Buna

Buna is the Auschwitz rubber factory in which Chaim Lerner survived the Holocaust as a prisoner forced into industrial slave labor. The site matters not merely as a wartime setting but as the material origin of Chaim’s later identity: his survival depended partly on a skill the German war machine valued, yet that same system tortured, exhausted, and humiliated him. Buna therefore becomes a grim bridge between technical expertise and organized murder, between the fact of survival and the moral questions Chaim spent the rest of his life articulating.

Industrial Setting and Forced Labor

Buna was connected to the German war effort through rubber production. Before the war, Chaim had trained as an industrial chemist in Cracow, and the Germans used that specialized background to keep him alive as an asset in the factory. His position did not make him safe. He was beaten, tortured, worked to exhaustion, and humiliated, while his father, sisters, and roughly a million other Auschwitz victims were not preserved as useful labor and were killed.

The factory’s industrial purpose also exposes the false distance between ordinary production and exterminatory violence. Chaim’s technical knowledge placed him inside an economic system that treated a human being as valuable only insofar as his labor could serve the war effort. Yet the narrative is careful not to turn Buna into a site of professional accomplishment. Chaim did not pursue chemistry there in any meaningful sense; his work consisted of hauling heavy barrels of toxic materials from one place to another, a task for which his body was poorly suited.

Chaim’s Survival and Its Conditions

Chaim later explained that Buna was one reason his degree saved his life at selection. His knowledge of German also helped him understand the guards’ orders and avoid several beatings. These advantages were real but precarious. Survival depended on the intersection of timing, bodily endurance, language, technical credentials, and chance rather than on any simple distinction between deserving and undeserving prisoners.

Chaim’s account refuses to make survival morally comfortable. He suggested that surviving the lager could require an instinct for self-preservation: knowing when to enter the right line, perhaps pushing someone else out, and rationing bread so that sharing did not destroy the person who shared it. Buna thus forms part of his later argument that survival itself could carry an ethical burden. The factory preserved him as labor, but it did not rescue him from the violence or from the questions that survival would leave behind.

Memory, Responsibility, and Postwar Transformation

Buna remains central to the story of Chaim’s encounter with Otto Schiller, the German civilian who had been his boss at the factory. After the war, Schiller abandoned chemistry and became a professor of English literature, as Chaim later did. He invited Chaim to a literary conference in London and wrote that he wanted to meet him in a pub to ask forgiveness. Schiller also described himself as a “necessarily harsh manager,” emphasized occasions when he had smuggled Chaim food, and insisted that he had avoided beating him. Chaim could confirm that Schiller had not personally subjected him to physical torture, but he had no memory of the food Schiller claimed to have provided.

The correspondence turns Buna into a dispute over the vocabulary of responsibility. Schiller’s euphemism does not erase the structure in which he served; nor does the absence of remembered beatings settle whether he participated in other forms of coercion. His denial that he knew about the gas chambers and crematoria confronts Chaim with the familiar postwar claim that civilians did not know what was happening. Buna therefore survives in the narrative not only as a place but as an unresolved ethical relation between perpetrator, beneficiary, witness, and survivor.

After liberation, Chaim abandoned chemistry and earned one of the Hebrew University’s early PhDs in modern English literature. The change from industrial chemistry to literary scholarship does not sever him from Buna. It transforms the means by which he approaches it. The factory’s machinery, euphemisms, labor discipline, and questions of complicity reappear in his memoirs, lectures, and conversations about how language can reveal or conceal responsibility.

Buna in the Book’s Wider Geography of Violence

The memory of Buna is repeatedly placed beside later sites of political violence. When Yoav discusses the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, he contrasts the word “camp” with the radically different realities that it can conceal: Auschwitz as a site of gas chambers, firing squads, and starvation; recreational camps as places of leisure; and Sabra and Shatila as ruined refugee neighborhoods where civilians were murdered. The comparison does not make the locations identical. Instead, it shows how naming a place can distribute attention, sympathy, and blame.

That contrast becomes especially painful when Yoav describes the failure of Israeli forces to intervene immediately at Sabra and Shatila. Chaim had condemned the non-Nazi world for standing by during the destruction of European Jewry; later, Israel’s own soldiers became bystanders while Phalangist forces murdered civilians. Buna supplies the historical measure against which this later failure is judged. It makes the question of intervention personal and political without reducing Chaim’s death to a single event or guilt.

The same moral geography extends to Yoav’s account of killing two Lebanese boys after mistaking them for armed fighters. A battlefield command, a shield, a halftrack, and the confusion of live fire produce a catastrophe in which the supposed targets turn out to be children. The incident echoes Buna’s destruction of human distinctions through institutional language: prisoners become labor assets, civilians become collateral categories, and children become imagined combatants. The narrative does not equate these situations, but it places them in a continuous inquiry into how systems make killing appear organized, necessary, or unspeakable.

Narrative Significance

Buna is the buried foundation beneath Chaim’s public authority as an Auschwitz survivor and moral witness. His later affairs, political arguments, opposition to the invasion of Lebanon, and violent marriage belong to his postwar life, but the factory explains why questions of survival, responsibility, and euphemism carry such force for him. Even his final reflections on writers who leave no suicide notes return to the possibility that a life’s work may itself function as a note, while sometimes there is no explanation at all.

The location’s significance lies in this unresolved tension. Buna helped save Chaim because the German war economy needed his knowledge, yet it also demonstrates how survival could be produced by the same machinery that destroyed others. It is a workplace, a prison, a site of forced usefulness, and a source of testimony. By returning to Buna through Chaim’s memories and through Schiller’s evasive letter, the narrative keeps survival from becoming a simple triumph: the factory gives Chaim life, but it also gives him an obligation to ask what that life means and whether any account can finally explain it.