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 4-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Ka-Be”
Levi is weak and clumsy, and no one wants to work with him. As a result, he is often paired with Null Achtzehn (Zero 18), a prisoner known by other prisoners only by the last three digits of his entry number because he is regarded as no longer being a man; he “seems empty inside” (42). Zero 18 is apathetic to the point of being dangerous as a work partner because he does not ration his energy, working steadily up until the moment when he can no longer work at all.
A piece of metal falls on Levi’s foot after Zero 18 keeps stepping on his heels, so he attempts admission to Ka-Be, the infirmary. Anyone trying to gain entry into Ka-Be is forced to wait in line naked.
At Ka-Be Levi receives the designation of Arztvormelder (having a medical concern) and goes back to his hut. The next morning, he goes to a corner of the roll-call square with all the others who have been categorized as Arztvormelder for the determination of where he will be sent in Ka-Be. His bowl, spoon, beret, and gloves are taken from him, which is protocol for admittance to Ka-Be. All patients are made to undress outside in the cold, to take two showers, and to go through a second exam after again waiting in line naked.
The infirmary is set up like the huts, with two prisoners forced to share each tiny bunk. Ka-Be has few physical “discomforts.” Most patients are “free” most of the day, but they are forced to wake up at 4am for the reveille. This is a life of “limbo,” with no assurance of avoiding being killed, and, if you survive the infirmary, you must return to work. Levi has two bunkmates while in the infirmary, one of whom is killed.
Dysentery patients in Ka-Be are placed in a line every third day and are required to go to the bathroom in a tin pot front of a nurse, two at a time, to prove they have dysentery. They are given one minute. For those sick and waiting in line, some have to try to hold the diarrhea to produce it during the allotted minute, while others may not have the urge to go during their designated minute but desperately try.
Levi’s final assessment is that “Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts” (57). In “the long empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is” (57).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Our Nights”
Levi is released from Ka-Be after 20 days, when his foot wound is almost healed. After being released, every prisoner is given “new” clothes and shoes. This means that shoes must be broken in again, and quickly. A new spoon and knife must also be acquired by the prisoner. Most treacherous is the reassignment to a new hut, new bunkmate, and new hut leader. This release from the infirmary into new clothes, shoes, and circumstances is to be “ejected into the dark and cold of sidereal space” (60).
Levi is assigned to Block 45, however, where his best friend, Alberto, is. Alberto has been better able to “adapt” than any of the other Italians. He is an excellent judge of character yet is everyone’s friend as he fights for survival.
It is winter, and since work is not allowed in the dark due to concerns about prisoners escaping, there is more time to sleep. Some of the prisoners exchange bread for medical care, and one prisoner, engineer Kardos, takes on the job of suppurating corns and caring for feet, and “in this manner, honestly, engineer Kardos solves the problem of living” (62).
Levi sleeps back-to-back with his new bunkmate, who is much taller and bigger than Levi and cannot be shifted. Sleep is light, and Levi is often partially conscious of his horrific surroundings while sleeping. He dreams of returning home and trying to tell the people gathered around him, including his sister, his experiences. He experiences “a desolating grief” (64) in the face of the disinterest of those around him. Alberto says that this seemingly personal dream of the “unlistened-to-story” (65) is a common dream that many of the prisoners share.
On waking, Levi hears and sees others dreaming. Many appear to be dreaming of eating, also a “collective dream,” a “pitiless dream which the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known” (65). The food can be seen and smelled, it seems real, but before it can be possessed, it is taken away. The dream dissolves and then asserts itself with revision over and over.
This particular night Levi determines that it must be after 11pm because there is a lot of movement to the bucket next to the night-guard. Because of the amount of liquid consumed in the soup, the prisoners have to go to the bathroom through the night. One of the rules of the Lager is that the last person able to use the bucket has to take it out to empty it in the latrine. Low-numbered prisoners who have been in the camp longer are able to determine how full the bucket is by listening to the sound of human waste hitting the sides, so they are able to time when to use the bucket and rarely have to empty it. The night-guard often has favorites, too, who are not required to empty the bucket. About 40 gallons of waste are eliminated through the night, and the bucket only holds two gallons, so it must be emptied 20 times through the night. It is risky, especially for the inexperienced, to go to the bathroom. They must carry the “disgustingly warm” bucket out in the cold. It is always overflowing, so it spills on the legs and feet of whomever carries it. As disgusting as taking the bucket to the latrine is, it is better to do it oneself than to be sleeping, head to feet, with a bunkmate who has spilled the bucket on their feet.
Amidst the nightmares and wakeful terrors, the reveille looms in the night, to such an extent that almost no one needs to be told to wake up: “Very few sleep on till the Wstavac [“Get up”]: it is a moment of too acute pain for even the deepest sleep not to dissolve as it approaches” (68).
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Work”
Levi has another new bunk companion. His former bunk mate, a “gentle and silent” Pole, had to go to the hospital and left him his gloves, and Levi hoped against hope that he would not receive a bunk companion. But almost immediately a red-haired man with “the number of the French of Drancy climbed up beside me” (71).
Having a tall bunk companion is inevitable for Levi, because he is small, and two tall people cannot sleep together. Levi can immediately tell, though, that Resnyk is a good companion: he does not talk much, he is clean, he does not snore, and he only has to get up a few times in the night, which he does “with great delicacy” (71), as opposed to the Pole who would lumber up around 10 times through the night.
He is happy to find out that Resnyk has been assigned to his Kommando, too. The day’s work is to move a synthesis tube that weighs several tons. It is better to be given a very large load than small loads because the right tools are provided to move very heavy loads. They are working in the snow, which accumulates on their shoes so that by the end of carrying the heavy load, their shoes and feet are thick, heavy chunks. The hope of having a large load carried among many men, however, dies when they are told to carry the 175-pound wooden “sleepers,” which will be laid down to create a path for the heavy cylinder.
Levi wants to work with Resnyk, but he assumes that Reznyk will refuse him because he is not a good worker, but Resnyk does not. Resnyk lifts up the sleeper to place it on Levi’s shoulder carefully, stooping down himself to pick up the other end. He continues to work with this kind of care all day with Levi, who is exhausted and inflicts small wounds on himself to keep working, such as biting his lip to make it bleed.
Levi times a trip to the latrine when he is at his most exhausted. The usual jockeying for a good ladle of soup occurs at 11:30, and from noon to 1 everyone goes to the hut, where “within a minute everyone is sleeping, jammed elbow against elbow” (77), around the stove from which they are served soup. While everyone “clings on to his sleep, so as not to allow it to abandon him, all senses are taut with horror of the signal which is about to come, which is outside the door, which is here…” (78). And they are back to work.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Good Day”
Today is a sunny day, and it promises spring. Hunger is still present, though, until an extra 11 gallons of soup is secured by Templer, the “organizer” of the Kommando. This adds up to six pints extra for each person. They eat two pints at midday, and the other four pints are eaten in breaks during the afternoon, with five minutes suspension given them over these four feedings.
Templer himself eats 10 pints. He has the talent of being able to empty his bowels in anticipation of a big meal; everyone knows about this gift.
They are full for a few hours, and for a few hours no one hits them, and for a few hours “we are able to think of our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen […] For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men” (86).
Chapter 8 Summary: “This Side of Good and Evil”
The Waschetauschen, the ceremony of the changing of the underclothes, is late. Some prisoners say the lateness signals that liberation is coming, while others insist that a liquidation is imminent.
The ceremony involves clothes and more broadly, cloth, which is rare in the Lager. A rag in the camps is not an “extra,” discarded piece of cloth that would otherwise be thrown away. Instead, it is a piece of cloth that is carefully removed from the only shirt that a prisoner is loaned. If the sleeves are long, then cloth is removed from them; if not, cloth is removed from the tail of the shirt or by unstitching a patch. The removal must then be carefully disguised to avoid beatings. A rag can mean the difference between life and death, as it can be used in a shoe to prevent a wound from forming.
Once a cart is seen carrying disinfected shirts everyone knows the Waschetauschen is imminent. Before having to hand in their clothes to be disinfected, those with second shirts, which were either stolen or gotten in exchange for bread rations, rush to the Exchange Market in the Lager, hoping to get some bread for their extra shirt before it is devalued.
The market is always active and exists in the northeast corner of the Lager in the summer and in a washroom in the winter. Any bartering or exchanging is technically forbidden by the SS. Possessions themselves are forbidden, as everything belongs to the Lager.
At the market soup has a stable price, but turnips, carrots, and potato prices vary according to who is able to get them from the guards. Mahorca, a poor-quality tobacco, is also sold. Among the haftlinge (prisoners), tobacco is not sought for itself, but to sell to civilians working in the factory at Buna. The civilians will sometimes give more bread than the ration of bread with which the tobacco is obtained.
Many exchanges require a civilian intermediary. Levi gives the example of a high number, new and desperate, being spotted by a low number for the number of gold fillings he has. If the fillings are removed, the high number may earn four rations of bread. The low number takes the gold to a civilian working in the Buna factory and may make up to 20 rations, which are paid out gradually. The highest number of rations possible within the camp, with no civilian intermediary, is only four.
Civilians are punished for these exchanges by being sent to the Lager, but they are not shaved, their possessions are not stolen, and they are not tattooed with an intake number, though they must work and are disciplined. The Lager is their punishment, while it is not punishment for the haftlinge, for whom it is “nothing but a manner of living assigned to us” (94). The SS do not care about theft in general within the camp, but they do not want their property, including the prisoners (and their fillings), taken from them, so they suppress any profits potentially being achieved from outside that involve haftlinge. The SS are constantly smuggling items from inside to outside the camp themselves, however.
The nurses in Ka-Be make huge profits off the clothing and shoes of prisoners who have been killed. They also make money by selling and trading spoons that are made by prisoners working in the iron and tin-smith Kommandos. These profits are ensured by a law that prisoners cannot leave Ka-Be with their spoon. The nurses generally get the profits from about 50 spoons a day, while each prisoner is then required to spend a half ration to obtain another spoon. Forty pints of soup are set aside every day in Ka-Be to fuel trade with specialists.
Chapters 4-8 Analysis
The prisoners read one another through their numbers, which provide information about where they are from and when they arrived, and thus their level of experience in the Lager. While the numbers provide crucial, but limited information, some of the prisoners seem truly reduced to a number, such as the prisoner known only by the last three figures in his intake number, Zero 18. Zero 18 is so “empty” and a Non-Man that he is dangerous to work with because he is indifferent to his own exhaustion. Zero 18 is one of the “drowned,” a muselmann, a category of being that Levi analyzes in Chapter 9.
Sustaining an injury to his foot as a result of Zero 18’s indifference, Levi must go through the process of gaining admission to the infirmary, known as Ka-Be. Admission into Ka-Be requires repeatedly standing in line naked. The largest humiliation is wrought on the dysentery patients, who are forced to “prove” their illness by producing diarrhea in front of a nurse after standing in line naked. Some are tortured by not being able to produce on the spot, and others are tortured by having to hold their bowels while in line. Though the nurses and doctors humiliate and torture prisoner-patients through a cruel exposure of their bodies and bodily processes, Ka-Be is the one place in the camp where prisoners do not experience discomfort all day and night.
The prisoners dream at night, but their dreams quickly become nightmares: there is no escape from the horror of the Lager. There are two commonly held dreams. One is of trying to communicate the experience of the Lager upon return home, only to be met with disinterest. The second is of being presented with mounds of food, only to have it taken away. The prisoners have much to tell and need much to eat. Their nightmares suggest that they are as desperate for others to consume their stories as they are to consume food, which highlights the theme of The Difficulty and Necessity of Remembrance.
The body’s needs remain turned against the prisoners even as they try to sleep. They must choreograph when they go to the bathroom, as the small bucket that captures the waste of the hut’s almost 300 prisoners is constantly filling up and requires emptying. The prisoners learn, by sound, the volume of waste in the bucket and strategize when to empty their bladders and bowels to avoid having to empty the bucket. The chance of drifting into a sleep that does not produce a nightmare but actually provides physical and emotional rest is also feared, as waking up to the reality of the Lager is unbearable. To hear the “daily condemnation” of the command “Wake up” is “a moment of too acute pain for even the deepest sleep not to dissolve as it approaches” (68). Few allow themselves to experience this: despite their total exhaustion, they wake themselves up before they have to be woken up. Sleep is necessary but emotionally painful.
The despair and torture of the Lager is occasionally lifted by circumstances such as unexpected good weather and unexpected extra soup rations. This affords the possibility to “be unhappy in the manner of free men” (86). Unhappiness is a luxury when physical and mental survival is the state of being. The actions of the prisoners themselves, too, occasionally break through the despair. Resnyk, one of Levi’s work partners, is so generous that he shoulders more weight when they work together, helping Levi shoulder his own weight by placing loads gently on his shoulders. This generosity is unexpected and further explores the theme of Men and Non-Men.
The Exchange Market is fueled by prisoners’ terrible desperation and creativity. But the marketplace also helps to ensure that prisoners channel whatever energy they do not have, exhausting themselves further, into securing rations and other necessities. For the SS and the nurses and doctors in Ka-Be, the Exchange Market is one more facet of their total exploitation of the prisoners, and enormous profits are made off the prisoners’ basic needs.
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