Last spring the Germans had constructed huge tents in an open space in the Lager (camp). For the whole of the good season each of them held over a thousand men. Now the tents had been taken down, and an excess two thousand guests crowded our huts. We old prisoners knew that the Germans did not like such irregularities and that something would happen soon to reduce our number.
One feels the selections arriving. 'Selekcja': the hybrid Latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign conversations; at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention, and in the end it persecutes us.
Today is working Sunday, Arbeitssonntag: we work until 1:00 PM, then we return to camp for the shower, shave and general control of the skin diseases and lice. And in the yards, everyone mysteriously knew that the selection would be today. Rumors circulate, the young tell the young only the old will be chosen. The healthy tell the healthy only the ill ones will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded. German Jews will be excluded. Low numbers will be excluded. You will be chosen. I will be excluded.
The bell sounds. The bell always sounds at dawn, when it means the reveille; but if it sounds during the day it means 'Blocksperre', enclosure in the huts, and this happens when there is a selection to prevent anyone from avoiding it, or when the selected leave for the gas, to prevent anyone from seeing them leave. Our Blockaltester knows his business. He has made sure we have all entered, he has the door locked, he has given everyone his card with his number, name, profession, age and nationality and he has ordered everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. We wait like this, naked, with the card in our hands, for the commission to reach our hut. We are hut 48, but one can never tell if they are going to start at hut 1 or hut 60. At any rate, we can rest quietly at least for an hour, and there is no reason why we should not get under the blankets on the bunk and try to keep warm.
Many are drowsing when a barrage of orders, blows and oaths proclaims the imminent arrival of the commission. The Blockaltester and his helpers, starting at the end of the hut, drive the crowd of frightened, naked people in front of them and cram them in the Tagesraum which is the Quartermasters office. When the drive is over a warm and compact human mass is jammed into the Tagesraum, prefectly filling all the corners, exercising such a pressure on the wooden walls as to make them creak.
The Blockaltester has closed the connecting door and has opened the other two which lead from the dormitory and the Tagesraum to the outside. Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern. On his right is the Blockaltester, on his left the Quartermaster of the hut. Each one of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, give the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory door. The SS man, in the fraction of a second between two successive crossings, with a glance at one's back and front, judges everyones fate, and in turn gives the card to the man on his right or his left, and this is the life or death of each of us. In three or four minutes a hut of two hundred men is 'done', as is the whole camp of twelve thousand men in the course of the afternoon.
Jammed into the charnel-house of the Tagesraum, I gradually felt the human pressure around me slacken, and in a short time it was my turn. Like everyone, I passed with a brisk and elastic step, trying to hold my head high, my chest forward and my muscles contracted and conspicuous. With the corner of my eye I tried to look behind my shoulders, and my card seemed to end up on the right.
As we gradually come back into the dormitory we are allowed to dress ourselves. Nobody yet knows with certainty his own fate, it has first of all to be established whether the condemned cards were those on the right or the left. By now there is no longer any point in sparing each others feelings with superstitious scruples. Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most wasted-away. If their cards went to the left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned. Even before the selection is over everybody knows that the left was effectively the 'schlechte Seite', the bad side. There have naturally been some irregularities: Rene for example, young and robust, ended on the left. Perhaps it was his glasses, perhaps because he walks a little stooped, but more probably because of a mistake.
It must equally be a mistake about Sattler, a huge Transylvanian peasant who was still at home only 20 days ago. Sattler does not understand German, he has understood nothing of what has taken place. He stands in a corner mending his shirt. Must I go and tell him that his shirt will be of no more use? There is nothing surprising about these mistakes: the examination is too quick and summary, and in any case, the important thing for the Lager is that the most useless will be eliminated.
The selection is now over in our hut, but it continues in the others, so that we are still locked in. But as the soup pots have arrived in the meantime, the Blockaltester decides to proceed with the distribution at once. A double ration will be given to those selected. I have never discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable initiative of the Blockaltester or an explicit disposition of the SS, but in the interval between the selection and the departure (usually two to three days) the victims enjoyed this privilege.
Ziegler holds his bowl out, collects his normal ration and than waits there expectantly. "What do you want?" asks the Blockaltester: according to him, Ziegler is entitled to no supplement, and he drives him away, but Ziegler returns and humbly persists. He was on the left, everyone saw it, let the Blockaltester check the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When he is given it he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.
I see and hear Kuhn praying aloud, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him? Beppo is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber tommorrow and he knows it and lies there looking at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore. Does Kuhn fail to realize that the next time will probably be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what happened today was an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty can change?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhns prayer.
Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz, pgs. 126-130