common.
The prisoners are constantly being placed in lines and made to wait while a band plays music.
Work occurs in groups of 100-150 men called Kommandos, with a Kapo in charge. The Kapos are prisoners themselves. Some Kommandos are skilled and assigned to relevant departments of the Buna factory.
After two weeks, Levi has the hunger of the camps, has learned how to protect his small bundle, and has sores that will not heal. The Italians in his convoy had determined to meet once a week in a corner of the Lager, but they stop because it is too depressing to see fewer people return and to see the terrible health of those still alive. It is also too tiring to continue to show up and too hard to remember.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Initiation”
Levi is assigned to Bunk 30, with Diena as his bunkmate. Diena is “hospitable,” and they ask each other questions. With the reveille (“trumpet call”), everyone frantically gets up, rushing to the latrines, some people urinating in a frenzy to get to the line for their piece of bread.
After only a week in prison, Levi no longer cares about staying clean. A fellow prisoner, Steinlauf, however, insists on personal hygiene. The Lager’s purpose is to destroy men, and Steinlauf attempts to refuse this by maintaining what Levi describes as the “skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization” (39). Taking pride in polished shoes and good posture is “not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die” (39). Levi is skeptical of this approach, though he does not have an approach with which to replace Steinlauf’s (40).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Levi’s memoir almost immediately challenges assumptions that many readers might have about the Holocaust. Rather than insisting on actively remembering and revealing everything said and done during the transport to Auschwitz, Levi says that some things should not be remembered. When the Jews are hit for the first time, he also asserts that they do not feel pain because the action is so “senseless,” as if their physical senses can respond only to logical sense. Yet during the transport it is the physical and emotional pain that buoys them above the “bottomless” despair. It is not the will to live but pain itself that guards against total unhappiness. By the time they arrive they silence themselves and speak only in whispers. Here Levi introduces the beginnings of the theme of Language and Morality as Contextual.
After arriving at the camp there are long stretches of standing while not knowing specifically what will happen but knowing that it will be terrible. The torment of waiting for the unknown terror prohibits thinking and is thus like already being dead. The camp does not make any kind of “sense”: they are told to remove their shoes and make sure they are not stolen, yet none of them are interested in stealing shoes, and the shoes are removed immediately anyway. Levi is told by a guard that that there is “No why here” when he asks why can’t lick an icicle to slake his terrible thirst.
The lack of sense is contrasted with the organization of the intake cataloguing, in which each prisoner receives a number that is tattooed on their wrist. The numbers track the SS’s destruction of the Jews. They also take on meaning for the prisoners themselves, though, with the numbers reflecting old identities (where a prisoner came from and when they were imprisoned) and new identities (amount of experience and thus level of seniority in the camp). The prisoners read one another, in part, through their numbers.
The absence of basic tools, such as fingernail clippers, thread and needle, and scraps of cloth makes life even more difficult. The obtaining of these tools takes energy and often requires that prisoners exchange food rations for something as simple as a little piece of wire. Bodily realities, too, are foregrounded: the need for food, the pain of standing on two feet, and the fragility of skin. Bodily processes, such as urination and defecation, are often uncontrollable. They are so desperate for their bread in the morning that they urinate over themselves to get in line faster.
The prisoners’ bodies are used against them; even clothing and shoes, designed to embrace and protect the body, are weaponized. Many prisoners no longer have the energy to keep themselves clean. Some prisoners, however, respond through increased attention to hygiene and posture—the care of and maintenance of the body—as a means of refusing the destruction of humanity that Levi explores throughout his memoir. Steinlauf’s strategy is the first resistance that Levi analyzes, but he is skeptical. He is not sure that there is any kind of resistance that can counter this destruction, which points towards the theme of Men and Non-Men as the individuals in the camp come to be understood.
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