Primo Levi's Survival In Auschwitz

The Shoah is a hard topic to write on, because it would be insensitive to try to compare one Jewish experience to another. That’s why my goal is to try to gather the facts and answer the tough questions that are addressed in “Survival in Auschwitz”, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust?”, “Reading the Holocaust”, “The Hell of Treblinka”, and “Neighbors: The Destructions of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland”. Which asked if it truly was a Jewish experience or can this happen to anyone race? Where the Natzi the true perpetrators or were other groups of people to blame as well? By the end of this paper I hope to have answered those questions and to have grasp a better understanding on The Shoah. Primo Levi, …show more content…
He talks about what a typical workday would look like in the camp, which was that every morning they would have to wake up at the crack of dawn make there beds in a impeccable manners or they would face a beaten if their bunk wasn’t ready. By the time the hut-sweeper went to inspect things they had to have used the latrine, washed them self’s as best they could and made their beds and most often than not even after having done as instructed they were still beaten. After exiting the block they would “march to work, limping in our large wooden shoes on the icy snow.” and start there work day carrying 175 pound wooden sleepers until it was time for them to head back for there daily ratio of soup and bread. Goldhagen who he himself did not suffer during The Shoah, but had family who did wrote the book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary …show more content…
The reason why is that those chapters explains the inner workings of the camp and how words like “evil”, “good”, “just”, and “unjust” took a whole different meaning inside Auschwitz than how they are viewed on the outside. To try to grasp what these words meant to the prisoners “haftlings” inside of the camp, I think you have to either have lived or witnessed it, but Levi gives us examples that we might comprehend. Such as how even though they were prisoners inside the camp they still an exchange system, and they bartered their shirts and shoes for extra ratios of food. There was also those Jewish prisoners who Levi points out have lost a part of them self and would do and say anything to survive even if that means that they have to exploit there fellow inmates. Which he gives us an example of Henri a twenty-two year old fellow inmates who he describes as being “ inhumanly cunning”, and having a harden heart who listens to see for there weaknesses to later exploit them for his benefit. This is a perfectly example of how the lines of “evil”, “good”, “just”, and “unjust” are blurred and outside of the camps if someone did this its usually seen as evil and unjust, but inside the camp they live by different rules. This scene that Levi describes also reminded me of a scene watch in “The Grey Zone” where all the sonderkommandos gather together and eat and drink