Survival In Auschwitz Book Report

In Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, the book is actually a memoir of Primo’s accounts and experiences while he was imprisoned in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Levi was an Italian Jew who was only twenty-four years old when he was first captured by the Fascist Militia of Italy on December 13, 1943. He did not go directly to Auschwitz at first, but was eventually transported to Auschwitz by train a month later once the SS shows up and announced that all the Jews will be leaving the camp. While he is there, him and the other prisoners were directed into a shower room, was forced to strip naked, and had to wait long hours to see what the SS were planning to do with him and the other prisoners. The showers suddenly turns on and the prisoners were escorted out of the shower room once they were completely drenched. Afterwards they were given worn out clothes and shoes that did not belong to them, but rather what the camp had provided for them. Primo does learn he is a prisoner and was

tattooed with his prisoner number on his arm, which allows him to get bread and soup when he presents his number. Primo was subjected to many hardships and unfair treatment, such as constantly facing starvation, frequent sores on his feet from the long and harsh hours of working at the camp, and also suffering from the wet and cold.
According to Primo’s memoir, life in Auschwitz was solely on survival, their humanity was forcefully stripped away from them and many of the prisoners of the camp makes some attempt of keeping what little humanity they could hold onto as possible. Primo’s new friend Steinlauf teaches him an important lesson in this, which was the importance of fighting against a prison that is dedicated in creating the prisoners into beasts and preserving as much of their humanity as they possibly could. The prisoners at the camp also created a trading and bargaining system where they used the rationed bread as the form of currency to trade and bargain with others.
The work the prisoners were forced to do was very physically straining and exhausting. For Primo, since he is a scientist and not physically built like an athlete, he is clumsy and weak. There was an incident where his strength completely gives out on him and, while carrying a heavy load, injures his foot very badly. However, since his foot was not broken he was forced to keep working, but once he returned to his hut he notices just how badly his foot was injured and decides to go to a Ka-Be after soup. A Ka-Be is short for Krankenbau, and a Krankenbau is referring to the clinic at the concentration camp. He was able to somewhat comfortably rest there until his foot healed.
It seems as though not only did life for the prisoners and Primo entail hardships, unfair treatments, and suffering from harsh weather and diseases, but they were also subjected to harsh ridicule and lowly amusement by those who are working at the concentration camp as well. Primo tells about his experience at the Ka-Be, where a male nurse was finally inspecting him and his injured foot after standing and waiting for a long time on his injured foot. The male nurse would turn to another fellow nurse and casually talk and laugh as though he was not there. This already shows how desensitized staff members and workers were to the current situation at the time. Both of the nurses even went ahead and laughed even harder at the number on Primo’s arm. Primo explains that everyone knows that starting from a specific number and up classified them as the Italian Jews, and the people at the concentration camp recognized them as individuals that did not know how to work, allowed their bread to be stolen from them, and are slapped around from morning to evening then though they are highly intelligent individuals that all obtained degrees in their specific field. From this, one can see how people can create such harsh categorizations of specific races from situations they were forced to be in. The male nurse goes even further to make fun of Primo’s physical condition and stereotypical ideologies created in the camp of his race by pressing his thumb into Primo’s tibia and showing the deep impression that was made on his pale skin, resembling to wax. This was one aspect of how life was like during this time when it comes to how Germans treated those who were considered lesser or not even considered human. Especially those in the medical field, such as physicians, who worked directly under the ideology of hatred against the Jews. For physicians, membership into the Nazi party had a higher rate of acceptance compared to other professions, such as lawyers, teachers, musicians, and the general population, but they were also higher in terms of conducting services compared to the other professions. However, an important question that came about this period was how much a horrid and barbaric ideology was able to control a country known to have a history of cultural and scientific achievement, and expanding from that question was, specifically, what is it that made so many German physicians willing in conducting in some of the most harsh and inhumane treatment during the Nazi regime. One part of the explanation for this is that Nazi ideology, rather than a political or a nationalistic ideology, was actually a racial one. Basically, many of those physicians that worked under the Nazi regime were those who had the us versus them mentality, and racial ideology was, at the core, a faith that was believed in. The other part of the explanation was that it was also developed from medicine and science, which was a bit ironic, and the science found during this time was often new knowledge or pseudoscience. While this seems almost too unreal to believe, there were people with very useful skillsets and highly intelligent that may have supported the Nazi regime’s efforts, and even went as far as working for them. While their skillsets and intelligence are impressive features people can possess, it is ultimately their mindsets and beliefs that will influence what they choose to do. Basically, one’s profession, no matter how positive or good it is known to be, does not define the individual’s character and who they are as a person.
With Primo and the prisoners at the concentration camp, one of the first things the Germans did in order to dehumanize them and reduce them down into beasts is to strip away their constitutional rights. In the eyes of the Nazi regime, the Jews were lower than human so they did not deserve rights that humans have. For Primo and the prisoners, after living at the concentration camp for a period, it is as though the people almost solely relied on their survival mode, corruption more than absolute. With the system of exchange that was created between the prisoners, the number of illegal exchange practices mentioned in the “This Side of Good and Evil” chapter really highlights how almost everyone became corrupt despite their sense of morality. In order for them to survive in such unfavorable and harshly unfair living conditions, prisoners must throw away their sense of moral reasoning and judgment for things that are good. Words like “good” and “evil” just do not apply as clearly and as separately as it would outside of the concentration camp.
Since Primo was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, this actually fits into the overall larger history of the Second World War because concentration camps provided resources to fund the war to support Germany and Hitler’s pursuits.

The way Auschwitz fit to the larger history of the Second World War was how the prisoners of Auschwitz provided basically free labor and taking valuables from the prisoners attributed to the monetary cost of the Second World War. In the book, it mentions how the prisoners were even building a factory meant for synthesizing rubber, along with how the prisoners provided labor by means of mining coal and other various forms of unearthing and creating resources. However, with this free labor it was also accompanied by consequences after the Second World War. This results many cases of mental trauma on prisoners of the Holocaust. It broke up families and caused mass deaths, especially since Auschwitz is known to be a death

camp.
With Primo’s portrayal of his experience in Auschwitz, it can be generalized to the American people in the aspects of human rights and how information is dealt. The experiences of the prisoners created a narrative for how it is if one is stripped of their human rights. This can cause the enactment of laws that protect citizens from events that was described in Primo’s experience in Auschwitz. The United States created an executive order called the War Refugee Board, where the policy of the United States was changed to actively helping refugees instead of suppressing public knowledge of the events that regard refugees from other countries
Primo’s story is important because it provides a first-hand account of his personal experience in the infamous concentration camp. Primo did not write this book for the purpose of creating new accusations for what is already known as an atrocious event that took place. Rather, he wrote the book in order to show that the Germans are not complete monsters that are only capable of immoral acts and destruction, but rather to present certain aspects of the human mind, basically how average people are capable in random acts of atrocities.