Primo Levi on the Auschwitz Market

Most law-and-economists (and most economists?) are familiar with R. A. Radford’s seminal article, The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp (I can’t seem to find a weblink, but the cite is: Economica, 12 (48), Nov. 1945, pp 189-201). I wonder how many are aware that there is a parallel treatment in a better-known literary source. That would be Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (“if this is a man”--wretchedly mistranslated as Survival in Auschwitz), his account of his confinement in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Levi devotes a chapter to show how a system of trade and barter develops under the most extreme of conditions. Sometimes on their own, sometimes with the connivance or even the active participation of their captors, the prisoners traffic in bread, soup, shirts, “cigarettes” (= wood shavings)—indeed almost anything that might be valued inside the camp. Trade even leaps over the wall: prisoners work at their “day jobs” alongside free workers and goods pass more-or-less freely back and forth.

There is at least one “trading enterprise”—a group of Greek Jews from Thessalonika, in the camps for over three years, yet somehow able to maintain a sense of enterprise and a group cohesion. They hunker down around their own thick soup, “the product,” Levi says, “of their labor, their common purpose and their national solidarity” (73). The Greeks even help to define the face of the prison and its market, contributing a trade jargon (klepsi-klepsi: theft).

Levi is clearly fascinated by these guys, and it is not hard to see why. They are tough and pitiless yet they sing the old songs and retain an odd kind of cheerfulness—“the residue,” Levi reports, “of a wisdom, concrete and grounded, which draws together all the traditions of Mediterranean society” (id.).

Levi is also able to sketch out an arresting example of the ironic tensions constraining free choice in a larger society. As Levi explains, SS masters and the neighboring municipal authorities provide a context for the prisoners’ market economy. Yet their attitudes differ. The municipal authorities don’t mind the internal camp market, but they don’t like stuff jumping over the wall. The SS masters impose harsh punishments on the internal market, yet they tolerate, almost depend upon the smuggling trade. “I would now invite the reader,” Levi concludes acidly,

to reflect on what can be the meaning of our words “good” and “evil,” “just” or “unjust;” to consider in the context we have delineated and with the examples we have set forth , how much of common a shared morality we are able to sustain behind the barbed wire.

--Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo 77-8 (Einaudi Tascabili 1958)
(Translations are my own, be gentle)