“This is Hell:” Dehumanization in Auschwitz
Primo Levi wrote of his horrifying experiences during the Holocaust in Survival in Auschwitz, originally titled If This is a Man. Levi was born in Turin, Italy in 1919, to a middle-class family. He was a sickly child, but exceptionally smart and became a chemist. In Fascist Italy it was difficult for Jewish-Italians to find work because of racist policies. Levi eventually found his way to the forests to fight along with the Italian resistance against the Germans. His unit was captured and, since he was identified as a Jewish person, he was sent to a Jewish camp, which was the first stage of his descent into hell. Levi’s book is not only a description of the prisoners’ unimaginable suffering, but is also a book that shows, in Levi’s words, the “demolition of a man” (Levi 26). This essay discusses the dehumanization in Auschwitz, the Nazi German concentration camp in Germany occupied Poland, which turned into hell on earth.
For Levi and the other Italian Jews interned in that camp in Italy, dehumanization started the moment the Nazi Germans took over their camp. The Nazi Germans dehumanized Jewish people they enslaved by denying them any ability to control their lives and, in so doing, took away their present and their future as human beings. This was accomplished by refusing to give them any information about where they were going or what they would be doing. Levi learned on the morning of February 21, 1944 that he would be deported the next day, but was not told where. All he was told was to prepare for two weeks (14). Once in the camps, he knew that prisoners were being killed, but most prisoners never knew when they would be selecja, the Polish word for selected, for death. In the wint...
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...by striking them, and whipping them like dogs (109). Once Allied bombing of Levi’s factory started, he and others were forced to go to work anyway, among the “dust and smoking ruins.” They were trembling with fear, exhausted and thirsty, working in the heat of the late summer of 1944 (117).
Levi and the other prisoners at Auschwitz were denied their humanity, even in death. As Levi writes, for a person condemned to death, “he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by no means of punishment, pardon” (15). In the camp in Italy, Levi and the others learned that in life or in death, they were no longer humans to the Nazi Germans. On the first morning roll call, the day of deportation, one person was killed for every person missing. As Primo Levi’s book shows, Auschwitz prisoners ceased to be human, in life and in death.
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.
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 Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz, an autobiographical account of the author’s Holocaust experience, the concept of home takes on various forms and meanings. Levi writes about his experience as an Italian Jew during the Holocaust. We learn about his journey to Auschwitz, his captivity and his ultimate return home. This paper explores the idea of home throughout the work. As a concept, it symbolizes the past, the future and a part of Levi’s identity.
In his memoir “Night”, Elie Wiesel recalls his experience leading up to, in the middle of, and immediately following his forced servitude during the Holocaust. One of the most remarkable parts of Wiesel’s story is the dehumanization that occurs over the course of his imprisonment. In a system built to take away the identity of its subjects, Elie constantly grapples with his sense of self during the Holocaust and even finds himself lost by the end of the book. This loss of innocence and selfhood is a key element of Elie’s physical, emotional, and spiritual journey throughout the story.
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.
Concentration camps, such as the one in which Levi lived, were tools of national socialist ideology. It further empowered the Nazi?s to treat the Jews as subhuman (an ?inferior race?). Within in a short time after arriving at the camp, men were stripped of everything they had known throughout life. Families were immediately separated after the transport trains were unloaded, dividing the ?healthy? from the ?ill?. Levi learns that he is now called a ?Haftling? and is given a number (174517), which is tattooed on his forearm, replacing his actual name. ?The whole process of introduction to what was f...
Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.
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
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
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.
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.
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.