Primo Levi

In the autobiography” If this is a man” written by Primo Levi, it described the experience of Levi during his journey in the notorious concentration camp of Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945. This book act as a bibliography and a reminder of what we as human are capable. In the concentration camp, Levi had suffered a lot, both physical and mentally as the concentration camp exercises Levi’s body and spirit for survival. Not only did Levi faces hunger every day from the insufficient supply of water and bread but there were also mental challenges like facing death from the gas chamber, daily beating from the Kapo. The question this essay will focus on the use of people by Levi to portray the environment in concentration camp. Levi uses a lot of people …show more content…
Levi described the punishment given by Kapo as “We know well that to gain a small extraneous pain serves as a stimulant to mobilize our last reserves of energy. The Kapos also know it: Some of them beat us from pure bestiality and violence, but others beat us when we are under a load almost lovingly, accompanying the blows with exhortations, as cart drivers do with willing horse. (P73, fourth paragraph) The usage of irony, and metaphor describing Levi and prisoners being horse and Kapos are the cart driver, and some of the Kapos gave beatings because of their loving heart shows that in Auschwitz, the environment was in such abnormal that physical punishment is consider caring and loving as Levi know that if they failed the task that was set by the Germans, they will be consider the weak ones and Germans may put them into the gas chamber as they will be useless to the Nazis. In an odd and bizarre way, the Kapos were actually doing the prisoners a favour as pain can be your ally and this is a reverse of the normal environment. Also, Levi use the metaphor to describe that they were the horse and the kapo are cart drivers and it hints that in a way, the …show more content…
This forced the people to make choices and decisions for surviving whether it is to steal or seduce. The concentration is like a wild area where humanity doesn’t exist anymore, prisoners that is the strongest and most powerful can survive for longer than the others. Levi described a lot of characters that had bad behaviours but however didn’t comment on it because Levi knew that in such extreme environment, it is human nature that kicked in and used every instinct to survive whether it is gathering in a pack to form a pack of strong group, exploit people’s weakness to benefit yourself or stealing unattended gear. The concentration camp stripped the humanity inside the prisoners which makes them act like animals and think like animals. Such degrading treatment are sad even just to read in the book as when you start reading the people in the camp, you can understand the actions that they did and it was purely to survive and in Auschwitz it completely degraded and transform the prisoners into species that only cared about