The Muselmann was the camp word for the prisoner who had given up. The word, German for Muslim, originated among prisoners at Auschwitz and is thought to refer to the way the prisoner in the final stage of starvation, hunched, swaying, would resemble a Muslim at prayer. The Muselmann was the endpoint of the camp’s slow killing process. By the time a prisoner had become a Muselmann, they had only days or weeks to live, and their death was a formality.
The condition
A prisoner became a Muselmann through a combination of physical starvation and psychological collapse. The body had reached the point where there was nothing left to lose: the muscle had been consumed, the fat was gone, the skin hung loosely on the skeleton. The eyes were sunken and unfocused. The face had no expression. The mind no longer responded to stimuli; the prisoner did not flinch at beatings, did not orient to the voice of a friend, did not eat the food that was put in front of them. Movement was minimal and uncoordinated. The prisoner walked, when they walked at all, with a slow shuffle, the head down, the arms hanging.
The Muselmann was usually selected within days for the gas chambers. The SS doctors at the regular selections looked specifically for prisoners in this condition, since the camp’s purpose was to extract labour and a Muselmann could no longer work. The prisoner who became a Muselmann was, in the camp’s economy, dead already. The SS were merely formalising the position.
How it happened
The transition from a normal-functioning prisoner to a Muselmann was usually rapid in the final phase. A prisoner who had been holding on for months would, in the last week or two, lose the will to maintain the small daily disciplines of survival. Other prisoners watching the transition described it consistently. The prisoner stopped washing themselves, stopped eating their full ration, stopped responding when spoken to. The walk became slower. The prisoner stopped moving aside when an SS man approached. The standard rules of camp survival required constant micro-attention to the environment; the Muselmann had ceased to pay attention.
The transition was sometimes triggered by a specific event: the death of a friend, the news of a family member’s deportation, an injury or illness that broke the prisoner’s ability to keep up the work. Sometimes there was no specific trigger. The accumulated weight of the camp simply became too much for the prisoner to carry, and they put it down.
The other prisoners
The other prisoners avoided the Muselmanner. The reasons were multiple and not creditable to anyone. The Muselmann was a distressing presence: a reminder of what every prisoner could become at any moment, a visible failure of the survival discipline that everyone else was using. The Muselmann was also bad luck. Selections often took prisoners who happened to be standing near a Muselmann, because the SS doctor would point at a row of bunks and condemn everyone in it. Friendships with Muselmanner could pull a still-functioning prisoner toward the same fate. The Muselmann was also a moral failure, in the harsh logic of the camp: the prisoner had broken the unspoken contract that everyone would keep going until the SS killed them, and that any prisoner who gave up early was, in some sense, betraying the others.
This is one of the harder facts in the survivor literature. Prisoners who had been moral, decent, generous people in their pre-war lives describe in their memoirs the way they avoided their fellow prisoners who had become Muselmanner, sometimes refusing to look at them, sometimes refusing to acknowledge the relationship that had once existed between them. The avoidance was not cruelty in any normal sense. It was a survival mechanism in a place where survival mechanisms were everything.
What Levi says
Primo Levi devotes a chapter of If This Is a Man to the Muselmanner, calling them the drowned. His distinction between the drowned and the saved is one of the central conceptual frameworks of camp memoir literature. The saved were the prisoners who, by some combination of luck, position, friendship, work assignment, and personal resources, were holding on. The drowned were those who had been broken. Levi insists that he himself was a saved prisoner only by chance, and that the drowned were the truer witnesses of what the camp was. The drowned, however, were not coming back to give testimony. The saved would have to do it for them, and would do it inadequately, because they had not been at the bottom.
Agamben took up Levi’s analysis in his 1998 book Remnants of Auschwitz, treating the Muselmann as the figure through which the camp’s logic could be understood, the figure on whose existence the entire system depended and which the entire system finally produced. Agamben’s argument is contested but it has shaped the modern philosophical literature on the Holocaust.
What it means now
The Muselmann is one of the few specifically camp-derived concepts that has continued to be used. The word appears in modern psychiatric literature on the breakdown of the will to live in extreme situations, and has been applied to other contexts of long-term confinement and abuse. The use is contested; some Holocaust scholars argue that the term is so specific to the Auschwitz environment that exporting it to other contexts is a category error. Others argue that the underlying psychological process, the breakdown of the survival drive under extreme and protracted assault, is a real and recurring phenomenon and that having a word for it is useful.
What is not contested is that the Muselmanner existed, that they made up a substantial proportion of the camp population at any moment, and that almost all of them died. They are also part of the human cost of the Holocaust that gets less attention than the gas chamber dead, perhaps because the manner of their dying did not lend itself to the kind of commemoration the gas chambers attract. They died slowly, in their bunks, of hunger and despair, and most of them were never named in any record.
See also
Sources
- Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 1947
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books, 1988
- Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, Zone Books, 1998
- Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, Princeton University Press, 1997