Somogyi, the Hungarian chemist, who died on 26 January 1945, the day before the Russians arrived
Lakmaker, the seventeen-year-old Jewish boy from the Netherlands
Maxime, the Parisian tailor
Sertelet, the peasant from the Vosges
Alcalai, the Jewish glazier from Toulouse
Schenck, the Jewish businessman from Slovakia
Alberto, the twenty-two-year-old Italian and Levi’s inseparable companion and sharer of food
Towarowski, the Franco-Polish Jew, twenty-three years old
Cagnolati, the young peasant from the Vosges
Kosman, the Reuters correspondent from Alsace
Askenazi, the Greek barber from Salonika
Arthur, the thin peasant from the Vosges
Charles, the thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher from Lorraine
Brackier and Kandel, the two other chemists chosen to work in the laboratory
Levi and Levi, the two other Levis working in the chemical Kommando
Kraus Pali, the Hungarian from Budapest – tall, thin, glasses, a clumsy worker
Beppo the Greek, twenty years old
Kuhn, the old man who thanks God for not being selected, provoking Levi to write ‘If I was God I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer’
Sattler, the huge Transylvanian peasant
Rene, young and robust, but selected for death
Wertheimer, sixty, with varicose veins
Monsieur Pinkert, the diplomat who’d worked in Warsaw at the Belgian Embassy
Jean, the student from Alsace, twenty-four years old, for whom Levi tries to translate Dante
Limentani, from Rome
Frenkl, the spy
Stern, the squinting Transylvanian
Alex, the kapo, so dismissive of the doctors, the intelligentsia
Mendi, the rabbi and militant Zionist from Russia
Balla
Chajim, the Polish watchmaker, a religious Jew, Levi’s bunk companion
Ziegler
Iss Clausner
Piero Sonnino, Levi’s friend from Rome
Henri, the polyglot Frenchman, the manipulator, survivor
Elias Lindzin, the muscled dwarf of Warsaw, always moving, always working
Alfred L, the cold engineer
Schepschel, the Galician
Moischl
Lorenzo, the civilian worker who, by reminding Levi that there could be ‘a just world outside’, connected him to his humanity again and gave him the strength to go on
Templer, the Kommando organiser and exceptional soup eater
Fischer, the Hungarian who doesn’t eat all his bread immediately
David
Sigi, the seventeen-year-old from Vienna
Bela, the Hungarian farmer
Felicio, the Greek
Resnyk, the Pole who lived twenty years in Paris, thirty years old, shares Levi’s bunk
Waschmann, the rabbi from Galicia, who discusses Talmudic questions in Yiddish with Mendi
Finder
Kardos, the engineer, who tends to wounded feet and corns in the evening
Walter Bonn, the civilised Dutchman, and fellow patient of Levi’s in the Ka-Be (‘infirmary’)
Schmulek, the Polish Jew, albino, a blacksmith, selected for death from the Ka-Be
Steinlauf, the former sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army, a man of good will who scolds Levi for not trying to keep clean
Schlome, the sixteen-year-old Polish Jew, who is amazed that there are Jews in Italy
Diena, Levi’s first bunk companion
Mischa
Flesch, the interpreter, a German Jew, fifty years old, a former soldier
Mr Bergmann, the elderly man
Mr Levi, who asks about where their women have been taken
Freddie Knoller, the cellist from Vienna
Rudy Kennedy, the Jewish boy from Rosenberg, who works in the electrical Kommando
And all the others we do not have names for:
Null Achtzehn – the boy who cannot remember his name and so has become a number
the Galician
the gigantic French Häftling
the pale Dutch boy in the chemical Kommando
the two Hungarian boys who died on the final march out of Monowitz
the rascal from Trieste
the tall, red-haired Frenchman from the Drancy transports
the Hungarian doctor who studied in Italy, the camp dentist
the Yiddish storyteller
the young companion of Schlome
the brother of Henri, who died in Buna
And:
The young man hanged in November 1944 for helping the Sonderkommando revolt in Birkenau, in front of all the prisoners here, who shouts out, with his last breath, ‘Comrades, I am the last one!’ Nobody responds, the band plays and Levi feels ‘oppressed with shame’:
the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished … the Russians can come now: there are no longer any strong men among us, the last one is hanging above our heads … The Russians can come now: they will only find us, the slaves … To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded.
And those, the vast majority, who are not recorded at all.
*
We turn down Niwa Monowicka, under trees laden with snow. In my mind is something which Daniel Goldhagen says at the opening of Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It remains for me a defining statement of this paradox – the total impossibility of understanding the real meaning of genocide yet also the ongoing human obligation to try. And, inherent in the trying, the necessity to not allow ourselves to become numbed – to return again and again to the fact that these are individual deaths, multiplied unthinkable numbers of times:
Explaining this genocidal slaughter necessitates … that we keep two things always in mind. When writing or reading about killing operations, it is too easy to become insensitive to the numbers on the page. Ten thousand dead in one place, four hundred in another, fifteen in a third. Each of us should pause and consider that ten thousand deaths meant that Germans killed ten thousand individuals – unarmed men, women and children, the old, the young, the healthy, and the sick – that Germans took a human life ten thousand times … the Jewish victims were not the ‘statistics’ that they appear to us on paper. To the killers whom they faced, the Jews were people who were breathing one moment and lying lifeless, often before them, the next.
We reach the end of Niwa Monowicka, expecting to find some buildings connected to the Monowitz camp, some remnants at least.
But there is nothing here.
Or rather there is no trace of the concentration camp where the slave labourers for the Buna plant were imprisoned. A hamlet has taken its place, perhaps twenty, twenty-five houses, no shops, not even a church, round a grid of little lanes. Dusk now, we walk on, exhausted and appalled at the extinction of history represented here. We look in vain for a monument, for even a single panel of historical information, but there’s nothing.
It feels necessary to speak Primo Levi’s words here, in the face of this erasure. In the shelter of an apple tree, shaking now, both with the cold and a growing anger, I read to J. – Levi’s first hours in this place with his ninety-five fellow prisoners, his total shock. Clothes taken. Stripped of all possessions. Hair shaved off. Disinfected. Given rags to wear. Tattooed on left arms. Tormented by thirst:
Then the door opens and a boy in a striped suit comes in, with a fairly civilised air, small, thin and blond. He speaks French and we throng around him with a flood of questions which till now we had asked each other in vain.