The Czech Transport

"The Czech Transport"

This memoir was written by Zalmen Gradowski, a member of the Zondercommando, a group of prisoner's who work in the gas chambers. Although Gradowski is writing about his own experiences from the first person, the purpose of this piece is not to tell his own story. The purpose is to tell the victim's stories that would otherwise be erased with their deaths. This inherently brings up authenticity issues since the subjects of this narrative all died and cannot confirm the authenticity of the writing. However, this serves to create a new type of testimony that tells the story of those who did not live to tell it themselves.

Gradowski frequently writes about the feelings of those on their way to death in the chambers. This information had to be inferred. For example "Why were all the searchlights shining? Was the night too dark? Was the moonlight too faint?"(554). The lights are on to aid in preventing any escape or retaliation. Gradowski knows this, but those on their way to death do not. Therefore when writing from the prisoner's perspective, he invents thoughts that would likely be going through the minds of individuals in this situation.

Gradowski chooses to include these portions as they are important to understanding the situation from the victim's perspective. If Gradowski had instead chosen not to write about the victim's mental lives, this piece of writing would not achieve its goal of telling the story of the victim. If he had written the story from a completely objective point of view, the story of the victim would go untold. However it is this story that Gradowski wants to tell. He wants the reader to understand the victim's perspective. He therefore writes about the thoughts and feelings of the victims in order to get the reader to empathize with victims. He puts the reader in the shoes of the victims.

Gradowski repeatedly writes about the rhythmic beating hearts of the victims. "Their hearts beat rhythmically, full of fear and foreboding"(553). Gradowski can not assuredly know this information, but is nonetheless included because it serves an important purpose: to create a bridge to the reader. Everyone has a heart and knows what its like to feel their heart beat. In this way, the reader can empathize with the feelings of the victim. The "rhythmic" nature of the heartbeat brings up an image of a group heartbeat, of hearts beating together. This further unites the reader with the victim.

This empathetic nature of the writing provides a new type of testimony that tells the story of those who have been silenced by death. This functions to recreate the obliterated testimony of the victims. Therefore the empathetic quality of the writing is actually essential to its testimonial value. If this were left out due to its controversial validity, we wouldn't know the whole story of how they died and the events leading up to their death. The victim's story would go untold.

Thesis - Levi uses *literary technique* to address questions of humanity.

Levi alludes to the survival of humanity in even the most inhumane conditions. He and the other prisoners in Auschwitz are being driven by all forces to relinquish grasp on humane and moral tendencies. Everyone differs in the degree to which morality is surrendered, but two general groups of people clearly emerge. There are those that strive to retain all remnants of their humanity and moral code, and those that succumb to the wishes of their captors and do not follow any inkling of a moral code. Levi contrasts these two groups of people in the following passage.

"[In order to survive] One has to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia; to resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen one's wits, build up one patience, strengthen one's will power. Or else, to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways devised and put into