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Chapter 4. Ka-Be
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Survival in Auschwitz, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dehumanization and Resistance
Adaptability, Chance, and Survival
Moral Relativity
Racial Hierarchy
Oppression, Power, and Cruelty
Summary
Analysis
After 20 days, Levi’s foot is mostly healed and he is ejected from Ka-Be to his “great displeasure.” Leaving Ka-Be is dangerous in itself, since one is put randomly into a new block and new Kommando where they are unaware of the rules, customs, the inclinations of the Kapo. Every unknown element is a threat to his survival.
Levi’s observation that the unknown is dangerous suggests that, in an environment as chaotic and unpredictable as the Lager, any knowledge one may gain about their neighbors or their surroundings is a useful tool for survival.
Themes
However, Levi is assigned to Block 45, which is fortunate since his best friend Alberto lives in that block and has become quite popular and respected. Alberto is two years younger than Levi, but shrewd and intuitive, able to make himself understood even when he does not speak a man’s language—for there are many different languages in the camp, and communication is often difficult. Alberto intuitively understands whom to befriend and whom to avoid.
This introduces Alberto, who is not only the second-most present character aside from Levi himself, but who also demonstrates the manner in which resourcefulness and cunning aid one’s meager chance of survival in the Lager, especially in an environment where even the ability to communicate is hampered by such a variety of languages.
Themes
That evening, a prisoner who is famed as a Yiddish storyteller enters and chants a song he has composed about life in the camp, to the great enjoyment of the others, although Levi and most other Italians do not understand the language. Meanwhile, a former engineer plies his clandestine trade of tending to other prisoner’s foot sores and corns. The lights go out, signaling it is time to sleep, and Levi climbs into his bunk, pressed up against the back of a large stranger.
In light of the camp’s dehumanizing effect, actions like telling stories or plying one’s trade in the evening hours are distinctively human activities, and thus represent their own form of resistance to Nazi ideology and its campaign to strip the Jews of their very humanity. Maintaining such practices in such a difficult environment nods to the resilience of the human spirit.
Themes
Levi dreams fitfully of laying on a train track and of seeing his sister, trying to tell her about the life of the camp and all he has seen and heard and felt, but she turns away, uninterested in hearing his story. The pain of her disinterest wakes him, and around him Levi hears the other prisoners sleeping, their jaws moving as they dream the common, collective dream of food. He assumes it is late, since many men are already moving to and from the waste bucket, which their strained kidneys force each man to visit many times each night. Even so, night is a reprieve, an “armor” against the horrors of the camp, even though they often haunt the prisoners’ dreams as well.
Levi’s dream of being unheard represents a common fear—that the suffering the Jewish prisoners endure will never be acknowledged by the rest of the world. In the preface to Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote that this particular fear became his primary motivation in writing down this story in 1946 so that the pain and cruelty he and his comrades experienced would not go unseen or unheard.
Themes
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The morning bell at dawn and the apologetic command by the night guard to wake and rise for the day becomes a daily point of pain. The gentleness of night is replaced by the “hurricane” of the day as each man scrambles to make his bed, dress, and get to the latrine, and as each man’s foot sores once again bring fresh pain.
