Primo Levi Italian-Jew writer and chemist, who gained first fame with his autobiographical story SE QUESTO È UN UOMO (If This is a Man, 1947) of survival in Nazi concentration camps. Levi devoted the last fourty years of his life to attempts to deal with the fact that he survived Auschwitz. Levi published also poetry, science fiction, essays, and short stories. Levi was born in Turin. Just before the Fascist racial law of 1938 forbade Jews access to academic status, Levi started his chemistry studies at the University of Turin and graduated in 1941. Levi wrote also for the resistance magazine Giustizia e Libertà. When he tried to contact a partisan group he was captured in December 1943, and interned in a transit camp in Fòssoli. Two months later he was deported to the camp ofMoniwitz-Auschwitz. From the transport of 650 people, fifteen men and nine woman survived. Liberated by the Soviets in January 1945 Levi returned in Turin, after an eight-month odyssey. Levi took up his work as a chemist, living in a stately old building that his family had occupied for three generations. In 1961 Levi became the general manager of a factory producing paints. He retired in 1977 to become a full-time writer. His prison recollections Levi wrote in the form of memoir, Se questo è un uomo. It was reprinted in an enlarged edition ten years later. The book sold over half a million copies in Italy, was translated into eight languages and adapted for the theater and radio. It documented how the camp deprived each individual of his and her identity and dignity, and brought about annihilation of the internees. Levi's alert moral consciousness blocked any hate for the oppressors, in spite of the brutality to which he was subjected. LA TREGUA (1963) was its sequel, and portrayed the wanderings that Levi and his companions followed at Russian directive through a devasted eastern Europe. Among Levi's other works is IL SISTEMA PERIODICO (The Periodic Table, 1975). The work uses the Russian chemist Mendeleyev's periodical table of elements as the base of autobiographical meditations, each named for a chemical element, where among others 'Vanadium' represents his unexpected encounter with a former official Auschwitz and 'Zinc' explorers the fascist myth of racial purity. SE NON ORA, QUANDO? (1989) combined the emergence of Jewish consciousness and pride with the historical documentation of action taken on the Russian front by partisan Jewish groups against retreating Nazi forces. Levi died in Turin on April 11, 1987. His death was apparently a suicide - in his home building Levi hurled himself down the
Nyiszli says he began to hope. “ A ray of hope began to grow inside me. Perhaps we would after all succeed in leaving here alive”(Nyiszli, 201). This dream began to become reality on January 17th. With the arrival of the Russians, the SS troops fled and Dr. Nyiszli’s journey to freedom began. After surviving freezing weather and not admitting to working in Auschwitz when a German officer asked, Dr. Nyiszli was even closer to liberation. The Ebensee concentration camp, the fourth camp Dr. Nyiszli stayed at, was his last. After a year of being a prisoner, Dr. Nyiszli was a free a man. The war had ended and Dr. Nyiszli had endured a horrible
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 in the holocaust. We learn about his journey to Auschwitz, his captivity and ultimate return home. This paper explores the idea of home throughout the work. As a concept, it symbolizes the past, future and a part of Levi’s identity. I also respond to the concept of home in Survival In Auschwitz by comparing it to my own idea and what home means to me – a place of stability and reflection that remains a constant in my changing life.
...eft Gleiwitz with a hundred prisoners but made it to Buchenwald with only a dozen people, a dozen people which included Eliezer and his father.
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.
...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.
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).)
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.
Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz is a vivid and eloquent memoir of a Holocaust survivor from the largest concentration camp under German control in World War II. The original title in Italian is Se questo e un uomo, which translate to If This is A Man, alluding to the theme of humanity. The overall tone is calm and observational; rather than to pursue the reader, it is “to furnish documentation for a quiet study if certain aspects of the human mind” (Levi 10). The memoir is a testimony of Levi and the other prisoners’ survival at the Nazis’ systematic destruction attempts at the prisoners’ humanity. It was a personal struggle for prisoners, for individual survival, and struggle to maintain their humanity.
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
“Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.” This short quote is taken from Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz”. It depicts a true story of Primo Levi during the Holocaust, who was relocated to an extermination camp after beginning a great life after college. Primo was captured with a resistant group from Italy. He used his college education and degree in chemistry to stay alive.
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...
... inferior. Auschwitz is the most notorious concentration camp there was. Two things this camp had that others didn’t was the Gas Chambers and Dr. Mengele. His experiments took on a whole new meaning of cruel and the gas chambers were just another way to kill people. This paper gives me a better understanding of Night because sometimes it’s easier to understand what someone has gone through if you know the extent of the situation. Through my research of Auschwitz I found the extent of cruelty surpassed even my imagination. One thing Elie Wiesel said has stuck with me throughout all of my research on Auschwitz “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” (book's introduction xv) It made me realize that we need to remember the Holocaust and the Genocide that took place during this time because letting it happen again is just as bad as forgetting.
Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account on his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp. Setting out with his arrest by the fascist militia in December of 1943, the text conforms to Primo Levi’s experience in the succeeding twelve months as an inmate in the National Socialists’ Monowitz- Buna concentration camp, seven kilometers east of Auschwitz. Upon arriving in the camp, the first-person narrator, Primo Levi, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, embarks a world that renders him astonished; simply by making literary notes to Dante’s Inferno can he manage to draw its contours. After the degrading intake procedures, he actualizes that the objective of the place to which they have been brought is the psychological and physical devastation of the inmates. The inmat...
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.