Survival of the Mind

As I read Survival in Auschwitz I returned again and again to the final line of Levi's preface: "It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented" (10). Why did I keep returning to that statement? I kept raising my hand to my mouth, shutting my eyes, re-reading lines as though they might (hoping they might) suddenly become less horrific. They didn't, of course. I'm still grappling with the fact that Levi's book consists entirely of these horrific, factual recollections of life (if one can call it that) in Auschwitz. I still have trouble accepting that this was reality. And I imagine many survivors do, or did, or have, too. And that leads me to what I believe is the main subject of this post, and of Levi's book: the mind. 

In his preface, Levi writes, "this book of mine adds nothing to what is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing questions of the death camps. It has not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind" (9). 

I was fascinated by the fact that survival was made possible almost only by way of the mind. If one ceased to be able to hold certain ideas--certain survival tactics, certain understandings of the hell they'd been thrown into, certain definitions (many newly created as a result of suffering, of life and death and the question of morality in this world)--in their mind, they seemingly died (in spirit and in mind and, later, as a consequence, in body). The mind determined one's fate. 

This in itself is a difficult idea to come to terms with.

Levi explores many dimensions of the mind and survival, some of which are the ethical dilemmas (or forfeiting of ethics) in becoming a thief, a traitor...

I was also amazed by Levi's articulation of the idea that there is a difference between being unhappy as a free man and being unhappy as a prisoner of Auschwitz--"For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men" (76). 

The following is another stunning articulation of the imprisoned human and their mind: "For human nature is such that grief and pain--even simultaneously suffered--do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency" (73). 

I want to end with this quote from the chapter titled "The Drowned and the Saved," with Levi's haunting description of living men as dead:

"Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand" (90).