More handpicked essays just for you.
Survival in auschwitz research papers
Introduction of a report for auschwitz
Survival in auschwitz research papers
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Survival in auschwitz research papers
The book Survival in Auschwitz, originally titled more evocatively as If This is a Man, shares the experiences of the author, Primo Levi as a prisoner in the Auschwitz Nazi war camp during World War II. Levi has chosen to tell his story in the form of memoir, which means he is telling the events at the camp in which he recalls them. These are not meant to be a picture-perfect list of events as history remembers them. If that was what he was shooting for he could have simply written a historical non-fiction account by citing sources, included various statistics, and speaking to others who experienced similar brutalities under the Third Reich. Such a book might have been perceived as more objective and comprehensive than Levi’s memoir. It would have most definitely been viewed in this way if he incorporated the thoughts and opinions of his leaders in the camp, or those sympathetic toward the Third Reich. Instead, he wrote a short, subjective account of events, infiltrated with his personal thoughts and opinions about what happened at the camp. He also portrays to the reader how being in this camp changed his life and other people’s …show more content…
Primo shares his fortune to have the companionship of his best friend Alberto and the chance relationship with Lorenzo, an Italian civilian worker who slipped Primo food and marketable items, and more importantly, gave him a glimpse of humankind’s ability to be good. The friendship of Alberto and goodness of Lorenzo reminded Levi that there was something outside the hellish reality of Auschwitz worth living for. Later, Levi was one of three prisoners chosen to be a specialist in the laboratory, a result of his interview earlier in the year. The lab was clean, sheltered from the cold, and he was given a full ration of food, satisfying the physical needs that could keep prisoners alive
One of the main topics in Primo Levi's memoir includes a section of the nights he spent in the concentration camp along with his inmates. As dreary winter nights settled in, the days grew shorter, but this offered no relief. Their food rations grew very scarce, and since it was decided upon to not drink the water, they had to rely on the liquids in foods such as soup to keep themselves functioing. True, they gained more rest from the shorter work days, but this did not alter the utter torture they suffered. Each prisoner had dreams about how they desperately wished to return to their families, highlighting the gloomy tone of the passage.
In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, to say that Auschwitz is an interesting read would be a gross understatement. Auschwitz is a historical document, a memoir but, most importantly an insider’s tale of the horrors that the captives of one of the most dreadful concentration camps in the history of mankind. Auschwitz, is about a Jewish doctors, Dr. Nyiszli, experience as an assistant for a Nazi, Dr. Mengele. Dr. Nyiszli arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp with his family unsure if he would survive the horrific camp. This memoir chronicles the Auschwitz experience, and the German retreat, ending a year later in Melk, Austria when the Germans surrendered their position there and Nyiszli obtained his freedom. The author describes in almost clinical detail and with alternating detachment and despair what transpired in the
In Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz, an autobiographical account of the author’s Holocaust experience, the concept of home takes on various forms and meanings. Levi writes about his experience as an Italian Jew during the Holocaust. We learn about his journey to Auschwitz, his captivity and his ultimate return home. This paper explores the idea of home throughout the work. As a concept, it symbolizes the past, the future and a part of Levi’s identity.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel gives an in depth view of Nazi Concentration Camps. Growing up in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel, a young Jewish boy at the innocent age of 12, whose main focus in life was studying the Kabbalah and becoming closer in his relationship with God. In the memoir, Elie Wiesel reflects back to his stay within a Nazi Concentration Camp in hopes that by sharing his experiences, he could not only educate the world on the ugliness known as the Holocaust, but also to remind people that by remembering one atrocity, the next one can potentially be avoided. The holocaust was the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jew’s by Aldolf Hitler’s Nazi army between 1933 and 1945. Overall, the memoir shows
A fifteen-year old boy, Elie Wiesel, and his family are overwhelmed by the thought of uncertainty when they are forced out of their home; as a result, the family would be forced into a cattle car and shipped to Auschwitz. At first, the Jews have a very optimistic outlook while in
The Third Reich sought the removal of the Jews from Germany and eventually from the world. This removal came in two forms, first through emigration, then through extermination. In David Engel’s The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, he rationalizes that the annihilation of the Jews by the Germans was a result of how Jews were viewed by the leaders of the Third Reich-- as pathogens that threatened to destroy all humanity. By eliminating the existence of the Jews, the Third Reich believed that it would save the entire world from mortal danger. Through documents such as Franzi Epsteins’s, “Inside Auschwitz-A Memoir,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, one is able to see the struggle of the Jews from a first-hand account. Also, through Rudolf Hoess’s “Commandant of Auschwitz,” one is able to see the perspective of a commandant in Auschwitz. In Auschwitz: A History, Sybille Steinbacher effectively describes the concentration camp of Auschwitz, while Hermann Langbein’s People in Auschwitz reflects on Rudolf Hoess’s power and control in Auschwitz as commandant. Through these four texts, one is able to see the effects that the Third Reich’s Final Solution had on the Jews and the commandants.
...lyzes man’s internal and external issues which conveys mankind’s human condition. Survival in Auschwitz conclusively depicts how mankind reacts to the deepest and most torturous oppression within our past. He proves undoubtedly that the majority of man will fall to corruption or fail completely and give up hope altogether in the struggle for survival. His rather alluring account on how to truly survive in the camp and “documentation...of certain aspects of the human mind” relay the process of their dehumanization (Survival 9). Levi ultimately deems man’s reaction to oppression and the backlash of their means.
As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.
Later on in the story we see the Nazis leave their camp and take all the healthy prisoners with them due to the Soviet Forces closing in. Primo Levi is left behind and befriends the two Frenchmen he had met at Ka-Be named Charles and Arthur. The three share a hut together due to them all having Scarlet Fever. The three eventually decide to share the food that they find with everyone else. Primo Levi survives the entire length of his time at Auschwitz but now however, Primo Levi must how to learn to feel and live like a human being again, after living in a system whose entire purpose was to destroy him and the other
In Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Levi states that, "We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence" (87). He writes this memoir in part because he no longer feels the "driving necessity and physical disabilities," having escaped Auschwitz, he must not be silent any longer. Like many Holocaust survivors, Levi appears to write his memoir in order to share his experiences with the reader and in his great details, he seems to put together his past, devoting himself to his writing and only dying naturally after he has left his completed memoir. In many Holocaust memoirs, the authors have chosen not to include lavish emotion and grief; Levi, however, does express his emotions in each situation.
In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli tells the story of his time in Auschwitz. Dr. Nyiszli is a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp located in Poland. His story provides the world with a description of horrors that had taken place in camp in 1944. Separated from his wife and daughter, Dr. Nyiszli volunteered to work under the supervision of the head doctor in the concentration camp, Josef Mengele. It was under Dr. Mengele’s supervision that Dr. Nyiszli was exposed to the extermination of innocent people and other atrocities committed by the SS. Struggling for his own survival, Dr. Nyiszli did anything possible to survive, including serving as a doctor’s assistant to a war criminal so that he could tell the world what happened at the Auschwitz concentration camp.This hope for survival and some luck allowed Dr. Nyiszli to write about his horrific time at Auschwitz.His experiences in Auschwitz will remain apart of history because of the insight he is able to provide.
Primo Levi was taken from Italy to Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz 3, in the early spring of 1944 at the age of twenty-four. Unlike Eliezer Primo Levi had a vague idea of what transportation meant for those captured by the Germans, “Only a minority of ingenuous and deluded souls continued to hope; we others had often spoken with the Polish and Croat refugees and we knew what departure meant.” (Levi, 3) A reason for why Eliezer had not known what was occurring in the war before his transportation can be attributed to his young age and of the adults wanting to keep him unaware of the tragedies taking place. The rounding up of the prisoners within the camp of where Primo Levi stayed in Italy was also done in a very organized manner, “With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll- call.” (Levi, 4) Once the night had given way for dawn the horrors of what were to come in the concentration camp had already begun in the ways of roll call and being packed upon the train cattle transportation cars. Another resemblance of the opening chapters of the two memoirs is the fact that once again no one knew any information about what occurred at the camp they were headed to. As mentioned in Primo Levi’s memoir, “Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at the time, but it at least implied some place on this earth.” (6) The events leading up to the entry of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to Auschwitz were very parallel experiences with the main difference being in their backgrounds. Once they were within those barbed wire gates their lives would never be the same after witnessing the atrocities of what was to be known of
Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account on his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp. Setting out with his arrest by the fascist militia in December of 1943, the text conforms to Primo Levi’s experience in the succeeding twelve months as an inmate in the National Socialists’ Monowitz- Buna concentration camp, seven kilometers east of Auschwitz. Upon arriving in the camp, the first-person narrator, Primo Levi, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, embarks a world that renders him astonished; simply by making literary notes to Dante’s Inferno can he manage to draw its contours. After the degrading intake procedures, he actualizes that the objective of the place to which they have been brought is the psychological and physical devastation of the inmates. The inmat...
Primo Levi’s If This is a Man recounts with scientific and horrifying accuracy, Levi’s ten-month incarceration in Auschwitz. He encounters various individuals, who’s actions enabled him to survive and grow through the ordeal, in particular Charles, a 32-year-old French political prisoner who stayed with him in the camp hospital’s, the Ka-Be, room 13. In the final chapter of the memoir, Chapter 17: The Story of Ten Days, Charles, a teacher who had entered the camp the week before, is introduced. Although his memoir is structured like a novel, Levi does not dwell on the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but rather describes, with clinical detachment, the effects that actions have on the people around him, hence his keen observation of Charles, who’s actions had far reaching effects in the Ka-Be. With freedom in sight, chapter 17 not only signifies
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish Anti-fascist who was arrested in 1943, during the Second World War. The memoir, “If this is a Man”, written immediately after Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not only provides the readers with Levi’s personal testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, but also invites the readers to consider the implications of life in the concentration camp for our understanding of human identity. In Levi’s own words, the memoir was written to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”. The lack of emotive words and the use of distant tone in Levi’s first person narration enable the readers to visualize the cold, harsh reality in Auschwitz without taking away the historical credibility. Levi’s use of poetic and literary devices such as listing, repetition, and symbolism in the removal of one’s personal identification; the use of rhetorical questions and the inclusion of foreign languages in the denial of basic human rights; the use of bestial metaphors and choice of vocabulary which directly compares the prisoner of Auschwitz to animals; and the use of extended metaphor and symbolism in the character Null Achtzehn all reveal the concept of dehumanization that was acted upon Jews and other minorities.