Survival in Auschwitz: Chapter 17. The Story of Ten Days Summary & Analysis

In January 1945, Levi comes down with scarlet fever and is placed in the infection ward of Ka-Be, which guarantees him forty days of rest and isolation. Since he has eaten well and been spared hard labor the last several months, his body is strong enough to survive both selection and his fever. Levi spends his time seldomly speaking with the other men in the ward and using his new collection of tools to make cigarette lighters, which he can sell for several rations of bread each. Two pleasant Frenchmen, Arthur and Charles, are also in the ward, having only arrived in the camp days before. When a Greek barber speaks of the rumors that the Russian army is nearly upon them, both men are exuberant, though those who have been in the camp longer know that such optimism is foolish.

A Greek doctor arrives the same afternoon and informs them that any prisoners healthy enough to march will be given several days’ worth of rations, new shoes, and sent on a 12-mile hike with the rest of the prisoners and the German guards. Those too sick to travel would be left in Ka-Be to fend for themselves, under the care of the least sick patients. The doctor denies that the Germans will kill the patients of the ward, though he obviously thinks otherwise.

Alberto comes to say goodbye to Levi through the window, ignoring the quarantine since he has already had scarlet fever in in his lifetime. Alberto has found himself a pair of leather shoes to walk the journey in, and Levi knows that he must find himself a pair of shoes once he is strong and able again. But now he is left in the “hands of fate.” Roughly 20,000 prisoners and guards evacuate the camp on January 18, leaving some 800 prisoners in Ka-Be, 11 of whom share Levi’s room. “Almost in their entirety they vanished during their evacuation,” including Alberto.

None but a few SS guards remain with the patients at Ka-Be to distribute final rations, and even they seem uninterested. Levi summons the strength to gather some of the blankets left behind by those who have left. In the late evening, shortly after the lights go out, an air raid strikes the camp, burning several empty buildings down. A group of prisoners who felt they were threatened by being too close to the fire beg for shelter in the infection ward, but Levi and the others barricade the door until they leave. The explosions from the air raid have broken out one of the hut’s windows, and he realizes that in the morning they will have to forage for a woodstove and for food, which he relays to the Frenchmen.

As he recounts the 10 days between the Germans leaving and the Russians arriving, Levi’s narration switches to the style of dated diary entries. January 19: Levi wakes up with Arthur and Charles at dawn, feeling ill and weary and frightened. All the other prisoners in their hut are too weak or too frightened to rise. The three men, however, step out, finding the Lager in ruins from the air raid and from being sufficiently ransacked by the remaining prisoners. Even so, they find two sacks of potatoes left in the kitchen and an iron woodstove in an administrative office, which they manage to carry back with a wheelbarrow, as well as embers and scraps of wood to burn. Once the broken window has been sealed, the stove set up, and the heat of the fire begins to warm their hut, everyone manages to relax a bit.

One of the prisoners who remained inside while Levi, Charles, and Arthur foraged, makes the agreed-upon proposal that each man who did not forage should give a slice of bread to the three who did the work. To Levi, this marks a new beginning, a symbol that the “Lager was dead,” and that the survivors are beginning to transition from “Häftlinge to men again.” Even so, when the light and warmth of the stove draws other prisoners from other huts, Levi and Charles deny them entry. That evening, they can hear air raids and rifles in the distance, though they think little of it. Instead, though exhausted, they are proud to have “accomplished something useful—perhaps like God after the first day of creation.”

January 20: Levi rises to light the stove in the morning, joints still aching with fever, and Arthur boils three potatoes per person for breakfast. Having remembered a trench were vegetables were buried, Levi and Charles spend their day chipping turnips out of the frozen ground with a pickaxe, as well as packets of salt and a can of water. They manage to cart back 100 pounds of food, as well as a truck battery, still with a charge, that Levi finds in a surgery ward. That evening, Levi can see through his window the tanks, trucks, and horses of the German army snaking up the road past the camp, fleeing.

January 21: Although Levi is exhausted, Charles calls him to work again in the morning. As Arthur sets whichever men of the infection ward can sit upright to peeling potatoes, Charles and head set outside to find a place in the ransacked kitchen to make some soup from turnips and cabbage. The camp is covered in frozen filth—the dysentery patients have flooded the latrines and filled every available container that could be found.

After Charles and Levi find a suitable place and the needed equipment to cook soup, a group of prisoners once again gathers to beg for food, but Charles fends them off. However, an enterprising tailor steps forward and offers to make clothing out of scavenged wool blankets in exchange for soup, and both Charles and Levi find themselves newly equipped with heavy jackets and gloves. That evening, Levi tells the others in his hut that they should begin thinking of home again, to encourage themselves to survive.

January 22: The next morning, Levi and Charles boldly venture into one of the SS camp quarters, finding a wealth of vodka, medicine, leftover food, and magazines, which they happily carry back with them. Less than half an hour later, SS officers, apparently separated from their comrades, find 18 French prisoners eating from their stores of food in the SS dining hall, and the swiftly execute each one of them, leaving the corpses where they lay.

The camp is filling with frozen corpses, most of whom are either stacked in the yard or left lying in their bunks. Through the wall of the quarantine hut, Levi can hear the groans of the dying men in the dysentery ward. Struck with brief compassion, he drags a bowl of water and some leftover soup to them in the evening, which results in the dysentery patients shouting his name through the wall in every language, day and night. Levi recalls, “I felt like crying, I could have cursed them.”

In the night, a young man in the quarantine hut falls out of bed and soils himself, filling the hut with a foul stench. Charles rises, dresses himself, and then cleans the young man with straw, scrapes the floor clean with a plate, and carries the young man back to his bunk. To Levi, in the midst of such extreme exhaustion, this seems a great act of self-sacrifice.

January 23: Rumor has spread that a large cache of potatoes is buried outside the camp, beyond the barbed wire. Sometime in the morning, a group of prisoners manage to clear an opening, stamping down the barbed wire fence, and Charles and Levi are able to pass through unharmed. As they do, Levi realizes that he is free for the first time in over a year, without fences or guards keeping him prisoner or preventing his journey home. They find the potatoes, which although must be dug out with a pickaxe, are of such surplus that “nobody would die of hunger anymore.” Despite this good fortune, another patient of the infection ward, sick with diphtheria, seems very close to death.

January 24: The majority of prisoners left in Ka-Be continue to grow weaker and the number of corpses lying around the camp steadily grows. However, a hut filled with patients who were not diseased but only recovering from operations have grown healthy and strong again. They make a foraging trip to the English prisoner-of-war camp and return laden with flour, lard, and various other foods and goods. Levi, who had recently found a block of beeswax, leads the infection ward in making candles, which they trade the newly-wealthy for additional food that provides them with more nutritious than only potatoes.

January 25: Ravens arrive in the camp in large numbers to pick at the corpses. In Levi’s hut, a dying Hungarian named Sómogyi falls into a delirium and begins chanting the German affirmative “Jawohl” over and over again, “thousands of times.” The survivors try to reassure each other that the Russians will arrive any moment now. Although they are still weak and Sómogyi’s chattering is incessant, Arthur, Charles, and Levi spend their evening speaking excitedly on all manner of subjects around the stove, to the rapt attention of every other man in the hut, as the three “become men once again.”

January 27: Although Arthur, Charles, and Levi keep each other feeling sane and human, around them the dying survivors are reduced to a bestial state, concerned with nothing beyond immediate survival. Above them, Levi can hear small planes dog-fighting, and in the interludes, Sómogyi’s “monologue.” However, during the night, Levi and Arthur both hear him fall out of bed and go silent. He is dead, but there is no sense in moving him before the morning.

January 28: The survivors of the infection ward wake to find the “Sómogyi thing” lying on the floor, but they do not want to touch him before they eat for fear of his contagion. After breakfast, while Charles and Levi are carrying Sómogyi’s body out to the yard, the Russians arrive to free them from the camp. Although Sómogyi was the only man in Levi’s hut to die within the 10 days between the Germans’ leaving and the Russians’ arriving, five more die in the Russian mobile hospital established in Auschwitz. Five, however, survive, including Arthur, Charles, and Levi. Charles and Levi write letters back and forth long after the war has ended, and Levi remarks that he hopes to “see him again one day.”