auscwitz and primo levi

Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, was captured on December 13, 1943 by the Facist Militia during World War II. He was taken by train from Italy to Auschwitz, one of the worst concentration camps in all of Europe. While he was imprisoned, he was put through many terrible ordeals and faced death a number of times. Through his intense struggles, he depicted each moment with procission so that he could eventually combine them into a memoir. By using a rather mournful tone, he created his memoir in order to inform his audience of his heart-wrenching story and encourages them to participate in the lives of the facist prisoners before their liberation.

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.

An example of his gloomy tone is when he begins to put emphasis on how bad their nightmares began to be. Levi states that:

“So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantulus and the dream of the story are woven into a texture of more indistinct images: the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear and promiscuity, turns at nighttime into shapeless nightmare of unheard of violence, which in free life would only occur during a fever...

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...ts his readers to experience how dreadful life came to be, and all hopes of a normal life were long gone.

All of Levi's experiences while he was in Auschwitz describe the dire need for human society to thrive off of each other like parasites within communities. The metaphor of the Nazis being parasitic pests to society and the Jews being their hosts capture this statement rather well. His details that he leaves us in his memoir carry on the stories and experiences of not only himself, but of all of the inocent men, women, and children who lost their lives during this horrific time in history. Levi also imposes that his experiences, as well as the experiences of others, will instill in his audience's minds through his usage of discreat language and graphic context which helped in creating accurate dipictions of his trials towards readers.

Works Cited

primo levi