Lager

-Word for concentration or death camp; used in Levi’s novel

-Auschwitz, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka

“Outside the men on night-shift were handling a convoy of some 3,000 men, women and children, who had been led from their train into the hall 200 yards long and prominently labeled in various languages, Baths and Disinfecting Room.’ Here they had been told to strip, supervised by the S.S. and the Sonderkommando. They were then led into a second hall, where the S.S. and Sonderkommando left them. Meanwhile, vans painted with the insignia of the Red Cross had brought up supplies of Zyklon B cystals. The 3,000 were then sealed in and gassed.”

“20 minutes later the patented mechanical ventilators were turned on to dispel the remaining fumes. Men of the Sonderkommando, wearing gas masks and rubber boots, entered the gas chamber. They found the naked bodies piled in a pyramid that revealed the last collective struggle of the dying to reach clean air near the ceiling; the weakest lay crushed at the bottom while the strongest bestrode the rest at the top. … [The corpses were washed, disentangled and] dragged to the elevators, lowered to the crematorium, the gold teeth removed with pliers and thrown into buckets filled with acid, and the women’s hair shaved from their heads. The desecrated dead were then loaded in batches of three on carts of sheet metal and fed automatically into one of fifteen ovens. ... A single crematorium consumed 45 bodies every 20 minutes; the capacity of destruction at Auschwitz was little short of 200 bodies an hour.”