Where It All Goes Down
World War II, Auschwitz
The book takes place during World War II within the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Jews and other "undesirables" (like criminals, political dissidents, Romani and gay people) were transported from all over Europe to do hard labor and ultimately to be exterminated when they stopped being useful laborers. Prisoners lived under cramped and unsanitary conditions (as Primo tells us, they slept at least two to a small bunk), and had little to eat. On top of this, they were forced to do brutally hard labor every daylight hour. Many prisoners died of hunger, illness, exhaustion, and exposure to the cold, while others were arbitrarily "selected" for execution in the gas chambers or shot by guards for arbitrary reasons.
Auschwitz was a large complex of camps and sub-camps, labor camps and extermination camps. Inmates arrived by train, in cars designed for freight or livestock. You can click through the photos on this website to see some transports as they arrived. The sick, the elderly, and most women and children, were killed within hours or days of their arrival. The others were "spared" to be used for labor in the camp.
By some estimates, 1.1 million people were killed in gas chambers or died from starvation and illness in Auschwitz. About 90% of them were Jews (source). Primo was placed in the sub-camp called Monowitz-Buna, which was the site of a large factory complex for producing synthetic rubber. (Elie Wiesel was also in the Buna labor camp during part of Levi's time there.)
The camp where Primo lives during his time at Auschwitz is surrounded by razor wire, and as an added bonus, an electric fence. A number of long housing blocks fill the space, and this is what their interiors look like:
[T]here are only one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three levels, fitting close to each other like the cells of a beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize without wastage all the space in the room up to the roof. Here all the ordinary Häftlinge live, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut. Consequently, there are two men in most of the bunks, which are portable planks of wood, each covered by a thin straw sack and two blankets. (2.50)
Living conditions are crowded and filthy. And don't even get us started on the food: the prisoners only get a small portion of bread and some soup for each meal. The soup is mostly watery broth, with maybe a few small chunks of potato, cabbage or turnip. Longtime prisoners are savvy enough to know precisely where to wrangle a space in line, so that they can be more assured of getting a better portion of the soup drawn from the bottom of the vat (where the vegetables sink).
The work that the prisoners are forced to do (with very little food) is brutally hard and merciless. They often work in the rain, while slogging through mud and with bloody blisters on their feet from the ill-fitting wooden shoes they must wear. The work doesn't stop in the sub-freezing temperatures of the Polish winter. To add insult to injury, the prisoners are made to march in exact unison for the amusement of the SS.
When the Soviet army finally arrived at Auschwitz, these are some of the men they found. Primo and his friends were probably in the same condition. Warning: we'd rate this photo 8 out of 10 on the horror scale.