Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central)
Survival in Auschwitz is written from the point-of-view of Primo, the twenty-four-year-old Italian Jew imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. We see everything through his eyes—an intimate experience of the events he suffers through and the people he comes into contact with.
Levi wrote his book almost immediately after getting out of the camp—within about a year. This is what helps lend the book some of its heartbreaking immediacy. Here's one example of this, from early in the book when Primo first arrives at the Lager:
We climb down, they make us enter an enormous empty room that is poorly heated. We have a terrible thirst. The weak gurgle of the water in the radiators makes us ferocious; we have had nothing to drink for four days. But there is also a tap—and above if a card which says that it is forbidden to drink as the water is dirty." (2.2)
There are other moments where the narrative voice seems to look back upon events from after a passage of time, but for the most part, we share Primo's present: in the Lager.