There is no why here

Finished reading Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man the other day. It’s an account of his stay at the Auschwitz III concentration camp during the last years of World War II.

He doesn’t call it Auschwitz III but Buna, the name given by IG Farben because that is where they used forced labour to work on synthetic rubber (nitrile butadiene/ the polymerisation of - in German - Butadien and Natrium). IG Farben, by the way, was later split into several companies including Agfa, BASF, Bayer, and Sanofi. According to Wikipedia, 23 IG Farben directors were convicted at the Nuremberg trials, but were released no more than six years later.

But that was after Levi finished his memoirs. They paint an interesting picture of the psychological dynamic between the inmates, as well as between the inmates and the Nazis themselves. I don’t want to offend anyone by calling it interesting instead of horrific, but Levi himself describes it in an often undramatic and analytic way. Which, in my opinion, makes it all the more powerful. Especially when he talks about the Selektion, the selection of people too weak to work, selected to be sent to the gas chambers.

At the Selektion, people had to approach an SS-Man, who decided whether you should go to the left or to the right of him. One side was death, the other was a continuation of your grueling existence. But the inmates didn’t know which side was which. So they started watching who gets sent where, and figured it out by studying how sicklish each person looked, and on which side they end up at. The strategies people developed not to get sent to their death: walk with a forceful step, back straight, eyes forward. There is a dark comedy in these observations.

There is one particular paragraph that stuck with me, about an encounter with one of the guards:

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

There is no why here. There is so much meaning in that single sentence, it really struck me when I first read it. And I still think about it. Especially when I hear about the interactions Americans are currently having with the ICE thugs. There is no why. Obey or die. Or just die. There is no why.