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March 31, 2015
p139 At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to my name or, better, to my number: 174517. I must have by then overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time brought to a frenzy by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were only eighty kilometers away. Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour.
p140 We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (and not completely disagreeable) sensation of someone who has missed a meal and is certain that the next meal will not be missed: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had accompanied us now for a year, had struck deep, permanent roots in us, lived in our cells, and conditioned our behavior. To eat, to get something to eat, was our prime stimulus, behind which, at a great distance, followed all other problems of survival, and even farther away the memories of home and the very fear of death.
I was a chemist in a chemical plant, in a chemical laboratory (this too has been narrated), and I stole in order to eat. If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments and acquire the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving -- me, a respectable little university graduate -- the involuntary-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his Klondike Lager -- the great Buck of The Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: at every favorable opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything except the bread of my companions.
[His problem is that most of the substances that he could steal in the lab are liquids] ...This is the great problem of packaging, which every experienced chemist knows: and it was well known to God Almighty, who solved it brilliantly, as he is wont to, with cellular membranes, eggshells, the multiple peel of oranges, and our own skins, because after all we too are liquids. Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptible, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptible things. [See Doctor Faustus]
[With all this in mind he has to limit himself to items that were]
p141 ...solid, not perishable, not cumbersome, and above all new. It had to be of high unitary value, that is not voluminous, because we were often searched at the camp’s entrance after work; and it should finally be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that composed the Lager’s complicated universe.
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[Levy finds some iron-cerium rods and managed to get them into the camp where he consults with his friend, Alberto. Levi is skeptical of the value of these rods] p142 Alberto reproached me. For him renunciation, pessimism discouragement were abominable and culpable: he did not accept the concentration camp universe, he rejected it both instinctively and with his reason, and he did not let himself be tainted by it. He was a man of good and strong will, and miraculously he had remained free, and his words and his acts were free: he had not bowed his head, he had not bent his back. A gesture of his, a word, a smile had a liberating virtue, they were a rip in the rigid fabric of the Lager, and all those who had contact with him felt this, even those who did not understand his language. I believe that nobody, in that place, was loved as much as he was.
p143 He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it’s a matter of launching it. He would take care of it, he would turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.
I love this twist on the story of Prometheus. It is also quintessentially “Jewish” or, at least, bourgeois -- and for many of these authors (Ford Madox Ford, leaps to mind) those two things seem to be almost the same thing. Of course the world of the camps would also be a world of “trade” as are all human environments. People who reject trade on principle (Marxists and Religious people for the most part) usually, to the extent that they are successful in imposing their beliefs, often create new (black or underground) markets as a side-effect. And then even the true-believers often fall victim to temptation and greed through the operation of these markets.
It’s also worth noting that Alberto here (a man of trade, apparently, though we know little else about him) voices (see bold text above) an anti-nihilist philosophy not unlike that of Sartre. But unlike Foucault, Alberto asserts both his humanity and his freedom. A child of the haute bourgeoisie, and with the lessons of the Holocaust just behind him, Foucault embraced a far more pessimistic philosophy and view of the world than did someone actually living in Auschwitz.
We must be more astute. This speech, about the necessity of being astute, was not new between us; Alberto had often made it to me, and before him others in the free world, and still many others repeated it to me later, an infinite number of times down to today, with a modest result; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency of symbiosis with a truly astute person, who obtained (or felt he obtained) temporal or spiritual advantages from his companionship with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from being astute at my expense. I did not know, but he did... that in the plant there was a clandestine industry of cigarette lighters: unknown craftsmen, at spare moments, made them for important persons and civilian workers. Now flints are needed for lighters, and they had to be of a certain size: we had to thin down the rods I had...
...
...According to Alberto, the price of a lighter flint was equivalent to a ration of bread, that is, one day of life... [and they could make 120 flints] two months of life for me and two for Alberto, and in two months the Russians would have arrived and liberated us; and finally cerium would have liberated us, an element about which I knew nothing, save for that single practical application, and that it belonged to the equivocal and heretical rare-earth group family [Promethium is another rare-earth element], and that... it was not named after its discoverer; instead it celebrates (great modesty of the chemist of past times!) the asteroid Ceres, since the metal and the star were discovered in the same year, 1801; [not quite true -- see notes below] and this was perhaps an affectionate-ironic homage to alchemical couplings: just as the Sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres must be cerium.
...
One always hesitates to judge foolhardy actions, [in this case scraping the rods to reduce them in size -- creating sparks -- while concealed under blankets on a bed of shavings at night] whether one’s own or those of others, after they have proven to be successful: perhaps therefore they were not foolhardy enough? Or perhaps it is true that there exists a God who protects children, fools, and drunks? [Let’s not think too hard about that one in this particular situation] Or perhaps again these actions have more weight and more warmth than those innumerable other actions that have ended badly, and one tells them more willingly? But we did not ask ourselves such questions: the Lager had given us a crazy familiarity with danger and death, and risking the noose to eat more seemed to us a logical, indeed an obvious choice.
...
p146 We worked for three nights: nothing happened, nobody noticed our activity, nor did the blanket or pallet catch fire, and this is how we won the bread which kept us alive until the arrival of the Russians and how we comforted each other in the trust and friendship which united us.
Levi tells the story of his liberation elsewhere. Alberto was moved with a large portion of the prisoners to Buchenwald and Mauthausen and disappeared somewhere along the way.
He doesn’t mention it here, but Levi was saved in the end because he contracted scarlet fever and was too ill to move when the SS evacuated the camp. Thus he survived the Resistenza because he was Jewish and he survived the Holocaust because he was ill at just the right moment. “So it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut might say.
Cerium (Ce 58)
“Commercial applications of cerium are numerous. They include catalysts, additives to fuel to reduce emissions and to glass and enamels to change their color. Cerium oxide is an important component of glass polishing powders and phosphors used in screens and fluorescent lamps. It is also used in the "flint" (actually ferrocerium) of lighters.”
...
“Cerium metal is highly pyrophoric, meaning that when it is ground or scratched, the resulting shavings catch fire.[9]”
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“Cerium was discovered in Bastnäs in Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger, and independently in Germany by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, both in 1803.[17] Cerium was named by Berzelius after the dwarf planet Ceres, discovered two years earlier (1801).[12] As originally isolated, cerium was in the form of its oxide, and was named ceria, a term that is still used. The metal itself was too electropositive to be isolated by then-current smelting technology, a characteristic of rare earth metals in general. After the development of electrochemistry by Humphry Davy five years later, the earths soon yielded the metals they contained. Ceria, as isolated in 1803, contained all of the lanthanides present in the cerite ore from Bastnäs, Sweden, and thus only contained about 45% of what is now known to be pure ceria. It was not until Carl Gustaf Mosander succeeded in removing lanthana and "didymia" in the late 1830s, that ceria was obtained pure. Wilhelm Hisinger was a wealthy mine owner and amateur scientist, and sponsor of Berzelius. He owned or controlled the mine at Bastnäs, and had been trying for years to find out the composition of the abundant heavy gangue rock (the "Tungsten of Bastnäs"), now known as cerite, that he had in his mine.[12] Mosander and his family lived for many years in the same house as Berzelius, and Mosander was undoubtedly persuaded by Berzelius to investigate ceria further.[18]” -Wiki
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