Volume 44- No. 1
by Daniel D’Amelio (Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, was imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz and, among the relatively few to survive, he wrote books about that experience which have been translated into more than twenty languages. But he would not have lived to testify about that place of absolute evil had it not been for what Levi called the man “from heaven.”)
Primo Levi knew that he had only a while to live. He was starving to death.
As a forced laborer at Auschwitz, Primo, a man of slight build, had worked with a shovel doing excavation work, lugged sacks of cement and, working with a squad, carried cast iron girders. Now, on this day in June 1944, weak from hunger, he had been ordered to The Paper - 760.747.7119
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January 3, 2013
assist two bricklayers who were on a scaffold building a wall.
He glanced up at the bricklayers, waiting to be told what to do. They continued their rhythmic laying of bricks. Primo welcomed the moment of respite— such moments had been rare since his train convoy had arrived at Auschwitz on an icy day in February 1944.
The Nazis had been their usual efficient selves that day, separating the new arrivals: young men and women trucked to work at labor camps within the Auschwitz complex; and, at the same time, the unfit—the old, the sick, as well as mothers with children in arm and by the hand, herded toward what they were led to believe were shower rooms, but were actually gas chambers. It was there that most in each convoy ended up. An average of 10,000 died each
day at Auschwitz from both the gassing and from exhaustion and starvation in what the Nazis termed “extermination through labor.” In one day alone in August 1944, the number of deaths reached 24,000. Between 1940 and 1945, more than three million people died at Auschwitz.
Most of the men selected with Primo for work had died within the first three months; now in his fourth month at Auschwitz, it was all Primo could do to remain upright.
One of the bricklayers on the scaffold called down now in pidgin German for Primo to bring up a bucket of mortar that was near the scaffold. Primo stared at the bucket; it weighed at least forty pounds. He knew it would be impossible to comply. But he had to at least try—if he did not, he
would be beaten by the kapo (chief) of his barracks. (It was the kapos who gave prisoners their daily work assignments and who meted out the punishments for failure to carry them out. Prisoners themselves, the kapos were chosen by the Nazis for their ruthlessness.) Primo straddled the bucket and gripped the handle with both hands. His whole body straining, he managed to lift it a few inches. Then struggling to raise it higher, the handle slipped from his hands and the bucket fell, some of the mortar spilling on the ground. The bricklayer shook his head, turned to his co-worker and said in Italian, “Oh, well, what do you expect from people like this….”
Primo, who had been trying frantically to scoop the spilled mortar back into the bucket, stopped a moment—stunned to
“Primo Levi . . .” Continued on Page 2