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Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz
Reading the novel Survival in Auschwitz by author Primo Levi leads one to wonder whether his survival is attributed to his indefinite will to survive or a very subservient streak of luck. Throughout the novel, he is time and again spared from the fate that supposedly lies ahead of all inhabitants of the death camp at Auschwitz. Whether it was falling ill at the most convenient times or coming in contact with prisoners who had a compassionate, albeit uncommon, disposition, it would seem as though the Gods were always smiling upon him. Although throughout the novel primo is characterized as a very willing and competent individual, one can not say that his personality or his training as a chemist were the sole factors of his survival. For the purposes of this essay, it is necessary to further address the possibility that maybe Primo Levi was just a lucky guy.
The very first lines of the novel support without a doubt the fact that even Levi (Häftlinge # 174517) himself is aware of the capacity that luck plays in his life. He begins the novel with the phrase “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average lifespan of the prisoners destined for elimi- nation” (Levi 9). So, had he been captured prior to 1944, his story might not have been told. Seeing as life in Monowitz (aka Buna or the Läger) was particularly brutal upon his arrival, one can only imagine the conditions that existed before the Nazi war machine experienced its labor shortage.
When compelled to consider the conditions in which Levi was forced to live, it is clear to see that the will to survive must be complemented by another factor, as this will alone is not at all strong enough to sustain life. Not only are the authority figures brutish and sadistic, but the code among the prisoners themselves is even more cutthroat. In addition, the “cuisine” is terrible and is summed up in the following passage: “...every two or three hours we have to get up to discharge ourselves of the great dose of water which during the day we are forced to absorb in the form of soup in order to satisfy our hunger…” (Levi 61). Furthermore, the camp is arranged in a hierarchical system with each group of prisoners having corresponding...
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...urvivors, how fortunate was he to be among them! Primo Levi’s voice in this novel is so emotionless, that one is forced to jettison all biases regarding the Holocaust until completion of the novel. He does not concern himself with how the reader will look at his role in the story he tells; it is his story, thus the reader need only read and formulate their own conclusions. Because his is the story that so many will never get the chance to tell. He comes off as the quiet submissive type, yet underneath this façade is a very perceptive and clever human being. In fact, the saying “still waters run deep” just about sums up Levi’s personality. Recalling what was just written of Levi’s personality, it was premature to say that pure luck was the only guiding force in Levi’s survival; some credit must be given to the individual also. So it is of utmost importance to mention that his determination to survive and to provide an accurate, albeit, detailed account of what he had endured was also a major factor in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.
Works Cited
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault onHumanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1987.
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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.
Elizer’s personal account of the holocaust does not merely highlight the facts of the holocaust: millions suffered and the event was politically and religiously motivated, but provides an in depth investigation to what a person endured mentally, physically, and emotionally. Beginning as a teenager, Elizer thought highly of God and of his own beliefs, however, that quickly diminished when he was put into a system of sorting and killing people. During the holocaust, Elizer was not the only person to change; almost everyone suffered and changed differently. The stressful and harsh times affected Elizer just as they affected the person working next to him in the factory. Elizer quickly began to question everything “I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?” (Wiesel 32). Although Elizer forms this mentality, he also finds the will to survive, to protect his father, and to not turn into the people that were aro...
In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, both authors explore the source of human violence and aggression. Sigmund Freud’s book reacts to the state of Europe after World War I, while Primo Levi’s narrative is a first-hand account of his experiences during World War II. International and domestic tensions are high when both works are written; Sigmund Freud adopts a pessimistic tone throughout the work, while Primo Levi evolves from a despairing approach to a more optimistic view during his time at Auschwitz. To Sigmund Freud, savagery comes from the natural state of human beings, while Primo Levi infers violence is rooted in individual’s humanity being stripped away is.
When the author of Night, Elie Wiesel, arrives at Auschwitz, the Jewish people around him, the Germans, and himself have yet to lose their humanity. Throughout the Holocaust, which is an infamous genocide that imprisoned many Jewish people at concentration camps, it is clear that the horrors that took place here have internally affected all who were involved by slowly dehumanizing them. To be dehumanized means to lose the qualities of a human, and that is exactly what happened to both the Germans and the Jewish prisoners. Wiesel has lived on from this atrocious event to establish the dehumanization of all those involved through his use of animal imagery in his memoir Night to advance the theme that violence dehumanizes both the perpetrator and the victim.
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel gives an in depth view of Nazi Concentration Camps. Growing up in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel, a young Jewish boy at the innocent age of 12, whose main focus in life was studying the Kabbalah and becoming closer in his relationship with God. In the memoir, Elie Wiesel reflects back to his stay within a Nazi Concentration Camp in hopes that by sharing his experiences, he could not only educate the world on the ugliness known as the Holocaust, but also to remind people that by remembering one atrocity, the next one can potentially be avoided. The holocaust was the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jew’s by Aldolf Hitler’s Nazi army between 1933 and 1945. Overall, the memoir shows
(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).)
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
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
Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
Schwartz, Leslie. Surviving the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau: a teenage struggle toward freedom from hatred.. S.l.: Lit Verlag, 2013. Print.
Primo Levi’s tales of his labors in “Survival in Auschwitz” connected Marx’s ideas with work under extreme and unique circumstances. In the Lager, workers suffered extreme working conditions, were deskilled in labor, became one with the masses, and were dehumanized. Through Marx’s four estrangements (estrangement of man from the product of his labor, estrangement of man from the act of labor, estrangement of man from humanity, and the estrangement of man from man), it became evident the ways in which the Holocaust is a product of a heightened version of capitalist modernity.
Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) [first published as If This Is a Man], p. 86.
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish Anti-fascist who was arrested in 1943, during the Second World War. The memoir, “If this is a Man”, written immediately after Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not only provides the readers with Levi’s personal testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, but also invites the readers to consider the implications of life in the concentration camp for our understanding of human identity. In Levi’s own words, the memoir was written to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”. The lack of emotive words and the use of distant tone in Levi’s first person narration enable the readers to visualize the cold, harsh reality in Auschwitz without taking away the historical credibility. Levi’s use of poetic and literary devices such as listing, repetition, and symbolism in the removal of one’s personal identification; the use of rhetorical questions and the inclusion of foreign languages in the denial of basic human rights; the use of bestial metaphors and choice of vocabulary which directly compares the prisoner of Auschwitz to animals; and the use of extended metaphor and symbolism in the character Null Achtzehn all reveal the concept of dehumanization that was acted upon Jews and other minorities.