The Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics
Honorable Mention - 2001
If This Is A Man
Kelin A. Emmett
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI
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The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity
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If This Is A Man
Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs, are
enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and
inadequate to all needs, and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish
what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life. (Levi
87)
This is what renders Holocaust memoirs so rich and important for our understanding. We do
not read them solely to understand a world born out of Nazi hatred and terror. Although they
provide a window into that world, they also provide insight into the capacities of, and conditions for,
our own humanity. The ethical implications of life and behavior in that world have much to bear on
our understanding of ourselves. It is for us to explore those implications, and decipher their message
regarding what is essential “to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life.”
Primo Levi’s memoir Survival in Auschwitz, originally entitled If this is a Man, conveys the
reality of Auschwitz, wherein human beings were systematically broken down and annihilated, and he
depicts the degradation that came to bare the key elements constitutive of humanity. He gives us an
account of the individuals who were a part of his experience and the types of behavior that they
displayed. Levi goes to great lengths to describe one such individual, Henri, and we are led to believe
that this man compromised his integrity and his humanity in order to survive. Recently, Henri
himself (Paul Steinberg) published his memoir, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning, in which he
confronts the character that Levi drew of him. Steinberg concedes that he must indeed have appeared
that way, and at one point he expresses regret regarding Levi’s charge:
Maybe I could have persuaded him to change his verdict by showing that there were
extenuating circumstances...
I'll never know whether I have the right to ask clemency of the jury.
Can one be so guilty for having survived? (130-1)
What is so unique and availing about these two memoirs is that they are linked by the encounter of
two human beings, their observations of one another, and an ensuing moral judgment. They provide
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us with accounts of Auschwitz and the effects it had on the moral capacities of those who lived there.
Their connection offers a more concrete depiction of the adapted behavior that was subject to moral
reckoning. They illuminate the twofold nature of our ‘selves’, and what is necessary for selfpreservation. Taken together, these memoirs have ethical implications that speak to us, emphasizing
the importance of our relationships to our humanity.
Neither Levi nor Steinberg begins his account with arrival at Auschwitz. They were people
before their arrival with histories, families, and identities, and their experience entails those people and
the denial of the relationships that constituted the ways in which they related to themselves and their
world. They begin in a world in which Jews, once citizens, had been removed from civil society, their
rights as legal persons revoked, separated from families, robbed of their property and, some, who were
eventually transported to Auschwitz. Levi describes his capture, the long night spent at the detention
camp before the journey to Auschwitz, and the initial shock he experienced at the first glimpse of the
destiny that awaited him. He describes his reaction to the first blows he and fellow prisoners received.
“Only profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger” (16)? Already his referential
complex, his socialization to associate specific acts with specific dispositions, is disrupted, and already
he is forced to reinterpret his world. This is only the beginning.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, prisoners had already been subject to physical deterioration due to
the conditions of the ghetto, the detention camp, or the transport. These people had lost everything,
and were to lose more. Those who entered the camp would first be robbed of every coveted
relationship left to them. This was the final dissolution of natural families, and the last they would
ever own anything -- even their bodies. Levi expounds on the repercussions of such subjugation on the
person of the human being.
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…for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition
of a man…Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair
…They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the
strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still
remains. (26-7)
Persons like Levi or Steinberg were reduced to anonymous haftlings,1 stripped of their particularity and
individuality; they were reduced to an undifferentiated mob of ‘less than human’. The Nazis’ intent
was to render them unrecognizable as human beings, and undeserving of even the slightest moral
sentiment.
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his
habits, his clothes, in short of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and
needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself...It is in this way that
we can understand the double sense2 of the term ‘extermination camp’, and it is now clear what we seek to
express with the phrase: ‘to lie at the bottom’. (27)
This is the heart of the matter: what constitutes a man; a self? What is required for his maintenance as
such? What do we mean by ‘self-preservation’, and what is so definitive about our relationships with
others, and the material medium they entail, that they constitute who we are? Who are we, then,
without them?
Levi and Steinberg each describe the absurdity of the world into which they had entered, its
rules, methods, and unintelligibility to those whose concepts of ‘law’ had not yet eluded them. Levi
likens it to “madness” (51). Steinberg describes it as, “The parallel universe, the one where logic,
ethics, codes no longer apply and are replaced by another logic...”(14). Almost immediately upon
Steinberg’s arrival he was confronted with the epitome of the absurd. He was designated manager of
his friends who had been selected for a boxing match to entertain S.S. men and senior block inmates.
If ever there was a surrealist happening beyond the wildest imagination of a Breton, a Dali, a
Magritte, it was that evening at Monowitz. When I recall what I witnessed there from my front row seat, I
despair of bringing it to life in the mind of a sane human being. (23)
This place disrupted any reference an individual might have to civilized and rational expectations. One
had to adapt and reinterpret reality, to accommodate to a world where a person’s life could be ended
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without reason or provocation. The individual had to adjust to a world of “material impossibility”, in
which the universal will of prisoners to survive and be persons could not be realized (Steinberg 76).
‘Material impossibility’ created isolated and atomized individuals. Both authors emphasize the
horrors such isolation entailed. It was a world wherein everything is “hostile” and one “feels himself
ejected into the dark and cold of sidereal space”, helpless and vulnerable in search of human contact
(Levi 56-7). Levi attests that “here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is
desperately and ferociously alone” (88). Steinberg tells us “I was fully aware that I was alone, that I
would have to fight for life on my own” (48). They each refer to the radical adaptation such existence
required, which did not come easy, as it involved adaptation to “antilogic” -- unnatural for most and
impossible for many (Steinberg 47).
To survive you had to be able to adapt yourself...Which right from the outset was impossible for highly
structured personalities, men in their forties with social standing, a sense of dignity, men who couldn’t
accept that communication from on high to us, the bottom, came only through blows and insults. (47)
Auschwitz was a Hobbesian world entailing isolation, alienation, and a self-preserving struggle, and
those who could not adapt did not survive. Levi tells us “the Law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own
bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor’, and left no room for gratitude” (160).
The impossibility of everyone’s survival made it impossible for more inclusive or
encompassing forms of solidarity to form among prisoners. Isolated and atomized individuals at most
formed small isolated and atomized groups, whose goals could not realistically harmonize, even
though they were doubtless the same. This predicament must have made itself known to every man
who had once known dignity, had moral aspirations, and had genuine empathy and concern for his
fellow humanity. It must have been a fine line to walk for those who continued to remember such
notions. I do not purport to draw that line here. We need only note that Levi and Steinberg agree
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that morality was on slippery ground, and if it could exist at all, in Auschwitz, its existence was
perverted.
We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’,
‘just’ and ‘unjust’; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined...how much of our
ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire. (Levi 86)
This leaves us to wonder what was necessary for adaptation and the behavior it entailed. Both
memoirs suggest that it involved a form of moral compromise that provided for the difference
between, what Levi termed, the ‘drowned’ and the ‘saved’. Levi tells us that “survival without
renunciation of any part of ones own moral world - apart from powerful and direct interventions by
fortune - was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints”
(92).
Although these survivors contend that adaptation in this sense was necessary, that morality had
to be discarded, each also leveled moral judgments. Levi says that even in this world, there were those
who were capable of avoiding corruption and those who were not. In a passage describing his best
friend Alberto, Levi implies it was possible to understand the Lager and to adapt to it, “unscathed” and
“uncorrupted.”
He fights for his life but still remains everybody’s friend. He ‘knows’ whom to corrupt, whom to avoid,
whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist...Yet...he himself did not become corrupt. (57)
We can juxtapose this image with Levi’s depiction of the better-adapted inmate Henri. He describes
Henri as “eminently civilized and sane”, and as possessing “a complete and organic theory on the ways
to survive in Lager” (98). ‘Organization’, ‘pity’ and ‘theft’ were his methods of utility, and he seemed
to have a natural gift at making use of the first two.
There is no heart so hardened that Henri cannot breach it if he sets himself to it seriously. In the
Lager, and in Buna as well, his protectors are very numerous...But his favorite field is Ka-be: Henri has free
entry into Ka-be; Doctor Citron and Doctor Weiss are more than his protectors, they are his friends and
take him in whenever he wants...Possessing such conspicuous friendships, it is natural that Henri is rarely
reduced to the third method, theft…he naturally does not talk much about this subject. (99-100)
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It is unclear what made for the difference between Henri and Alberto, or how Henri’s behavior
entailed corruption. Perhaps, it is because Henri did not remain everybody’s friend, or that he did not
remain Levi’s friend.
To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one sometimes also feels him warm and near;
communication, even affection seems possible. One seems to glimpse...a human soul, sorrowful and aware
of itself. But the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace...again intent on his hunt and his
struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armour, the enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and
incomprehensible like the Serpent in Genesis.
From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of
defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him, but an instrument in his hands.
…I would do much to know of his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again. (100)
Even though adaptation was necessary for survival, and this entailed isolated individuals, or groups, to
engage in struggle and use others cunningly as instruments for their preservation, Levi judges Henri; a
judgment that was harsh enough to prevent Levi from wishing to encounter Henri again.
Steinberg concedes that Levi, his neutral and objective observer, must have gotten it right, that
indeed he was a “solitary fighter, cool, calculating” (130). He accepts Levi’s charge without so much as
a word about his behavior towards Levi. In fact, he doesn’t even recall Levi at all, and this seems
strange to him.
Perhaps because I hadn’t felt he could be useful to me? Which would confirm his judgment. (130)
The charge is validated through Steinberg’s sense of regret. The doctors’ choice of protecting him
while others died is an issue with which he still struggles.
You can’t argue with material impossibility. But it neither consoles you nor lets you off the hook.
The doctors let some die to save others…That was enough to make me feel uneasy, guilty of
being too lucky, of having left others to their common fate. Of course these feelings surfaced later, after
my rebirth. They stemmed from a morality that was obsolete in the camp. (76)
Steinberg tells us that morality was obsolete in Auschwitz, and only later, as a free man, did regret and
guilt surface. His memoir admits, and owns up to, without seeking to vindicate, the actions that
torment him. Too exhausted, he ignored his friend Phillip’s call from his deathbed, and let him die
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alone. In haste, he slapped a man whose near death delirium evoked in Steinberg his hatred of the
ever-threatening possibility of his own death.
If only I could get rid of this memory, sweep it away with my hand...
…It remains one of the abject wounds that can never heal and will be with me wherever I go
I slapped the old Polish Jew. The Khmer Rouge massacred their own brothers and sisters.
French soldiers tortured people in Algeria. The Hutus hacked the Tutsis to death with machetes.
And in this concert, I played my part. (126-7)
Steinberg admits of a morality that was obsolete in Auschwitz, and in his solitary and calculating
existence, and yet he did not escape with his human dignity unscathed or without humiliation; he
renders moral judgment on himself (162).
Even upon evacuation from Auschwitz, Henri casts moral judgment on another. During the
evacuation Steinberg had a piece of bread stolen from him.
I sometimes wonder about my thief. How do you live with such a thing? Stealing someone’s bread, you
steal his life. I think he probably died after making one of the many fatal choices that would confront us
in the following days, and besides, he didn’t have the moral resources to survive: he was already dead as a
human being3 when he robbed me. (137-8)
And here is the tension that these memoirs reveal. To survive one had to adapt to a world of isolation
and struggle, in which morality, if not obsolete, was significantly comprised. Material impossibility
necessitated such compromise for continued existence. Yet it seems that one also had to retain “moral
resources” to survive, and that those moral resources necessitated remaining human. Morality is
contingent on our level of humanity, and perhaps, the opposite is also true. Obliteration of one’s
humanity, or moral self was powerful enough to undermine physical survival. This is Steinberg’s
judgment, and Levi says the same. Auschwitz was “the resolution of others to annihilate us first as
men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards” (51)
We learn from Levi’s perception of Steinberg that he maintained some level of his humanity.
Levi caught sight of a human soul, one capable of warmth, affection and communication, however
muffled by a cold and solitary existence. These memoirs shed light on another necessary aspect of
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adaptation. It was not enough to adjust to a Hobbesian world, or provide for physical survival;
inmates had to also establish some kind of ethical life within the camps. Contacts and friendships
were necessary not only for material aid, but also for human recognition and self-maintenance. Levi
describes his relationship with Lorenzo as a relationship that not only offered material aid but also a
reminder of a just world.
…Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated...outside this world of negation.
Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man. (122)
Steinberg, no doubt, was also involved in some ethical relationships. His protectors provided not
merely physical protection, but also human recognition and validation.
That the struggle would leave me no resources to help my friends was something I would not learn until
much later, when I’d hit rock bottom.
…[in] the beginning…I was still carrying the ballast of a full range of human feelings:
friendship, compassion, solidarity. After they’d gone by the board, it would be a long while before I
retrieved them again, too late for the friends of my first days, but in time for a few others along the way.
(48-9)
In reference to his passivity towards Phillip, Steinberg reveals the twofold nature of his closest
confrontation with death in Auschwitz; ‘rock bottom’, his physical and moral annihilation. That he
could not have ascended without help and recognition from others is worth noting. In providing
material aid and favors that enabled his physical sustenance, his benefactors provided recognition of his
humanity and enabled the retrieval of his human emotions and moral resources.
It seems, then, that self-preservation involves both the physical and moral components of
‘self’. Adaptation had to account for the survival of both, for survival as human beings. This sheds
light on what is essential, even adventitious, for the “human animal in the struggle for life.” In The
Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Axel Honneth explicates the necessity
of recognition relationships4 for the development and maintenance of self-confidence, dignity and selfesteem, each of which affects the way in which human beings relate practically to, and identify,
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themselves. He illuminates the horrors faced by isolated individuals and explores the repercussions of
disrespect, such as denigration, insult, denial of rights, exclusion, abuse anti torture, that bear,
respectively, on these practical self-relations (129).
Because the normative self-image of each and every individual human being…is dependent on continually
being backed up by others, the experience of being disrespected carries with it the danger of an injury that
can bring the identity of the person as a whole to the point of collapse. (131-2)
This danger is most threatening when it involves our most fundamental relation-to-self, our selfconfidence, which is developed through love and is necessary for trust in ourselves and our world.
Physical abuse poses the greatest threat to this kind of trust in reality.
…what is specific to these kinds of physical injury...is not the purely physical pain but rather the
combination of this pain with the feeling of being defencelessly at the mercy of another subject, to the
point of feeling that one has been deprived of reality...the further consequence…is the loss of trust in
oneself and the world, and this affects all practical dealings with other subjects, even at a physical level.
(132-3)
If we consider the forms of recognition that Honneth deems necessary for identity formation and selfmaintenance, it is clear that Auschwitz threatened the existence of the self on each of these levels. The
gravity of the injustice that befell prisoners of Auschwitz incurs from an injury regarding “the positive
understanding of themselves that they [had] acquired intersubjectively” (131).
This sheds light on why individuals with more developed identities might not have adapted,
and why someone like Steinberg whose life was devoid of “ties and enduring friendships” was “trained
for solitary combat” (Steinberg 39). It might also explain the harsh impression that Steinberg’s lack of
recognition, or indifference, left on Levi. Finally, we understand how this world breached a far greater
threat to the ‘self’ of its inhabitants than their physical existence. His personality, his identity, his
intellect, his emotions and all of the ways in which he relates to himself and his world were in danger
of eradication, even while the body continued to live and breath. Steinberg describes it:
Not a banal, respectable death; a different death. We probably ought to invent a different word.
Decomposition? Putrescence? What term does justice to the physical, psychological, and moral
annihilation, experienced in wretched shame? (19)
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Levi also describes it:
…we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old
wise ones, instead of warning us ‘remember you must die’, would have done much better to remind us of
this great danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men,
it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here (55)
And these considerations are voiced again, and again, in other Auschwitz memoirs as well.
It is for us then, as free men and women, to heed their message. The twofold nature of ‘self’
engendered the tension between physical and moral survival. Our moral precepts necessitate the moral
and ethical selves that constitute our identities and depend on relationships of recognition. If we take
seriously these conditions for selfhood and morality, it is our duty to reflect upon the extent to which
those conditions are met within a society that, today, has the capacity to overcome material
impossibility, but is premised on an ideal of humanity that presupposes isolated and atomized
individuals and calculative, instrumental, and (often) cunning interaction, and that yields mainly
negative liberties. In essence, it is a society that obscures, even denies, the importance of social
relationships in the formation and maintenance of the ‘self’, and that pinches the moral resources
essential for human survival. In doing so, we must reflect upon our own behavior in a society that
makes all of us, more or less, like the ‘Serpent in Genesis’. We might also ask if we have a right to ask
clemency of the jury, and just who are those who comprise our jury. As we engage in our daily
activities, we must be conscientious about our relationships with others, and realize how deeply we are
connected to, affected by and, in turn, affect others. Only after we explore such considerations, can we
justly comprehend the peril that indifference engenders, even in our own world, and evaluate how
much of a moral world can exist “on this side of the barbed wire”.
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The memoirs Levi and Steinberg have left for us reveal these aspects of ourselves. Their
remembrances unveil the scope of our humanity and reveal that which is essential to it, the
implications of which, to each of us now and here after, are indispensable.
We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic
and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away, and that the Haftling is
consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be
drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are
reduced to silence. (Levi 87)
We have learned, through Levi and Steinberg, that they were not completely silenced. Relationships of
recognition and human intersubjectivity, however muffled, existed on some level for the preservation
of the ‘self’ necessary to the maintenance of the moral resources imperative for survival. We must
never cease to reflect upon the conditions that affect our humanity or fail to appreciate the profundity
of Levi’s concern.
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NOTES
1
Prisoners.
2
Italics my own.
3
Italics my own.
4
Honneth draws from G.W.F. Hegel’s early Jena writings and G.H. Mead’s empirical psychology to develop an
account of individual and social struggle that is in itself normative, due to the necessity of intersubjective
relationships of recognition for individual and societal identity formation and maintenance.
WORKS CITED
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Moral Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. 1958. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Steinberg, Paul. Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning. 1996. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
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