If This Is a Man

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1947

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-8

Chapter 9

Chapters 10-15

Chapters 16-17

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Historical Context: The Holocaust and Auschwitz Concentration Camp Complex

The Holocaust is the genocide of European Jews during WWII, from 1941-1945. During this time Nazi Germany, along with its collaborators, systematically murdered six million Jews, two thirds of the European Jewish population. The word Holocaust derives from the Greek word meaning “burnt offering.”

The Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the killing of not only Jews but also other groups targeted by the Nazis, including Polish and Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, and Roma. The Hebrew term Shoah, which means “catastrophic destruction,” refers exclusively to the genocide of the Jews. The Nazis used the term “Final Solution” to describe their plan to achieve genocide.

As part of their Final Solution, the Nazis operated over 1,000 concentration camps in Germany and occupied territory. Auschwitz refers not to just one camp but a complex of over 40 camps, including Auschwitz I, where people were initially taken. Over 80% of those transported to Auschwitz were “selected” to be killed upon arrival, usually by gassing. The minority who were not killed were sent to work camps.

The Auschwitz complex also included Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration camp and extermination camp with gas chambers, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a slave labor camp for the chemical company IG Farben. Farben received tax incentives for the construction of the camp, colloquially known as Buna, after the synthetic rubber Farben was trying to produce through its enslavement of camp prisoners.

Levi arrives at Auschwitz I, with its infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work sets you free”) sign over the entry gate and is then moved to the Buna work camp. Prisoners in the Buna work camp periodically go through selections, too. Those selected to be killed are transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they are gassed.

Literary Context: Jewish Holocaust Literature

Jewish literature of the Holocaust has appeared in several stages.

Diaries, letters, and hidden texts make up the first wave of Holocaust literature. These first writings were usually not intended for publication and were often explicitly private, such as diaries. The Diary of Anne Frank is the most famous of Holocaust literature, written from 1942-1944, ending when Frank’s family was discovered in hiding and taken by the Nazis. While most Jewish prisoners did not have access to paper or pen, some in higher positions in the camps were able to gain access to these materials and write, usually hiding their work. Letters, too, are an early form of Holocaust writing. Levi is able to send a postcard back home to Turin by way of his civilian friend in the Buna factory, Lorenzo, and he receives a response. The reader is never told in If This Is a Man, though, the content of what he writes, or what he receives.

The second wave of Jewish Holocaust literature, which includes Levi’s If This Is a Man, is written by survivors of the camps. These texts appear in various genres, including poetry, but they are generally first-person accounts of the experience of being imprisoned.

First-person memoirs written by survivors are, like autobiography, considered non-fiction. These narratives have the burden of providing “evidence” of the Holocaust, so the genre’s conventions include the presentation of factual information about the exterior, objective world of the camps. The narratives are, however, at the same time subjective, told from the author’s perspective. They highlight the author’s subjective, internal experience of the factual, external reality of the Holocaust.

Levi’s narrative does both, providing a wealth of objective information about architecture, how spaces are used, and the rules and “ceremonies” of the camp. At the same time, he also tries to describe his subjective response to these realities, often providing an expressionist take on the outside world, representing that world through his internal emotions. The morning that he is forced to board the transport trains to Auschwitz, for example, he describes the dawn of that day as a “betrayer” and the sun as an “ally of our enemies” (7).

Subsequent generations of Jewish Holocaust literature have included narratives by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which represents the Holocaust through cartoon figures of mice and cats. As the Holocaust becomes a more distant event, true first-person accounts will be impossible, and inherited connections will arguably also become more distant, requiring new modes of expression.