Survival in Auschwitz: Chapter 8. This Side of Good and Evil Summary & Analysis

The prisoners of the Lager hear a rumor that shirts will soon be issued once again, taken from a new batch of arrivals to the labor and death camps. This sends every man who has somehow gained possession of more than one shirt to the illicit Exchange Market established in the north-east corner of the camp—the men with shirts to sell want to liquidate them before their value is deflated. Although forbidden by the SS, the Market thrives, functioning like any other economy except that it deals in such goods as soup, bread, tobacco, and shoes, each valued at fluctuating exchange rates based upon a ration of bread. As with all things, the Greek Jews dominate the Market, being the best thieves and the most auspicious merchants.

As with standard economics, the prisoners engage in various—often complex—investment schemes, even trading with Polish civilians, investing camp-issued tobacco for a return of bread, eating a portion and then reinvesting their remainder to purchase a shirt which can then be flipped on the market. Prisoners with sharp minds and strong networks of relationships in and outside the camp can see high yields on their investments. Many have their gold fillings pulled from their teeth to use as starting collateral. Some even scam new-arrivals, stricken with such unfamiliar hunger, out of their own gold fillings.

Although contact between Häftlinge and civilians is expressly forbidden and harshly punished, the possibility for financial gain makes it commonplace. Civilians found guilty of interaction with prisoners are themselves sent to the camps for periods of months as punishment, though they are not shorn or tattooed. For them, the labor camp is merely a temporary sentence, not an extended state of existence. Anything that can be stolen and may be useful to other prisoners, to Kapos (who need supplies for their workers) or to civilians is pilfered and introduced to the underground economy. The nurses of Ka-Be are known to be a primary force in the Market’s functioning, selling the shoes and clothes of the dead as well as various chemicals and kits. More than anything, the nurses sell spoons, which cannot be obtained otherwise and which the nurses confiscate from outgoing patients, as if it were their fee.

Levi notes that “Theft in Buna, punished by the civil direction, is authorized and encouraged by the SS; theft in the camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilian as a normal exchange operation.” With these varying precedents of the ubiquity of theft and its necessity for survival, Levi suggests to the reader that “good and “evil” and “just” and “unjust” mean entirely different things to the outside world than they do to the men of Auschwitz. Such simple, rigid morality simply cannot survive in the Lager.