Primo Levi Analysis

Those who adapted themselves to survive in these conditions of adversities were made prominent and they struck their fellow prisoners with double the hostility of Germanprominants.

Primo Levi takes our attention to the two particularly well differentiated categories among men imprisoned in the German Lagers – namely, the saved and the drowned. The nature of this very categorization raises the question on morality of this categorization among men, (not in the terms that it is carried out by the writer, but in the terms that such an unfortunate categorization did exist in a human society at any point of time), because such a division is much less evident in ordinary life in the light that it rarely happens that a man “loses himself”. The drowned refers to those prisoners …show more content…
Pairs of opposite other than 'saved and drowned', such as 'cowards and courageous' or 'unlucky and fortunate', are not as apt, as they are considerably less distinct and allow for intermediary gradations. It is a pure catastrophe how a categorization as morally unfortunate as such could exist in a society of ordinary men.
Considering the fact that man is a social animal and derives the ultimate meaning and purpose to his life from the sense of society to which he is a part, one moral question examination of which becomes ineluctable is the solitude experienced at various levels by the prisoners at the camps. As primo Levi mentions, “everyone is desperately and ferociously 'alone' in Lagers, and hence the struggle to survive is without respite.” If one finds himself in state of vacillation, he will find no one to extend a hand for help; on the contrary, someone will surely knock him aside, because it is in no one's interest that there be one more 'weak' and 'incapable' man surviving for long. The absurdity of the situation lies not in the fact that in the Lager man is alone and struggle for life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, but in the fact that the ferocious law which