If This Is a Man

“Selection” refers to the process of choosing prisoners who will be killed by the SS. Those who are selected are usually gassed. The majority of prisoners sent to Auschwitz were selected upon arrival and immediately killed. About 20% were deemed good candidates for slave labor, and they were sent to the work camps.

Selections were not limited to the initial arrival at Auschwitz, and the prisoners anticipate selection in the fall of 1944 in Buna. The selections require the prisoners to strip, both as a means of humiliation and also as a means of assessing their bodies’ capacity for labor. They prepare for the selection by assuring one another that they are all physically sound enough to avoid selection. Levi believes that he was not selected while he was in Buna because a mistake was made. This potential mistake makes the selection process all the more terrifying, if this is possible, because there is no way, even following the “logic” of the SS, to understand it. Sometimes there are so many prisoners arriving in Auschwitz on transport trains that the SS do not bother to select who is most exploitable, and whole compartments of people, sight unseen, are sent to the gas chambers.