The Drowned And The Saved By Primo Levi Analysis

This book was effective and achieved the purpose of describing the Holocaust in a personal and relative manner. I do not think anyone who reads this book does not finish it with a better understanding of what the victims of concentration camps experienced. This book

Between memoirs and history textbooks, two very different approaches to historical matters are dealt with: one appeals to emotion, while the other to reason and logic. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, he discusses his life during the Holocaust and what life in a prison camp was like on an emotional level. The treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Nazi guards is more appalling through the emotional description of a survivor like Elie Wiesel than through the contextual and fact based evidence found in a textbook. One such example of this is when Wiesel describes how when the Jews were herded onto the cattle carriages to move them from Geiwitz to Buchenwald, and how the Nazi’s distribution of rations led to the Jews eating snow off one another’s backs:

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.

Obviously nothing justifies the heinous treatment of Jews in concentration camps, but Levi gives us reasons why he believed the SS were able to treat Jews in this way. He believed that the prisoner’s appearance after a few days, “dirty and repugnant,” could have been a source of the terrible treatment; it is much easier to oppress those who look almost inhuman. Levi also believed the treatment was just another way to prove racial superiority. The ability to completely suppress and

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.

As the world around the authors begins to collapse, they are faced with evil and the uncertainty of whether to face the events with optimism or pessimism. Levi begins his experience on a more negative note as he describes what it's like to be on the bottom. “I have learnt that I am haftling. My number is 174517,” (page 27). Levi has lost hope in his own identity. He isn't optimistic or pessimistic, he is indifferent because he feels he is no longer a man, but a property of the Nazis. Levi also demonstrates negativity during his stay at Ka-Be. As he sits and watches the Jews do their usual morning ritual and march he describes how the Germans

The survivors were so used to living and sleeping with corpses that they too felt that their own soul was no longer with them. It was very difficult for Jews to recuperate from the racial purification attempts of the Holocaust, but those who showed hope and perseverance through theses grueling times were able to regain their life and self worth. Throughout Levi’s reawakening, he met very extraordinary people, many of whom are survivors of the Holocaust just like him. These people can be seen as a symbol in Levi’s reawakening helping him establish new life after liberation. Jews are deeply hated amongst the European nation and Levi encounters three authority figures they guide him with rules that he must abide in order to escape detestation. During a walk along the churches of Cracow, Levi came across the first authority figure, a priest. They carried the most “extravagant and chaotic conversation in Latin.” (Levi, 50) At the end of their encounter the priest advises Levi not to speak German in public. The second authority figure that Levi encountered was a lawyer traveling through Treblinka. He was a Polish man but he could speak German as well. Like the priest, he also advised Levi not to speak German in public. A police officer, the third figure of authority in Levi’s reawakening, showed compassion towards Levi and offered him “a night in warmth, in jail.”

As humans mature, the perception of a perfect world begins to reveal the horrors in life. This causes human’s innocence to slowly diminish. In a memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel demonstrates how his innocence fades away as a teenager in a concentration camp. Wiesel experiences many horrendous scenes in the concentration camp. He has spent most of his teenage years there which traumatizes him for the rest of his life. He gradually starts to lose everything he has loved, which results in surviving alone. Wiesel’s loss of innocence causes his life to become more difficult by witnessing his father slapped, the disbelief in God, and observing children being incinerated alive.

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.

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

In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great

The first quote that stands out in Primo Levi’s book is in chapter one, “The Journey”. In this chapter, Primo Levi is describing his arrival. An important quote from this chapter is when Primo Levi says “They walked in squads, in rows of three, with an odd, embarrassed step, head dangling in front, arms rigid. On their heads they wore comic berets and were all dressed in long striped overcoats, which even by night and from a distance looked filthy and in rags. They walked in a large circle around us, never drawing near, and in silence began to busy themselves with our luggage and to climb in and out of the empty wagons” (Levi 20). Primo Levi is describing his arrival at Auschwitz. The importance of this quote is of the picture Primo Levi puts in the reader’s mind. Primo Levi does a great job describing in emotional detail of what his arrival was like. In the next paragraph, Primo Levi says “We looked at each other without a word. It was all incomprehensible and mad. But one thing we had understood. This was the metamorphosis that awaited us. Tomorrow we would be like them” (Levi 21). This quote stands out because it shows the realization Primo Levi had while watching the poor, lifeless Auschwitz prisoners work. By watching the prisoners, Primo Levi had fully acknowledged that this is the life that awaits him the next day. This is important for Primo Levi because by understanding what the future holds for him in Auschwitz, he can better prepare himself for survival in Auschwitz.

The prisoners in Auschwitz were treated very poorly and the world came crashing down on them even before they were brought there. When Levi was informed that he was going to be going to Auschwitz from Turin, Italy he did not know what to expect but he did not expect this. He said, "dancing before my eyes I see the spaghetti which we had just cooked, Vanda, Luciana, and I, at the sorting-camp when we suddenly heard the news that we would leave for here the following day; and were eating it and we stopped" (74). He was not aware that he would not be able to eat like this ever in the camp and was almost convinced that he would never eat like that again period. He thought about this in one of the rare moments that he had a chance to think about his past life that was very depressing for anyone to think about. They all thought they would be stuck there forever which it seemed liked already.

"Man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly." (Levi 1.3). In one short sentence, Levi sums up the situation: its human nature to use any means necessary to survive. And that 's exactly what happens in the camp. There are many in the camps who are not able to cope with its horrible circumstances. Unfortunately, those who are unable to cope result in animalistic behavior. When being exposed to inhumane conditions, one begins to act inhumane. Null is an example of one who regresses into an unconscious state of being. Levi presents Null as an example of one who has resulted in doing anything and everything to survive. Levi recounts, “when he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty

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,