If This is a Man

Christmas is near, and Alberto and Levi are walking together in “the long grey file” (171). Lorenzo brings between six and eight pints of soup every evening. Silberlust, the tin-smith, has made a zinc bucket/pitcher (menaschka) out of scraps of gutter for three rations of bread for Lorenzo and Alberto to carry the soup.

They are talking and walking back to the hut with the menaschka. They are both creative and have found ways to survive. Levi smuggles brooms from the lab by cutting them into pieces and then restoring them. Alberto, too, gains rations through a complicated exchange of different size files. As they get closer to the hut they see the searchlight focused on the gallows; an execution is imminent. A fellow prisoner who purportedly helped to blow up a crematorium at Birkenau is about to be hung. There are rumors that he was planning a mutiny, too. Before the prisoner is killed, he yells out “Kamaraden, ich bin der Letzte!”—Comrades, I am the last one!

Everyone watches silently and docilely, uncovering their heads only when told to do so. Levi is overwhelmed by this man, who “must have been made of another metal than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us, could not bend him” (177).