If This Is a Man

Two broad categories of existence in the Lager are proposed: the drowned and the saved. These categories are not evident in ordinary life. The muselmann (plural, muselmanner), or “drowned,” form “the backbone of the camp” (103).

The drowned are an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand (103).

The drowned also “have no story, and single and broad is the path to perdition” (103). However, for the saved “the paths to salvation are many, difficult and improbable” (103). In ordinary life, there is a third path, but it does not exist in the Lager.

The chapter lays out several paths to “salvation,” all requiring a combination of the roles of Organisator, Prominent, and Kombinator.

The prominents are given power. Non-Jewish prominents are chosen from outside prisons specifically to “supervise” in the camps. These are not average Germans, or even average prisoners. The narrator is more interested in Jewish prominents, who unleash the power they are given on their own people, unloading the abuse they suffer from above on those below them.