Chapter 17

“Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human. We three were for the most part immune from it, and we owe each other mutual gratitude. That is why my friendship with Charles will prove lasting.(172)”

The camp did devastating things to people. It deprived them of their life, their joy, their family. To get what I’m about to say into focus, think of dorm students. We live away from our parents, and we get so used to it that its sometimes hard to go back home. We’re not used to having close family around us. In the camp people got used to having no joys, to living without basic needs. A lot of people had the experience of living as a non-human. What makes Levi special and his three friends is that they didn’t get affected by being a non-human. That proved to be very useful. Because they could function as normal humans, they were able to get more done. They could think creatively, and could give resources to others, instead of taking it all for their own. If they had taken it all for themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to get back to their real homes. They wouldn’t have gotten back to the life that they used to have. This refers back to the golden rule, “do unto other as you would have them do unto you.” Its hard to get our minds around the fact that before this rule was applied, but now it is. I’m almost not sure what to think either. But, somehow, we need to obey God’s standards in all of it, even if we go to concentration camp. We need to hold on to God’s standards, and release our own. I think that is how we will survive.

Chapter 16

“Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue and cold, even if we return home.(150)”

The German’s conquered the Prisoners, and the prisoners know it. Primo may have survived Auschwitz, but he was defeated. By defeated I am not referring to death, but spirit. The quote stats that they is more to not being broken then just adapting and living. To stand up against problems requires more. To fully comprehend this will require experience in a concentration camp, and since I hope none can say, “been there, done that” this will not be an easy topic. Maybe it has to do with faith. Before all they had to do was follow orders, steal and some other things. But now they’ve been given a choice, they have been given the choice to try and escape. They have been broken, because they can longer try to fight back. The prisoners have been lowered to the bottom, not physically, but spiritually. Even if they had the choice, Primo and the others are dead. There is no will left to stand up for what they believe in, even if the had the choice to. There is no will left to change things, they have no will to oppose power. The people in the camp were broken down and conquered. But people also have a miraculous way of getting up when they are down. Just in the next chapter we see more humanity returning to them. What makes a lot of these prisoners unique is that they were conquered, but they didn’t let that fact get in their way of fixing themselves.

Chapter 15

“These girls sing, like girls sing in laboratories all over the world, and it makes us deeply unhappy. They talk among themselves: they talk about the rationing, about their fiances, about their homes, about the approaching holidays...(143)”

Naturally as humans we want to be the best. We want to exceed others and be looked up to. We want others to bow down before and exclaim that we are the best. That’s probably why Simba wanted to be king, but its true. We want success. We want a good job. Now image if you had those ambitions in life. You wanted to be the best, and have the best. And you firmly believe you could too. But then one day it all changed. Because of your ethnicity, a culture that had no reason to be against you, took your life, your money, and made you live out on the street. Everyday now you see them as the walk to a from work. You see them talking about taking a vacation, about going to Hawaii. Their happy. The sing on the street, in their house, and at work. It makes you unhappy because that’s the kind of life you wanted, you wanted to be happy, and now their happy, and you aren’t. This is what is happening. The jews before their deportation expected a lot from life. They didn’t get it. The work until they die, and then some. When someone who has been through that much sees someone who is extremely happy, they start to get upset. If my life was taken from me, I would get upset over those that still had a life. But to men who have not seen life in so long, how can they feel anger. All the anger they could have felt was released on the German’s. So they sit there, unhappy at joy, because it is not their own.

Chapter 14

“Kraus misses his stroke, a lump of mud flies up and splatters over my knees. It is not the first time it has happened ,I warn him to be careful, but without much hope: he is Hungarian, he understands German badly and does not know a word of French. He is tall and thin, wears glasses and has a curious, small, twisted face; when he laughs he looks like a child, and he often laughs he works too much and too vigorously: he has not yet learnt our underground art of economizing on everything, on breath, movements, even thoughts. He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because one does not normally die of blows, but one does of exhaustion, and badly, and when one grows aware of it, it is already too late. He still thinks... oh no, poor Kraus, this is not reasoning, it is only the stupid honesty of a small employee, he brought it along with him, and he seems to think that his present situation is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work, as well as being of advantage, because according to what everyone says, the more one works the more one earns and eats.(132)”

When in Rome, do as the Romans. We’ve all heard that saying, but how many of us follow that. Well, it all depends on whether or not you choose to succumb to others belief’s or not. You could say that you will not change yourself no matter what people say, or you can change what you think every time says something. Both have positive and negative effects. If you don’t change yourself, you cannot be corrected, and will have trouble in many environments as you cannot change to fit in. But on the other hand, if you change yourself constantly, how can anyone determine what you believe, and is it possible to believe anything? What is happening to Kraus is that he is no changing to his environment. He is using the same techniques found in the real world as in the concentration camp. He works hard, expecting more food. That is why he won’t survive. If he wants to survive, he has to change himself. He has to work as if this work is nothing to him, he has to work slowly as to conserve energy. Work yes, but if the people you are trying to please will not reward you, what is the point? Yes, it sounds bad to lower your standards, but in a place that has no standards, is it really necessary to have any at all? I guess my point is this. The main point in life is to survive. Sometimes you have to go against your standards, and adopt true standards. We need to put our own ideas behind us, and rely on what will help us get through life.

Chapter 13

“Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean gain?(130)”

We so often assume that if we love God and obey him nothing will happen to us. That is not true. God does not make our life perfect, because we not perfect. But what he does do is he helps us with our struggles. If we call out to him in our distress he will answer us. But what we want is not always what the maker of the universe wants. The maker of the universe has a mind we cannot even understand. If we then think that we can ask for something, and it was based on our own wisdom, then we are very mistaken. The folly of God is greater then man’s wisdom. So if we thank God for saving us from some horrible thing, and other people are going there, we cannot thank God for saving us, because that is a disgrace to God. Our maker has control over everything. He chooses things are right, not what we always want. To thank Him for allowing another person to die should not bring gratitude, but remorse. So what is happening is the camp is wrong. A man is thanking God because he was not killed, when those around him will be mercilessly killed. God has control of everything. This is an abomination to the human race, we should in no way thank God for sparing us. Something like the concentration camp is over our heads to know what God was thinking. So we shouldn’t try and understand. We should just accept.

Chapter 12

“ But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.(122)”

We live with people we look up to. When we look at someone who is above us, we want to be like them. We want to be the people they are, so we imitate them. We change ourselves to be more like them, because we think that if we do, we will have what they have. Primo may have no imitated this man Lorenzo, but he did learn something from the experience. He learned that he is still a man. He realized that there are good people left in the world. Levi wasn’t exactly living a Christian life. He would steal, and do about anything to survive. But when he saw Lorenzo, he realized that one could survive in the camp without being corrupted. I’m not sure if Levi was immediately affected, but we do know this. In a couple of days when the Germans leave he would change back into a man with morals. In a way, that’s very similar to what Christ did for us. We were sinning in a world in which nothing mattered. We were dead, we had no real life within us. But God said that he loved the world, and because of that he came down to earth in the form of a child, to save us. He lived a blameless life, one without sin, and set an example for us. When he came he showed how to really live, and we realized we were dead. He brought us back to life and we now realize that we are men, made in the image of God.

Chapter 11

“And after ‘ When I came?’ Nothing. A hole in my memory. ‘Before Aeneas ever named it so.’ Another hole. A fragment floats into my mind, not relevant: ‘...nor piety To my old father, not the wedded love That should have comforted Penelope...’, is it correct?(112)”

Its funny that poetry can represent our lives so well. In this case what Primo and his friend are saying is not exactly what they feel, it’s a quote from a book. But yet, its so similar to their own memory. They hardly know where they came from. The things in the past are not important anymore. As a Jewish girl named Raga once said that is isn’t important about where she came from, but that she was Jew. Because is isn’t. In the concentration camp, you cannot use your old lifestyle to get you through. The concentration camp has rules that don’t make sense. The have also forgot things of the past because of that. Because they are forced to make a new lifestyle to live, they forget their old self and the knowledge that they used to have. But what is happening here is important, this could have been the reason Primo survived. He remembered the past because his friend concealed him from the concentration camp for only a few minutes. He became something more then living. He became more then just atoms. He became a man. But the end of the poetry also has meaning. In the end it talks about how the love that penelope got never satisfied her, and how he didn’t respect his dad. This is what the concentration camp also is. No respect, no love. There is nothing here but wasteland. Again, it was fortunate for Primo to realize that he still has some sort of living soul within him.

Chapter 10

“ We are satisfied with this. When one waits time moves smoothly without need to intervene and drive it forward, while when one works, every minute moves painfully and has to be labouriously driven away. We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs.(104)”

We all know that when we go to a friends house, time seems to fly by, but when we have that boring class, we are wondering if time could go any slower. We tend to think that horrible things move slowly, and good things more quickly, which is true in most cases. In the concentration camp it is a little different. There, time is slower when nothing happens. But that is a good thing. For teenagers it seems that waiting is the wost limit you could put on a person. But in the lager, it is a blessing. Waiting means no work, which is the closest thing there are going to get to going over to a friends house and playing computer games. Its all about perspective. We think waiting is bad, because it doesn’t benefit us, but time was a precious thing in the lager, and not to be messed with. Waiting meant more food, less energy, more rest. Waiting meant that you could survive on less calories and less sleep. Waiting parts go by quickly, while the work drags on. In the concentration camp work happened everyday, no rests. Imagine how good it felt to get away from all the turmoil of life and just relax and try to be like men a little bit! The thing is, as teenagers, we don’t really realize how important waiting is. We don’t realize it is a gift, and a need. Our brains need time to relax and think, to breath. We need to just let time go on smoothly and wait, instead of trying to make it flow by, life is too short as it already is.

Chapter 9

“If the drowned have no story, and single and broad is the path to perdition, the paths to salvations are many, difficult and improbable. (90)”

Are we drowned? How can we tell if we are dead? Many people who passed through this concentration camp did not have a story. They lived each day of their life as if nothing was wrong. The accepted the harsh treatment unjust officials placed on their backs. They did nothing about that fact. Yes, at one point they may have had a story, but of recently, their minds are blank. Because of the camps large number, and the hatred of the Nazi’s, the Jews were chosen at random to be killed. If the concentration camp is earth, then being killed is perdition. Hell is way worse, but being killed in a concentration camp must have been a lot closer to what we know of. The quote then says that if we are meaningless in the camp, and will die their, then being saved is a lot of ways, but is very unlikely. What their saying is that there are many ways to be saved, but none of them are likely. The paths are many because of the many circumstances the prisoners endure. There is always a chance to be redeemed; always a chance that you won’t be chosen. But that is not going to happen. The concentration had few rules. One of those though was that all Jews must die sometime. So are we drowned? If we don’t have a religion we are; we don’t have someone to save us. Luckily for us though, we have God to save us. He sent his son to receive our death. With that off of our backs, we can escape life’s penalty.

Chapter 8

“One section of the camp itself is in fact set aside fore civilian workers of all nationalities who are compelled to stay there for a longer or shorter period in expiation of their illicit relations with Haftlinge. This section is separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire, and is called E – Lager, and its guests E – Haftlinge. ‘E’ is the initial for ‘Erziehung’ which means education.(83)”

Its amazing how much learning is looked down upon. In high school especially, we tend to think school is a prison. We think that education is a curse, and must be rid of. Students try and accomplish that are best they can, by talking during class, text messaging during class, and getting the cheap way out of homework. We take the ability to learn for granted. But I think that in school we are not getting the reality. School is not a prison, it is keeping others away. We are in the barbed wire, and we think we are trapped. But we are protected, from things in the world around us. In school we can mature our brain and soul, so when we are released from this protective place, we can survive. Just think for a moment what your life would be life if there were no schooling. We would live life not knowing how much fuller our existence could be. When we go to work, we wouldn’t be able to think of ways to improve our status, we wouldn’t know how to work hard to get a larger pay check. We couldn’t read books, and all in all, we would be sweeping garbage from the streets. School teaches things that we need for life, we cannot do without. So in reality when students look down and school and try to get around it, they are merely hurting their future. In conclusion, School is not a curse, it is a privilege.

Chapter 7

“Today the sun rose birth and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white and distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless number, and when even I felt its lukewarm through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.(71)”

The prisoners are tired, they are frustrated, and they are cold. They are standing on possibly a hill, and mist is all around them. Suddenly, light comes from the hills. The sun has spread its warmth on the prisoners, and they are warmed. If I were a prisoner, I would defiantly be thankful for that sun, and so were the men. This is finally something they can hold on to, something that makes their life richer, another reason to keep living. Levi in this passage realizes why men worship the sun. Men worship things that make their lives easier, which is almost a flaw in our community. We have no commitment, we worship things for our own good. If we do things for ourselves, the results in the end will not be satisfying. Its kind of like friendship. If we are a friend to someone merely to gain benefits for ourselves, then those friendships will not be deep, and will not last long. Also, religions that are for man’s benefit, and not for Gods, will also not be deep. We need something more then human, especially when it comes to religions. These men in the field are looking for something. They are looking for some sort of god that’s going to say, I’ll save you. Sometimes God works like that, and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he saves us, but sometimes he himself has a plan that’s greater then we can see. No matter what, God is always in control, even if the sun doesn’t shine down on us. We should also trust him anyway.

Chapter 6

“I bite deeply into my lips; 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 horses.(67)"

Have you ever felt that someone should just kill you because you have so much homework for the next night? That’s what these prisoners feel. The pain of the work is so much that its easier for them if someone beats them so that the pain that is related to the work will decrease, and another pain will arise. Which leads to the next point, not all the guards at the camp were evil. Many of them were good in fact. They beat the prisoners lovingly. That is amazing. You would thin that after a certain amount of time the guards would become hard and not care about the prisoners at all. What would make the guards care about the prisoners? We could say that the guards were good, but if they were good, why wouldn’t they then stop the concentration completely? Maybe the guards weak minded. Maybe they didn’t realize how much power they really had. Maybe they were too afraid to change things, thinking that they themselves might be killed if they opposed. So instead of opposing, they helped in the small things they could. Things that the generals wouldn’t catch, and possibly that the prisoners wouldn’t either. Yes, their were bad ones in the camp, people that thrived in the act of destroying another human, but like on earth, not everyone is bad. There are some good people left, and there were some people in the camp that cared about the prisoners. So next time you say you want someone to kill you, be careful, they just might do it lovingly.

Chapter 5

“Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study. It is based on an invaluable activity of adaptations, partly passive and unconscious, partly active: of hammering in a nail above his bunk from which to hang up his shoes; of concluding tacit pacts of non-aggression with neighbours; of understanding and accepting the customs and laws of a single Kommando, a single Block. By virtue of this work, one manages to gain a certain equilibrium after a few weeks, a certain degree of security in face of the unforeseen; one has made oneself a nest, the trauma of the transplantation is over.(56)”

Home, oh sweet home. Is it merely females that make card boxes into livable homes? Oh have all humans built in a drive that creates a setting that is livable. In psychology we are learning about how humans try and live in an equilibrium. Their body tries to create stability. And I think that’s what Primo is talking about. The men at this camp were trying to create a sense of home likeness in their surroundings. As silly as that sounds, and also as impossible as that is to do in a concentration camp. These men did that, and that also means that having a home is important to them. With so many rights stripped off of their backs, maybe they needed this one last resort to say, “after my day at work, I can go to a bed, and that is MY space.” Without homes, they men would have died, and that is a clue on how they did survive. All men have basic needs that need to be met. I often do that. When struggles come up in my life with other people, I tell myself to not talk to people. For the moment that works, because I transport myself to a spot in which nothing can touch me. It’s reliving going into this state, because I know I can raise myself above the situation. Luckily, I’m the kind of person that cannot keep my mouth shut, so I end up talking. But these men are like that, they need something, anything, to fulfill them.

Chapter 4

“Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not often happen to us, and they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.(44)”

Dreaming is a mysterious thing. In ancient times God spoke to men and women through dreams. But in the concentrations camp, it has a different meaning, like most things that are found there. In the concentration camp, dreaming is a way. Dreaming is way for the men at this camp to get away from everything that goes on around them. Its kind of similar to day-dreaming for me. When I wish to get out of the current situation I am in, my brain tends to wander, helping to entertain myself. While they were not trying to entertain themselves, we are doing the same thing. The difference is that they wish to get away from the work. Unfortunately, the work is so hard that they cannot dream. They are “tired beasts.” To some extent, we need some sort of enjoyment, something like a gateway from the current world to the world in which we are trying to create. Without imagination, we cannot dream. Men in turmoil, trying to survive in a hard place, being deprived of life, would have a hard time enjoying and creating one of the beauties of life. Thus they would not have as many dreams, which is an irony in that the people who need it most don’t get it, and the people who don’t need it, like students, get it. I guess like dreams, we don’t really know why some things happen. We don’t know why we deserve some things, while others do not get anything.

Chapter 3

“For many weeks I considered these warnings about hygiene as pure examples of the Teutonic sense of humour, in the style of the dialogue about the truss which we had heard on our entry into the Lagar. But later I understood that their unknown authors, perhaps without realizing it, were not far from some very important truths. In this place it is practically pointless to wash everyday in the turbid water of the filthy washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality, and necessary as an instrument of moral survival.(40)”

In a sense, it is absurd to have such measures of cleanliness in a concentration camp. It makes sense that Levi would question the reason for that. But he also reaches a conclusion on the existence of such rules. Without such rules, it would not be possible for people to be people in the concentration camps. In every person, there is some sense of human natural characteristics. Cleanliness is one of them. In ever culture there is some sort of making things tidy and neat. It’s a way that we survive. If we didn’t do things like this , we would have waste in our homes and would die of some sort of disease. Yes, in the concentration camps it may seem completely useless to clean oneself, but I made the prisoners be human. Less then a normal human, but yet human nonetheless. Without these rules, could it be possible that the prisoners would revolt, and demand more rights. But the Jews and criminals didn’t revolt, possibly because they had their basic needs met, so their body told them they didn’t need to fight to live. The rules were not their for maybe the prisoners, but for the guards. The guards also had a hard time killing men, so if guards could be convinced that the prisoners were getting good treatment, they might not be so bad. They could do their job because they were brainwashed somewhat that they prisoners weren’t treated all that bad. The rules in Auschwitz may have seemed pointless to the prisoners, but they held a great deal of value to the guards.

Chapter 2

“…As for the high numbers they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the words ‘freshmen’ or ‘conscript’ in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile, and stupid fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his bole of soup ‘in your custody’; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread, you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffelschalenkommando, the ‘Potato Peeling Command’, and if one can be enrolled in it.(28)”

If life everywhere there are winners and losers. I guess that the concentration camp also had this rule. The newer residents were tricked and confused by other older members who should have had to wisdom and empathy to tell them about real life in the concentration camp. But the didn’t. Sure it was funny that these ignorant newcomers would go asking to be part of the Potato Peeling Command, but that wasn’t all of it. These old prisoners were indirectly teaching new prisoners to know the rules of the camp. We learn best my mistakes, so when the newer prisoners were told to get new shoes, and it wasn’t real, they learned survival skills. Some of these included not trusting anyone, and learning the power of the officials. But why wouldn’t the old prisoners look down on the new prisoners, and instead of saying, “ha ha, your life sucks” say something like, let me show the ropes here. With all the persecution, you would think that those who had been beaten would say, I have love for my fellow man, and would help him. Maybe it had something to do with that they were not shown the way, so they had so sympathy for others, but maybe it had something to do with the language and clash of cultures once again. Since they couldn’t understand each other, not just verbally, but also culturally, they segregated themselves. These men weren’t Jews, they should have known that all around. People of the same culture will bond together. These men didn’t. What is a man, its not his past, but he does right now. Unfortunately, the Germans judged on the past.

Chapter 1

"With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll-call. At the end the officer asked 'Wieviel Stück?' The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty 'pieces' and that all was in order. They then loaded us on to the buses and took us to the station of Carpi. Here the train was waiting for us, with our escort for the journey. Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?(pg. 16)"

Auschwitz was a shame to human kind. Humans are made in the image of God, with senses, with imaginations, with creativity, with love, and to merely talk about such a marvellous person as a thing is a disgrace. We are all equal in God's site. We are all human. Who made one man over another? Who appointed rulers to judge the world?. In Romans 13:1 it says that "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God." That really irritates me. How could God appoint people to rule and be unjust to those who deserve the same as us? But God had a reason for everything, even a tragic thing like WWII. But I guess that we have all been given things. We all posses certain things, and all of us unfortunately do not use then to their fullest extent. I believe that the Nazi’s didn’t use what God gave them to the extent that he wanted them to. The prisoners were wondering the same thing. How could a man beat a man without anger. How is that possible? That was possible because the concentration camp leaders appointed themselves over others. And when the did that, they could look down on others because they truly thought that those under them were no longer human. And because they treated them that way, the prisoners also learned to be less then human. They took blows and slaps that a normal human being would not be able to bear. When the prisoners were hit, they didn’t even feel pain. The Jews were deprived of the right of life, which should never be take away.

Chapter 0

One million people died in Auschwitz. That means that if the average person lives to be about 80 years old, for every hour of your life, eight people would die. It was cruelty in one of the highest regards. Not only to just merely death, but more then death, loss of hope. Children were taken from their parents, only to find out later that they too were to be killed mercilessly. Or maybe they’d get “lucky and have some crazy and perverted scientist kill them in the name of science. Such things should never happen again. It wouldn’t be half as bad if the kids had gone with the parents so they could die together, it wouldn’t be half as bad had people had hope in a future. But the concentration camps were designed to destroy hope, and hope they did destroy. “There was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there.” – Libusa Breder, Jewish prisoner, Auschwitz. Hope was lost, the only thing that possibly remained was instinct to survive, a most of that was burned up in a dark room anyway. So if hope was lost, what truly are human beings? If such a place would cause questions like this, what kind of place is this? A place where human beings are treated worse then animals, and expected to do more. A place where life was decided in a mere second, a life that took 9 months to create now takes 1 second to destroy. May this never happen again.