Survival in Auschwitz (If this is a man) Themes
Visions of Auschwitz
Because he spent almost a year as an inmate in Auschwitz, Levi is able to give us—via Survival in Auschwitz—a personal and methodical view of life inside the barbed wire. From the prisoners bei...
Freedom and Confinement
Freedom and confinement are two loaded concepts in Survival in Auschwitz. The folks in concentration camps are confined physically, but their lack of freedom is completely consuming—there's no qu...
Dehumanization and Suffering
In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo and his fellow prisoners endure all types of hellish suffering while in Auschwitz. In fact, the entire complex was diabolically designed to be a sort of mechanized f...
Language and Communication
From the babble (Babel) of numerous languages spoken at the camp, to the way that the Nazis use all sorts of euphemisms to distract everyone from what they are really trying to accomplish in the co...
Race
In Survival in Auschwitz (and in history), Jews are the primary victims of Nazi persecution and are targeted for extermination for the mere fact that they are Jews. This ends up being really an arb...
Perseverance
Survival in Auschwitz shows the world the superhuman struggle to survive that these prisoners fought on a daily basis. And there are as many methods for survival in the camp as there are prisoners....
Strategies and Choices
Remember in Survival in Auschwitz when Levi states that "the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment" (9.2)? The Jewish prisoners, along with all the other victims of th...
The Arbitrary and the Absurd
In Survival in Auschwitz, Auschwitz is governed by a set of illogical and bizarre rules, rituals and ceremonies that make Catch-22 look as straightforward as The Golden Rule. From seemingly everyda...