The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, two days ago now, prompted thoughts of Primo Levi's If This Is A Man: Remembering Auschwitz, which I read four or five years ago but which remains vivid in my memory.
One of the aspects of Levi's writing that had such a strong effect on me was the way he portrayed the intimate, personal, horrifying details of the Holocaust. The full reality of millions of people imprisoned, executed, or worked to death is so vast that it causes an emotional numbness; I simply shut down, because to feel in the face of so much suffering would be too overwhelming.
But reading Levi's description of life in Auschwitz, one man's experience makes the Holocaust more terrifying to me than the staggering death count:
When one's nails grow long, they have to be shortened, which can only be done with the teeth (for the toenails, the friction of the shoes is sufficient); if a button comes off, one has to tie it on with a piece of wire; if one goes to the latrine or the washroom, everything has to be carried along, always and everywhere, and while one washes one's face, the bundle of clothes has to be held tightly between one's knees: in any other manner it will be stolen in that second.
...Do not think that shoes form a factor of secondary importance in the life of the [camp]. Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours or marching cause painful sores which become fatally infected. Whoever has them is forced to walk as if he was dragging a convict's chain...; he arrives last everywhere, and everywhere receives blows. He cannot escape if they run after him; his feet swell and the more they swell, the more the friction with the wood and the cloth of the shoes becomes insupportable. Then only the hospital is left: but to enter the hospital with a diagnosis of "dicke Fusse" (swollen feet) is extremely dangerous, because it is well known to all, and especially to the SS, that here there is no cure for that complaint.
...
The [beam we are carrying] is coated with snow and mud; at every step it knocks against my ear and the snow slides down my neck. After fifty steps I am at the limit of what a person is theoretically able to support: my knees bend, my shoulder aches as if pressed in a vise, my equilibrium is in danger. At every step I feel my shoes sucked away by the greedy mud, by this omnipresent Polish mud whose monotonous horror fills our days.
I bite deeply into my lips: we know well that to gain a small, extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The [guards] also know it: some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart-drivers do with willing horses.
...
[Winter] means that in the course of these months, from October till April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold.
...
Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say "hunger," we say "tiredness," "fear," "pain," we say "winter," and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the [camps] had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one's body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.
