Analysis Of Primo Levi 's ' The Gray Zone '

The concentration camps of the Holocaust were home to countless injustices to humanity. Not only were the prisoners starved to the brink of death, but they were also treated as animals, disciplined through beatings nearly every day. Most would not expect an ill-prepared young boy to survive such conditions. Nevertheless, in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Wiesel defies the odds and survives to tell the story. Wiesel considers this survival merely luck, yet luck was not the only factor to come into play: his father had an even greater impact. Prior to their arrival at Auschwitz, Wiesel lacked a close relationship with his rather detached father; however, when faced by grueling concentration camp life, the bond between Wiesel and his father ultimately enables Wiesel’s survival.

The memoir,”Night”, shows the perspective of Elie Wiesel, a young boy that was sent to a concentration camp alongside hundreds of other Jews, that lost their valuables , faith and family.The terror within the concentration camp slowly deteriorate the Jews ,physically and mentally.The jews had a choice to be selfish or selfless,given the jews’ situation it is best to do what was in their best interest. Throughout Elie Wiesel’s memoir, “Night”; many individuals had a hard time navigating the brutality within the concentration camps.Through these times of brutality, many people in the camp had to choose to either be selfish or altruistic. Given the jew’s situation, it is better to act selfish than to be altruistic.

Primo Levi was one of these survivors. In Survival in Auschwitz, Levi struggles to articulate the atrocities that occurred in Auschwitz while simultaneously admitting the impossibility of such an undertaking. As he confesses in his book, “…our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.” A scientist by trade, Levi speaks of his time in Auschwitz in bare, almost clinical terms. Two popular critiques have arisen from this approach: the first, that Levi does not explore his emotions, and the second, that he does not court readers. I’d argue, however, that it is this very boundary built between author and reader that makes Levi’s testimony so effective.

The Holocaust, yet another unpleasant time in history tainted with the blood and suffering of man. Human beings tortured, executed and starved for hatred and radical ideas. Yet with many tragedies there are survivors, those who refused to die on another man’s command. These victims showed enormous willpower, they overcame human degradation and tragedies that not only pushed their beliefs in god, but their trust in fellow people. It was people like Elie Wiesel author of “Night”, Eva Galler,Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser, and Solomon Radasky that survived, whose’ mental and physical capabilities were pushed to limits that are difficult to conceive. Each individual experiences were different, but their survival tales not so far-reaching to where the fundamental themes of fear, family, religion and self-preservation played a part in surviving. Although some of these themes weren’t always so useful for survival.

Everyone who has taken a history course that goes through the 20th century knows about the atrocities performed in Nazi Germany; 11 million people exterminated and countless others put into concentration camps with unimaginable conditions. But most people do not try to explain how the German soldiers could do these things to other human beings. Primo Levi in his book Survival in Auschwitz attempts to answer this question. He begins by explaining the physical and psychological transformation of the prisoners and how that enabled the Germans to see the prisoners as inhuman and therefore oppress-able. Levi believes that the Germans treated the Jewish prisoners horrendously because of the prisoner’s

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Night by Elie Wiesel are two tragic stories about the experience of these Holocaust survivors during the horrors of the second world war. In the 1940’s it was a very difficult time for Jews who were victimized by the German Nazis and sent to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where conditions were worse than imaginable. Elie first entered a concentration camp when he was 12, along with his father, mother, and three sisters. Levi, an Italian jew, was 24 when he was sent to the camps for participating in a resistance group, but unlike Wiesel, did not have his family by his side. Levi, despite his bitter character, acquires hope from the humanity and compassion of others while Wiesel, even with his strong relationship with his father, can't maintain his desire to hope for survival or alliances.

‘Survival in Auschwitz’, is a book based on the personal experience of the author, Primo Levi, in the death camp at Auschwitz where he was taken prisoner after the arrest. The Nazis took Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and chemist, to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland in 1944, where he and other prisoners endured months of cruel and inhuman treatment, stripped of fundamental rights and forced to work under adverse conditions until death. As the Holocaust survivor, the purpose of writing the book arose from the need to let the world know what was happening at the death camp and level of inhumanity that man can subject his fellow human being to thereby ensuring the memories and stories of the Holocaust will be recognized and live on and are not forgotten.

The Reawakening, by Primo Levi, is a sequel to his first novel, Survival in Auschwitz. It is a deeply powerful memoir of his liberation from the most brutal concentration camps of them all, Auschwitz. Published in 1946, the story of Primo Levi’s pursuit for freedom has inspired many people around the world. Levi’s quest back home to Italy was a grueling mission, from ruthless acts of the Nazi regime, the traumatic effects of imprisonment in Auschwitz and the near death experience of hunger and illness. The Holocaust brought a cloud of darkness filled with pain and despair. Very few victims of the Holocaust survived and those who did found it extremely hard to cope with the traumatic memories that the Holocaust instilled in them. Those who

Between Dignity and Despair, a book written by Marion A. Kaplan, published in 1998, gives us a portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany by the astounding memoirs, diaries, interviews with survivors, and letters of Jewish women and men. The book is written in chronological order of events, from the daily life of German Jewish families prior to when the Holocaust began to the days when rights were completely taken away; from the beginning of forced labor and exile to the repercussion of the war. Kaplan tries to include details from each significant event during the time of the Holocaust. Kaplan

My goal with my research is to look into the resistance of both the Jewish people and the others in European society who assisted in Jewish escapes. The perceived image of the Jews during the Holocaust is of “lambs to the slaughter.” The pictured painted of the rest of European society is one of either knowing accomplices or silent spectators. The Jewish people had many forms of resistance, some small and some large. While many of their neighbors were silent spectators, but many people were actively resisting the tyrannical Nazi government by assisting Jewish escapes. Each of these individuals risked their lives and the lives of their families and friends to aid these hunted individuals. They all deserve to have their stories heard and honored. In a time of complete chaos and destruction many people would not have the ability or fortitude to save the life of another person. The people that I will discuss in this paper were not only able to take that step, but put themselves and their families in real and eminent danger for the life, at times, of a complete stranger.

The inmates eat soup while in the camp. When the time comes for them to get their bowls filled, Levi professes they “have an animal hurry” to consume their food (Survival 69). This metaphor suggests the men’s animalistic behavior due to their severe thirst and hunger. The concept of dehumanization carried out by the Schutzstaffel primarily targets the prisoners‘ “identity” and “community” (“Dehumanization”). Each man’s struggle to survive in Auschwitz depends on their principal focus of themselves. They can “no longer elicit compassion or other moral responses”, every man endures on his own, and they cannot think of others. Ironically, waiting around to pass time satisfies the inmates; “ [they] are always happy to wait” (Survival 104). Levi rationalizes their content when Alex tells them to wait and says they have “the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs” (Survival 104). He compares his Kommando to spiders, as they sit lifelessly, trapped in an abandoned labyrinth. The action of waiting brings the men solace, for once, as “time moves smoothly” and they have no duties to complete (Survival 104).

Primo Levi was a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor from the concentration Auschwitz. Primo Levi talks about in his book called “Survival in Auschwitz” about what it means to survive. There are many quotes that stand out in his book and have strong importance to them.

World War II was a war that took many lives from civilians that deserved to have a life of their own. They were ordinary people who were victims from a horrible and lengthy war that brought out the worst in some people. In Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Levi gives a detailed account of his life in a concentration camp. Primo Levi was a young Italian chemist who was only twenty-four years old when he was captured by the Nazis in 1943. He spent two long and torturous years at Auschwitz before the Russian army freed the remaining prisoners of the camp. He tells about life inside the camp and how tough it was to be held like an animal for so long. He says they were treated as

Survival in Auschwitz tells of the horrifying and inhuman conditions of life in the Auschwitz death camp as personally witnessed and experienced by the author, Primo Levi. Levi is an Italian Jew and chemist, who at the age of twenty-five, was arrested with an Italian resistance group and sent to the Nazi Auschwitz death camp in Poland in the end of 1943. For ten terrible months, Levi endured the cruel and inhuman death camp where men slaved away until it was time for them to die. Levi thoroughly presents the hopeless existence of the prisoners in Auschwitz, whose most basic human rights were stripped away, when in Chapter 2 he states, "Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits,