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twenty-four survived. Upon arrival some 525 were chosen for the gas chambers. Within a couple of hours they were dead and loaded in elevators to the furnaces. Another hundred were worked to death in the camps. The brutal conditions are thoroughly documented. Levi himself provides one account, just under two years after the events:
     
    Before that period [February 1944] there were no medical services and the sick had no possibility of getting treatment, but were forced to labour as usual every day until they collapsed from exhaustion at their work. Naturally, such cases occurred with great frequency. Confirmation of death would then be carried out in a singular fashion; the task was entrusted to two individuals, not doctors, who were armed with ox sinews and had to beat the fallen man for several minutes on end. After they had finished, if he failed to react with some movement, he was considered to be dead, and his body was immediately taken to the crematorium. If, on the contrary, he moved, it signified that he was not dead after all, so he would be forced to resume his interrupted work. 4
     
    The cold efficiency of the Nazi killing machine is nowhere described with more dispassion than in the autobiography of the Auschwitz camp’s commandant, Rudolph Höss, written during his free time while standing trial at Nuremberg. 5 With some pride he describes how he himself came up with the idea of using Zyclon B—a pesticide for rats—to gas hundreds of people at a time and then of using specially built crematoria to dispose of the bodies. With some fondness he recalls having built the two large crematoria in 1942–43, each with “five ovens with three doors per oven, [which] could cremate about two thousand bodies in twenty-four hours.” 6 There were two smaller crematoria as well. This was a killing machine unlike anything the world had ever seen. As Höss recalls, “The highest total figure of people gassed and cremated in twenty-four hours was slightly more than nine thousand.” 7 It reads like a contest.
    As horrible as it was, the gas chamber was in some ways preferable to the other options. The right-hand man of the mad doctor Mengele, Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner with advanced medical training, who did most of the requisite autopsies (for example, on twins, as Mengele “experimented” to determine how to make Aryan women doubly productive), tells of whathappened when the gas chambers were overcrowded with victims. The “surplus” were taken out, kicking and screaming, to be shot in the back of the neck in front of a huge pyre built inside a deep ditch. They were then tossed into the flames. The fortunate ones were dead first: “Even the ace shot of the number one crematorium, Oberschaarführer Mussfeld, fired a second shot into anyone whom the first shot had not killed outright. Oberschaarführer Molle wasted no time over such trifles. Here the majority of the men were thrown alive into the flames.” 8
    On other occasions, with the children, the rush to murder meant that there was no bullet anesthesia at all. A particularly haunting image was given at the Nuremberg trials by a Polish woman named Severina Shmaglevskaya, an Auschwitz detainee who managed to survive the camp for over two years, from October 7, 1942, until its liberation in January 1945. At the trial she described the “selection” process by which some Jews were sent to the labor camp, whereas most—including all women with their children—were taken off to an immediate death. In this excerpt from her testimony, she is being questioned by the prosecuting counsel, named Smirnov:
     
    MR. COUNSELLOR SMIRNOV : Tell me, Witness, did you yourself see the children being taken to gas chambers?
    SHMAGLEVSKAYA : I worked very close to the railway which led to the crematory. Sometimes in the morning I passed near the building the Germans used as a latrine, and from there I could secretly watch the transport. I saw many children among the