At the beginning of the chapter, Levi tells us that he’d come down with scarlet fever on 11 January 1945, at the height of the Polish winter, as the Russian guns get closer to Auschwitz. He’s admitted to the Infektionsabteilung (the infectious-diseases room within the infirmary compound); there are twelve other men there, suffering from scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhus and other illnesses. He writes that he ‘enjoyed four peaceful days. Outside it was snowing and very cold, but the room was heated. I was given strong doses of sulpha drugs.’ He then learns from a barber that the whole camp is about to be evacuated, including all the patients able to walk. His friend Alberto, who has meant everything to Levi, comes to the window of the room to say goodbye. ‘All the healthy prisoners … left during the night of 18 January 1945. They must have been about twenty thousand, coming from different camps. Almost in their entirety they vanished during the evacution march: Alberto was among them. Perhaps someone will write their story one day.’ The following day all of the remaining Germans and SS in the camp leave, but the heating plant is abandoned too and, with the temperature outside minus five, heat becomes the overwhelming priority.
On 19 January Levi and the two Frenchmen with scarlet fever – Charles and Arthur (both from the Vosges, the former a teacher, the latter a peasant) – get up at dawn to try to find a stove, some fuel, and food. Despite their physical weakness they find a heavy iron stove and some potatoes and wheel them back across the camp in a wheelbarrow; the place now resembles some post-apocalyptic hell with skeletal prisoners crawling over the camp searching for food, fouling the snow. The three return to the Infektionsabteilung hut, exhausted from their efforts, and full of urgency to get the stove working. Levi then writes this, which expresses in more tangible words some of the abstracted concepts relating to compassion and redemption that we’ve been wrestling with today:
We all three had our hands paralysed while the icy metal stuck to the skin of our fingers, but it was vitally urgent to set it up to warm ourselves and to boil the potatoes. We had found wood and coal as well as embers from the burnt huts. When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed.
Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour’, and left no room for gratitude … It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.
In the next days, Charles and Levi find frozen turnips and some salt, they also collect wood, and snow for water. Arthur organises the stove, cleans the room and looks after the patients. They take it in turns to empty the lavatory bucket in a cesspool outside. They begin to explore the abandoned SS camp, just outside the fence; here they find frozen soup, vodka, medicines and eiderdowns which they take back to the hut, narrowly avoiding a group of SS officers, who half an hour later kill eighteen Frenchmen they catch in the abandoned dining hall. On the night of 22 January, Lakmaker, a seventeen-year-old Dutch Jew, in a terrible state, falls out of his bed, trying to reach the bucket. Levi then describes what they do – in the context of their illness and exhaustion these actions seem astounding and miraculous in their humanity:
Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the lamp, he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with a knife. He lifted Lakmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a mother, cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and lifted him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate fellow could lie. He scraped the floor with a scrap of tinplate, diluted a little chloramines and finally spread disinfectant over everything, including himself. I judged his self-sacrifice by the tiredness which I would have had to overcome in myself to do what he had done.
Over the next days they find more potatoes, buried in two long ditches just outside the camp. Levi tries to get medical help for one of the men suffering from diphtheria. Outside their hut ‘the pile of corpses in front of our window had by now overflowed out of the ditch’; they are acutely aware of the appalling conditions in the tuberculosis and dysentery wards next door, where Levi describes terrifying scenes. On 25 January the Hungarian chemist, Somogyi, suffering from scarlet fever and typhus, speaks for the first time in five days: ‘I have a ration of bread under the sack. Divide it among you three. I shall not be eating anymore.’ For the rest of that day and the next he falls into a delirium, murmuring ‘Jawohl’ with every breath, thousands of times. Levi here writes:
I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man. Outside the great silence continued. The number of ravens had increased considerably and everybody knew why. Only at distant intervals did the dialogue of the artillery wake up. We all said to each other that the Russians would arrive soon, at once; we all proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but at the bottom nobody believed it.
Levi, Charles and Arthur talk around the stove and share stories and memories. ‘I felt ourselves become men once again. We could speak of everything.’ On the night of the 26th Somogyi finally dies; with his last gasp of life he throws himself from his bed.
27 January. Dawn. On the floor, the shameful wreck of skin and bones, the Somogyi thing … There are more urgent tasks: we cannot wash ourselves, so that we dare not touch him until we have cooked and eaten … The living are more demanding; the dead can wait. We began to work as on every day.
The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Somogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher on the grey snow. Charles took off his beret.
This is where If This Is a Man ends, and the point at which The Truce begins, with the arrival of the Russian army:
There were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their Sten guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive.
To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw …
They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame … that the just man experiences at another man’s crime: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist.
It is this concrete image I return to again and again. The collision of worlds. The living, the barely living and the dead. The young Russians. Levi and Charles. Somogyi. And, each year, at the end of January, I reread these passages, to spend time with these men again. These words recorded many years ago. Recordar, from the Latin recordis, to pass back through the heart. Which is all that we can do.