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Survival in auschwitz research papers
Auschwitz case study essay
Survival in auschwitz research papers
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From the first sentence of the Preface to Survival in Auschwitz, we learn that Primo Levi attributes his survival in the concentration camp to luck, or his “good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944” (9). It was because of luck that Levi had a chemistry background, qualifying him to spend portions of the day during the most brutal months of his last winter in Auschwitz in the chemistry laboratory, and because of luck that he formed and sustained relationships with Alberto and Lorenzo. Levi perhaps considered himself lucky most for having withstood “selection”—the method the camp guards used to choose prisoners to die instantly in the gas chambers. Levi writes, “[t]he fact that I was not selected depended above all on chance” (125). Levi understands that selection is an arbitrary process. As Levi comments, “the important thing for the Lager is not that the most useless prisoners be eliminated, but that free posts be quickly created” (129). Selection is so frivolous that Levi and Alberto determine that when René is selected to be sent to the gas chambers and Levi is not, that it was “probable” (128) that this was due to a “mistake with [their] cards” (128). Because selection is a mostly indiscriminate process, Levi understands that prisoners have little bearing on their own survival. The Nazis were determined to kill a certain number of prisoners, and it made little difference to the Nazis which prisoners were sent to die. It is moments after the selection of October 1944 that the passage takes place. In this passage we witness the responses of several prisoners to selection, as narrated by Levi. Levi's perception of the situation is shaped by his understanding that survival in the Lager is due to fluke. Bepp... ... middle of paper ... ...lection. This choice is not something that Kuhn should be thankful for. This passage ends with Levi bitterly remarking, “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer” (130). It is through this line that we realize Levi is not condemning Kuhn. Levi does in fact realize Kuhn is an old man, whose body and spirit had been crushed by the Nazis, just as Levi's, and the other prisoners' bodies and spirits, and Kuhn is merely attempting to comfort himself. Besides the fact that the Germans legally considered Kuhn a Jew, we know nothing of Kuhn's religious beliefs and practices, and so his “prayer” could have been a mere secular utterance the way a present day American college student “thanks God” for a snow day. Yet it is Kuhn's “prayer,” and the sentiment it contains, that Levi finds troubling, both for the deceased prisoners, and those prisoners still temporarily living.
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...
The arguments of Christopher Browning and Daniel John Goldhagen contrast greatly based on the underlining meaning of the Holocaust to ordinary Germans. Why did ordinary citizens participate in the process of mass murder? Christopher Browning examines the history of a battalion of the Order Police who participated in mass shootings and deportations. He debunks the idea that these ordinary men were simply coerced to kill but stops short of Goldhagen's simplistic thesis. Browning uncovers the fact that Major Trapp offered at one time to excuse anyone from the task of killing who was "not up to it." Despite this offer, most of the men chose to kill anyway. Browning's traces how these murderers gradually became less "squeamish" about the killing process and delves into explanations of how and why people could behave in such a manner.
An example of the harshness is the selections, where he saw people who slept beside him the night before, get sentenced to death. He makes it clear that just because you passed an examination, doesn’t mean you’re safe. You might have been lucky this time but there will be a next time and they can just as easily give you death. He is basically saying that if you want to survive, then you had to prove yourself strong and healthy, but basically it was all on luck. This teaches us how cruel the Nazis were to the people in the concentration camps. Every selection would be dreadful and you had no way of knowing wheth...
The second prisoner was a young boy who was being hanged for the fact that he stole weapons during a power failure. The significance of this particular hanging was the young boy’s lack of rebellion, his quiet fear and the unbearable duration of his torment. The boy had lost all hope and was one of the only victims who wept at the knowledge of their demise. What made this case different from the rest was not only his youth, but also his silence, and emotion and the fact that it took a half an hour for him to die, as a result of the lightness of his young body. Even though he was constantly tortured and provoked by the guards before he was hanged, he still said nothing, unlike the two people who joined him, who both shouted in defiance. His quiet courage really stood out as an unspoken and unannounced rebellion not only for the Jews, but it showed the doubts that some of the guards began to have. “This time, the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner.” Although this quote is one sentence it still shows the effect the boy had on everyone in the camp. Even though the prisoners had been living with the constant presence of death, the execution of this young boy made them feel emotion they believed they had lost forever. This death was an unsaid act of rebellion in the sense that it showed the audience that there was indeed still some sensitivity left no matter how much both the prisoners and the guards were dehumanized: the prisoners as merely a number, and the guards as ruthless
Primo Levi recollects his intense experiences after being sent to a German death camp (Auschwitz) in his book Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazis had been collecting Jews and others to lock inside concentration camps; there the Nazis used extreme tactics in keeping the prisoners under control in an inhuman state. For example, the prisoners would dig holes at random times during the day then have to fill them up later, they were stripped from there names and given a six-digit number for which they were referred to, and they were fed just enough to work, but not enough to resist the guards. Levi and many others were able to, in some degree; hold on to there humanity during this outrageous time.
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...
Epstein shows the process that the majority of Jews were being put through, such as the medical examinations, medical experimentations, gas chambers and crematoriums. Medical examinations were used to determine if the Jews were healthy enough to work. Dr. Mengele used the Jews as “lab rats” and performed many experiments such as a myriad of drug testing and different surgeries. The gas chamber was a room where Jews were poisoned to death with a preparation of prussic acid, called Cyclo...
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Classic House, 2008. Print.
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
This year there's been a lot of brutalities. In fact, there have been at least 500 people killed by the police officers this year. In this article, we are going to be talking about police brutality against African Americans. We are also going to talk about the differences and similarities of different cases that have been in the news this year. For example, the Sandra bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and the Walter Scott cases. Also, we're going to talk about how these cases have affected the African American community.
August 2014, Police killed Michael Brown an unarmed black teenager. This set off protests and brought more attention to police killing unarmed black men in Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities. In most of these incidents, the office never gets charged with a crime. Which increases the thought that police are not held accountable for their actions. This has all started a movement called Black Lives Matter (Police Brutality).
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.
The quote, “how can one hit a man without anger,” (Levi et al. 1947). really shows the hatred of the Jewish People by the German people. Levi says this quote in the first chapter of the book, setting the stage for the violence and hatred he and the Jewish People were about to face. This hatred was just normal life for the SS Solders. After realizing the hatred, they faced, many of the Jewish People questioned how they could survive this. You see many methods of survival throughout the book. One of the ways that people survived this was showing humanity towards each other. There a few examples of this in the book. Some of them include; Steinlauf giving Levi advice in the washroom, Levi talking about the “drowned” and the “saved”, and Levi’s friendship with Alberto.
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.