Air raid sirens were a common occurrence in Monowitz from the summer of 1944. Air raids gave prisoners a chance to escape, to meet and speak to fellow prisoners, to steal food, to gain some respite from their labours and the torment of the Kapos. Some prisoners welcomed the air raids as a sign that the Third Reich was obviously nearing its end. The air raids also frightened their tormentors, the SS guards.

There were large scale air attacks by the US Air Force against the I. G. Farben synthetic oil plant in Monowitz on 20 August, 3 September, 18 December and 26 December 1944, and on 19 January 1945, the day after the beginning of the evacuation of the camp. During the raid of 20 August, seventy-five prisoners were killed and a hundred and fifty injured; on 3 September, three hundred people, including SS and prisoners, were killed or injured. The high number of prisoner casualties was in part due to I. G. Farben employees forbidding prisoners to take cover in makeshift shelters.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

This sentence suggests Sunday afternoon bicycle rides and walks with family in bourgeois pre-war Germany. Levi’s subsequent use of the SS man’s first name in the next sentence (‘È Rudi’) also suggests a relatively relaxed atmosphere, as if Levi sees a friend on that Sunday afternoon ride or walk.

The picture painted of a quant Sunday afternoon bicycle ride is highly ironic. By 1943, Germany was struggling to keep its armed forces and economy operating. There was a serious lack of fuel for the vehicles of the Wehrmacht and the factories of the Third Reich. Resort was made to the use of the horse and bicycle for transport, wood gas for powering automobiles, and, above all, there was rationing. Synthetic oil production was seen as an alternative to overcome the lack of access to natural resources, including oil. I. G. Farben, the giant German chemical conglomerate, took the decision in 1941 to build a synthetic oil plant at the village of Monowitz, near Auschwitz, utilising the slave labour from the Auschwitz camps and the local abundance of coal and water. As the war progressed and the fuel shortage worsened, the importance of the synthetic oil plant at Auschwitz surged. This was visible in the increasing number of Auschwitz prisoners assigned to work at the I. G. Farben plant, and the creation of a Monowitz sub camp of Auschwitz in 1942 and, subsequently, an independent camp, Auschwitz III–Monowitz in 1943. By 1944, ten thousand Auschwitz prisoners were housed at the concentration camp Auschwitz III–Monowitz, working solely for I. G. Farben.

‘Rudi’ is riding his bike as there is little petrol for vehicles, even for the SS and the concentration camps, and even at the plant supposedly producing synthetic oil.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

For Levi, Alex, the Kapo, was one of the most fearsome individuals in the Monowitz camp, even more so than the SS men. The SS had developed and honed the concentration camp system, starting in 1933 in Dachau. They developed the system to control and eventually break the prisoners. One of the methods used was to introduce camp prisoner functionaries who would have total powers over other prisoners. This had the benefits of reducing SS manpower needed to administer the camps but also of breeding division in the prisoner community.

The Kapo was the most feared of all prisoner camp functionaries. He was responsible for prisoner roll calls, overseeing the prisoner barracks, and supervising the prisoners at work. He literally had power of life and death over the prisoners. The Kapos were originally chosen from the German criminals (‘green triangles’) incarcerated in the concentration camps from the 1930s. They were chosen for their brutality and because they were German, and therefore separate from Jews, gypsies, and foreign political prisoners increasingly incarcerated in the concentration camps from 1941. Later in the war, Kapos were also chosen from the other prisoner communities including Jews, who could be equally as brutal as the German criminal Kapos.

Levi was correct to be afraid of ‘Alex, il Kapo’.

CM

Subcamps of Auschwitz project

In the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Primo has been admitted, through a kind of perverse and humiliating ‘chemistry examination’ carried out by Nazi official Herr Doktor Pannwitz, to a so-called ‘Chemical Kommando’. This Kommando will work, notionally, in a laboratory of the Buna-Werke industrial rubber plant, under construction by IG Farben next to the Monowitz-Auschwitz III concentration camp (and other POW and labour camps). The ‘cistern’ here is not a laboratory setting, but is probably a work site within the Buna complex.

Monowitz was the largest of the extensive network of so-called satellite- or sub-camps beyond Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. For more information on Monowitz, see the Subcamps of Auschwitz project.

RG

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).

For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.

CLL

In the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Primo has been admitted, through a kind of perverse and humiliating ‘chemistry examination’ carried out by Nazi official Herr Doktor Pannwitz, to a so-called ‘Chemical Kommando’. This Kommando will work, notionally, in a laboratory of the Buna-Werke industrial rubber plant, under construction by IG Farben next to the Monowitz-Auschwitz III concentration camp (and other POW and labour camps). The ‘cistern’ here is not a laboratory setting, but is probably a work site within the Buna complex.

Monowitz was the largest of the extensive network of so-called satellite- or sub-camps beyond Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. For more information on Monowitz, see the Subcamps of Auschwitz project.

RG