Auschwitz: The Counterlife

There is a brief but arresting passage in Primo Levi's 1947 classic memoir Survival in Auschwitz (originally titled If This Is a Man) about a French Jewish inmate he identifies simply as "Henri." Levi, a chemist and an Italian Jew who had been shipped to Auschwitz in 1944, dissected with Darwinian precision

and Dantean lyricism the human types who inhabited Hitler's most lethal death camp. If the cast is all too familiar--SS men and their prisoner-lackeys; Jewish inmates speaking the Babel of a dozen tongues; the "drowned" and the "saved," Levi's terms for victims and survivors--the individual portraitures rise to the level of characters in literature.

One of the more memorable personages was this Henri, said to be 22 at the time, with a soul encased in armor. Fluent in four languages, Henri had the "delicate and subtly perverse body and face" of one of those sado-erotic, arrow-pierced figures you see in Italian Renaissance paintings. Few were his equal at "organizing," camp slang for stealing and trading. None had more patrons and protectors throughout the camp. Henri resembles nothing so much as a postmodern trickster in his facility at conjuring power out of powerlessness. But Levi, always the moralist and stern judge, preferred similes of seduction when characterizing Henri, likening him in one place to a wasp that paralyzes its prey by eliciting their pity, comparing him in another to the biblical serpent.

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