Auschwitz Report

Leonardo De Benedetti, Primo Levi, Robert S. C. Gordon, Judith Woolf

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781781688045
• eBook ISBN: 9781781688069
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public.

Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report details the authors' harrowing deportation to Auschwitz, and how those who disembarked from the train were selected for work or extermination. As well as being a searing narrative of everyday life in the camp, and the organization and working of the gas chambers, it constitutes Levi's first lucid attempts to come to terms with the raw horror of events that would drive him to create some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature and testimony. Auschwitz Report is a major literary and historical discovery.

Report on the Sanitary and Medical
Organization of the Monowitz
Concentration Camp for Jews
(Auschwitz – Upper Silesia)

Dr Leonardo De Benedetti, physician and surgeon
Dr Primo Levi, chemist

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE, and the already numerous accounts provided by ex-internees of the various concentration camps created by the Germans for the annihilation of the European Jews, mean that there is perhaps no longer anyone still unaware of the nature of those places of extermination and of the iniquities that were committed there. Nevertheless, in order to make better known the horrors of which we too were witnesses and very often victims throughout the course of a year, we believe that it will be useful to make public in Italy a report which we submitted to the government of the USSR on the request of the Russian Command of the concentration camp for Italian ex-prisoners at Katowice. We were inmates of this camp ourselves after our liberation by the Red Army towards the end of January 1945. We have added some information of a general nature to the account given here, since our original report was required to concentrate exclusively on the operation of medical services in the Monowitz Camp. Similar reports were requested by the government in Moscow from all doctors, of whatever nationality, who had been liberated in the same way from other camps.

We left the concentration camp at Fossoli di Carpi (Modena) on 22 February 1944 with a convoy of 650 Jews of both sexes and all ages. The oldest was over eighty, the youngest a baby of three months. Many were ill, and some seriously so: an old man of seventy who had been struck down by a cerebral haemorrhage a few days before our departure was loaded onto the train anyway and died during the journey.

The train consisted simply of cattle trucks, locked on the outside; every wagon was crammed with over fifty people, the majority of whom had brought as much luggage with them as they could, because a German warrant officer attached to the Fossoli Camp had suggested to us, with the air of giving a piece of disinterested and kindly advice, that we should provide ourselves with plenty of warm clothes – jerseys, rugs, fur coats – because we were going to be taken to lands with a much harsher climate than our own. And he had added, with a benevolent little smile and a knowing wink, that if anyone had any hidden money or jewellery on them then it would be a good idea to take that along as well, since it would certainly come in useful up there. Most of those who were leaving had risen to the bait and followed a piece of advice which concealed a crude trap; others, a very few, preferred to entrust their belongings to some private citizen with free access to the Camp; while still others, whose arrest had not given them time to provide themselves with a change of clothing, left with only what they had on their backs.

The journey from Fossoli to Auschwitz lasted for exactly four days, and it was a very painful one, particularly on account of the cold, which was so intense, especially during the night, that in the morning the metal pipes which ran along the insides of the trucks would be found covered with ice due to the condensation of water vapour from the air we had breathed out. Another torment was thirst, which could not be quenched except with the snow that we gathered on the single daily halt, when the convoy would stop in open countryside and the passengers were allowed to get out of the trucks under the strictest of surveillance from the numerous soldiers, ready, with their sub-machine-guns constantly aimed, to open fire on anyone who showed signs of moving away from the train.

It was during these brief halts that food was distributed, truck by truck: bread, jam and cheese, but never water or anything else to drink. The possibility of sleep was reduced to a minimum, since the quantity of suitcases and bundles cluttering the floor did not allow anyone to settle into a comfortable position in which they could rest; instead, all the passengers had to be content to crouch down as best they could in a very small space. The floor of the trucks was always soaking wet, and no provision had been made to cover it even with a little straw.

As soon as the train reached Auschwitz (at about 9 p.m. on 26 February 1944) the trucks were rapidly cleared by a number of SS men armed with pistols and equipped with batons, and the passengers were forced to leave their suitcases, bundles and rugs alongside the train. The company was immediately divided into three groups: one of young and apparently able-bodied men, comprising ninety-five individuals; a second of women, also young – a meagre group made up of only twenty-nine people – and a third, the most numerous of all, of the children, the infirm and the old. And, while the first two were sent separately to different camps, there is reason to believe that the third was taken straight to the gas chamber at Birkenau, and its members slaughtered that same evening.

The first group was taken to Monowitz, where there was a concentration camp administratively dependent on Auschwitz, and about 8 kilometres away from it, which had been set up towards the middle of 1942 in order to provide labour for the construction of the ‘Buna-Werke’ industrial complex, a subsidiary of IG Farbenindustrie. It housed ten to twelve thousand prisoners, even though its normal capacity was only seven to eight thousand men. The majority of these were Jews of every nationality in Europe, while a small minority was made up of German and Polish criminals, Polish ‘politicals’, and ‘saboteurs’.

The ‘Buna-Werke’, intended for the production on a vast scale of synthetic rubber, synthetic gasoline, dyestuffs and other by-products of coal, occupied a rectangular area of about 35 square kilometres. One of the entrances to this industrial zone, completely surrounded by high barbed wire fences, was situated a few hundred metres from the Concentration Camp for Jews, and a short distance from this, and adjoining the periphery of the industrial zone, was a concentration camp for English prisoners of war, while further away there were other camps for civilian workers of various nationalities. We should add that the production cycle of the ‘Buna-Werke’ was never initiated; the starting date, originally fixed for August 1944, was repeatedly postponed because of air raids and sabotage by Polish civilian workers, right up to the evacuation of the district by the German army.

Monowitz was therefore a typical ‘Arbeits-Lager’. Every morning, the entire population of the Camp – apart from the sick and the small labour force assigned to internal work – would file out in perfect ranks, to the sound of a band playing military marches and cheerful popular songs, to reach their places of work, up to six or seven kilometres distant for some squads. The route would be covered at a rapid pace, almost at a run. Before the departure for work, and after returning from it, the daily ceremony of the roll-call would take place in a special square in the Lager, where all the prisoners had to stand in rigid formation, for between one and three hours, whatever the weather.

As soon as they arrived at the Camp, the group of ninety-five men was taken to the disinfection unit, where all of its members were immediately made to undress and then subjected to a total and painstaking depilation: head hair, beards and all other hair quickly fell away beneath scissors, razors and clippers. After which they were put into the shower room and locked up there until the following morning. Tired, hungry, thirsty, half asleep, amazed by what they had already seen and worried about their immediate future, but anxious above all about the fate of the dear ones from whom they had been suddenly and brutally separated a few hours earlier, with their minds tormented by sombre and tragic forebodings, they had to spend the whole night standing up, with their feet in the water that trickled from the pipes and ran over the floor. Finally, at about six the following morning, they were subjected to a complete rub-down with a solution of Lysol¹ and then to a hot shower; after which the Camp clothes were handed out, and they were sent to get dressed in another large room, which they had to reach from the outside of the building, going out naked into the snow with their bodies still wet from their recent shower.

The winter outfit of the Monowitz prisoners consisted of a jacket, a pair of trousers, a cap and an overcoat of woollen cloth in broad stripes, plus a shirt, a pair of cotton underpants and a pair of foot-cloths, a pullover and a pair of boots with wooden soles. Many of the foot-cloths and the underpants had obviously been made out of the ‘tallit’ – the sacred shawl with which Jews cover themselves during prayers – retrieved from the luggage of some of the deportees and made use of in this way as a mark of contempt.

By the month of April, when the cold, though less severe, had not yet gone, the thick clothing and pullovers would be withdrawn and trousers and jackets replaced by similar articles in cotton, also with broad stripes; and only towards the end of October would the winter garments be distributed again. However, this no longer happened in the autumn of 1944 because the woollen suits and coats had reached the end of any possibility of reuse, so the prisoners had to face the winter of 1944–45 dressed in the same thin clothes as during the summer months, with only a small minority being given a light gabardine raincoat or a pullover.

Having spare clothes or underwear was strictly forbidden, so it was practically impossible to wash shirts or underpants; these items were officially changed at intervals of thirty, forty or fifty days, depending on availability and without the possibility of choice. The new underwear was not actually clean, of course, but simply disinfected by steam, because there was no laundry in the Camp. It usually consisted of short cotton underpants and of shirts: always cotton or some other thin cloth, often without sleeves, always of a disgusting appearance because of the many stains of all kinds, and often reduced to rags. Sometimes instead one would be given the jacket or trousers from a pair of pyjamas, or even some article of female underwear. The repeated disinfections weakened the fibres of the cloth, removing all resistance to wear and tear. All this material represented the shoddiest part of the linen seized from the members of the various transports which, as is common knowledge, flooded ceaselessly into the station at Auschwitz from every part of Europe. Coats, jackets and trousers, whether summer or winter, were distributed in an unbelievably bad condition, covered with patches and impregnated with filth (mud, machine oil, paint). The prisoners wer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Biographical Note
• Note on the Texts
• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews (Auschwitz – Upper Silesia)
• Glossary of Medical and Pharmaceutical Terms
• Bibliography
• In Memory of a Good Man (1983): Primo Levi
• Leonardo de Benedetti (1983): Primo Levi