Primo Levi was twenty-four years old in the winter of 1943 when the Fascist Militia arrested him. With “little wisdom and no experience,” he, along with six hundred and fifty others, was taken from his home, stuffed in one of twelve wagons, and hauled off to the unknown. They soon came to find out that this unknown destination was Auschwitz, but all other questions were left unanswered. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months but Levi lived in the concentration camp at Auschwitz for ten months before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. He was one of twenty people who left the camps alive. Almost immediately after returning to Italy, Levi began writing his story, Se questo è un uomo, which has been translated as If …show more content…
If “the Lager was a great machine to reduce [them] to beasts,” how can one retain his humanity? Although they were “slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death” they still had one power, to refuse their consent, they can refuse to become beasts like the Lager intended to make them. They can wash their face without soap and with dirty water, they can polish the shoes that are torn and almost nonexistent, and they can try to take care of themselves to keep whatever dignity they have left alive. Dying, as a man, in the Lager was a difficult task since the Nazi’s plan was to “annihilate [them] first as men in order to kill [them] more slowly afterwards.” Living in the horrible conditions and being brutally beat hurts not only the physical body, but the mind as well. As Levi suggests in the text, in order to retain one’s mental stability, one must focus on small distractions. By training their minds to focus on things such as the freezing cold throughout the winter, or making it through the first half of the workday, they were able to distract themselves from their hunger and thirst, slightly giving relief to their pain. “When one works, one suffers and there is no time to think,” there is no time to question anything, there is no time to …show more content…
The third factor that deterred Levi from giving into the dehumanization system of the Lager was the small reminders of his humanity. The first happened when he was ill and residing in the Ka-Be. Since he wasn’t working, he had time to rest and eat, without working interruptions or physical discomfort. Whoever “still has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscious re-awaken,” are reminded of what has been taken from them, and learns that their personality and humanity is fragile. The second profound instance is when Levi speaks of his caretaker, Lorenzo. Levi was at his breaking point, in a world, “shaken everyday more deeply by the omens of its nearing end, amidst new terrors and hopes, with intervals of exasperated slavery” when he happened to meet Lorenzo. Lorenzo was a Italian civilian worker who brought Levi a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration everyday for six months, gave him a vest of his, wrote a postcard on Levi’s behalf to Italy, and brought hum the reply. This seems like something so little, but in the state and condition Levi was in, Lorenzo was a godsend. Usually in the camp, in order to receive anything extra, one must give up something of theirs as a trade. However, Lorenzo gave without expecting anything in return. Levi credits Lorenzo for his
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, to say that Auschwitz is an interesting read would be a gross understatement. Auschwitz is a historical document, a memoir but, most importantly an insider’s tale of the horrors that the captives of one of the most dreadful concentration camps in the history of mankind. Auschwitz, is about a Jewish doctors, Dr. Nyiszli, experience as an assistant for a Nazi, Dr. Mengele. Dr. Nyiszli arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp with his family unsure if he would survive the horrific camp. This memoir chronicles the Auschwitz experience, and the German retreat, ending a year later in Melk, Austria when the Germans surrendered their position there and Nyiszli obtained his freedom. The author describes in almost clinical detail and with alternating detachment and despair what transpired in the
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
In Levis description of his journey to Auschwitz, home gradually becomes a symbol of the past. As a young Jewish chemist, participating in the anti fascist movement, Levi was arrested in Italy and eventually taken to the concentration camp, Auschwitz. As he is about to board the train to the camp, Levi claims “the happy memories of our homes, still so near in time and space [were] as painful as thrusts a sword” (Levi 10). At this point in L...
In the memoir Night by elie Wiesel, humans can’t maintain a moral mentality when under great suffering as portrayed through Elie and fellow inmates. Because of all the distress and mentally and physically straining things the inmates had to go through, they became brutal savages. People started to not care about what they did, they just cared about how they were
A prisoner in Auschwitz and a friend to Levi, Steinlauf, was a 40-year-old ex-Sargent of the Austro-Hungarian Army. Nonetheless he also was dealing with hunger, exhaustion, polluted water shortages, and trying to keep his humanity intact. He greets Levi in the washroom and notices that Levi explains he had began to see washing as a waste of energy and warmth because, “after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference between him and me will have disappeared.”(Levi, 40) Instead of washing he decides “to let myself live, to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.”(Levi, 40) Steinlauf stops Levi explaining to him how important it is
(It should be noted that when describing hardships of the concentration camps, understatements will inevitably be made. Levi puts it well when he says, ?We say ?hunger?, we say ?tiredness?, ?fear?, ?pain?, we say ?winter? and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day?? (Levi, 123).)
Primo Levi’s narrative of the Holocaust explains the true struggle and chance for survival for the Jews in camps, specifically Auschwitz. Separately, Levi describes the true chance people had for survival in that they could have been selected to or in some cases boarded alone either the train car going to work or the train car going straight to the gas chambers. This is similar to the bombing of Hiroshima where some people could have been in the city, such as Saeki visiting her mother in which she could have died, or Kuribayashi being lucky enough in the distance away from the city. As Levi worked in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, he describes the struggle and dehumanization Jews had to go through to survive including tattooed numbers on their arms which labelled them, prisoners stealing soup or shoes to keep going. The major difference between the Hiroshima bombing and the Holocaust was the torture before an end versus an end before a torture. The Holocaust was either a two-minute torture in a gas
On their way to the concentration camp, a German officer said, “’There are eighty of you in the car… If anyone is missing, you’ll all be shot like “dogs” ”’ (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans compared the Jews to dogs or animals, and that the German have no respect towards the Jews. Arrived at the concentration camp, the Jews were separated from their friends and family. The first thing of the wagon, a SS officer said, “’Men to the left! Women to the right!”’ (Wiesel 29). After the separation, Eliezer saw the crematories. There he saw “’a truck [that] drew close and unloaded its hold: small children, babies … thrown into the flames.” (Wiesel 32). This dehumanize the Jews, because they were able to smell and see other Jews burn in the flames. Later on the Jew were forced to leave their cloth behind and have been promise that they will received other cloth after a shower. However, they were force to work for the new cloth; they were forced to run naked, at midnight, in the cold. Being force to work for the cloth, by running in the cold of midnight is dehumanizing. At the camp, the Jews were not treated like human. They were force to do thing that was unhuman and that dehumanized
In his book Night Mr. Elie Wiesel shares his experiences about the camps and how cruel all of the Jews were treated in that period. In fact, he describes how he was beaten and neglected by the SS officers in countless occasions. There are very few instances where decent humans are tossed into certain conditions where they are treated unfairly, and cruel. Mr. Wiesel was a victim of the situation many times while he was in the camps. Yet he did not act out, becoming a brute himself, while others were constantly being transformed into brutes themselves. Mr. Wiesel was beaten so dreadfully horrible, however, for his safety, he decided to not do anything about it. There were many more positions where Mr. Wiesel was abused, malnourished, and easily could have abandoned his father but did not.
In 1844, Karl Marx published the piece “Estranged Labor,” which touched upon four forms of estrangement and alienation of the Capitalist worker including estrangement of man from man, estrangement of man from his humanity, estrangement of man from the product of his labor, and estrangement of man from the act of labor itself. Just under a century later, the “normality and uniqueness of the Holocaust,” as described by Zygmunt Bauman, modeled Marx’s four estrangements. Found in his novel “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi’s Holocaust experiences served as an example of these four estrangements, representing the Lager as a heightened version of capitalist modernity.
Leon Leyson had to work hard to survive. He made himself useful and therefore they kept him in the factory. When he would work he would get food and that helped him survive. He had hope that he would survive struggling for a way out. For many years he struggled in the camp until finally. Schindler let them all free.
If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform. Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account of his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp.
Dehumanization often begins with the removal of personal identification. An important language technique that Levi utilizes to mark this stage of dehumanization is listing. The use of listing can be seen in the quote, “nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair”. The use of listing effectively highlights the involuntary elimination of the physical possessions that help one define oneself or express self-identity t...