Journal #17

Chapter 17. The Story of Ten Days

"I had a high fever. I was lucky entirely to myself: I lay down with relief
knowing that I had the right to forty days' isolation and therefore of rest."

Primo was lucky to fall sick with fever. If it were not for fever, he would have gone with the Germans and eventually be killed by them. It sounded ironic to me, because fever saved him from death. It also reminded of the Ka-Be, the infirmary, discussed at the beginning of the book. To be sick in the Auschwitz meants to rest, if the sickness was not fatal. Now that all the people except sick people are evacuated, there is no one to force them to work, no one to punish them, and no one to distribute foods. However, they still show their respect to those who suffered and would suffer for a little bit more: "We could not find anything to say, but for the time being we did not touch the bread." Should they have already been blinded by hunger and pain, they wouldn't wait until the bread was distributed among themselves. It would be done even before they were sliced into pieces. January 27, the last day in the Auschwitz, was also the last moment they were stuck in the nightmare. It was the end of their experience in the Auschwitz, but their memory would never leave there. Germans, though they were eventually put down, tortured so many people to the end of their lives.

Journal #16

Chapter 16. The Last One

"But everybody heard the cry of the doomed man, it pierced through the old thick
barriers of inertia and submisiveness, it struck the living core of man in each
of us: 'Kamaraden, ich bin der Letz!'(Comrades, I am the last one!)

I thought to myself: what would I have done if I were in the same situation? Do I really care about me being the last one to die, if I were to be killed anyway? That "doomed man" is symbolizes hope and determination. He was the only person so brave to take his thought into actions and rebel against the Germans. What about the other prisoners?"I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened. We remained standing, bent and grey, our heads dropped, and we did not uncover our heads until the German ordered us to do so."Complete Submissiveness. While the last one was crying for his independence from the Germans, the very sign of his triumph over them. Had they even murmured anything, they might have been able at least to rebel silently against the Germans. Shame on them. Their courage is taken out since long ago, and they no longer seem to have any dignity against the Germans now. The dead person was killed, but he is yet to be dead. Germans might have been successful in taking his life away, but they never took his humanity away. How easy is it to kill a person, and how difficult is it to destroy that person?

"To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one."

Journal #15

Chapter 15. Die drei Leute vom Labor

This chapter focuses on the reminiscence Primo Levi feels as he finds German people living like nothing's going on. There are several girls working in the laboratory, who are not prisoners but "civilians." They talk about daily life without gratitude that they are gifted with everyday life.

"Only two weeks and then it will be Christmas again; it hardly seems real, this
year has gone by so quickly!"

This sentence shocks Primo Levi and makes him think of the past, when he was just like the girls chattering about trivial things. To him, the year he spent inside the Auschwitz was probably the longest year he has ever spent.
From his narration, I found that he is deprived of all the dreams he had before, and now he is left with nothing except agony."My days were both cheerful and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure. Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself."I imagined how he felt like. Say the Third World War broke out, and I'm imprisoned as a captured civilian. All the complaints I had - too much homework, pressure from the parents, and so on - would be gone and the only thing I think of would be survival. Just thinking of that, taught me why I should be grateful for what I have and what I go through right now.

Journal #14

Chapter 14. Kraus

What I saw from chapter 13 comes out as a main theme in this chapter, but now it seems more hopeless.

"What a good boy kraus must have been as a civilian: he will not survive very
long here, on can see it at the first glance, it is as logical as a theorem."

In this quote, I found that Primo Levi is not only judging whether Kraus is going to survive or not, but he actually shows condescending attitudes toward him.
It seems that as time goes on, prisoners have more and more pressure that they have to overcome in order to survive. What makes me more curious is how the survivors are going to live. Can they live in a normal, ordinary way just like others? Can they forget about the atrocities they have gone through for months? Some people get too much pressure and stress that they have psychological impact from them and lose their abilities to live ordinarily. Well, seeing that Primo Levi wrote a whole book about his experience with lots of details, he was definitely unable to delete all the memories, but he handled with them without going crazy. There probably are, however, people who lost their control over the memories.

Journal #13

Chapter 13. October 1944

'Selekcja.' I found more fear in the word than any other words in the book. But it was not just fear that it created.

"The young tell the young that all the old ones will be chose. The healthy tell
the healthy that only the ill will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded.
German Jews will be excluded. Low numbers will be excluded. You will be chosen.
I will be excluded."

How simplistic point of view is that. It shows how people are reluctant to see themselves susceptible to what is very probable to happen to them. This does not only put the prisoners into fear, but also disorganizes them. They try to find others' weaknesses and reasons to be picked and killed.

"It is absurd of Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose
veins, he hardly even notices the hunger anymore. But he lies down on his bed,
serene and quiet, and replies to someone who asks him with my own words."

Has Primo Levi changed? He seems like he's judging others based on their probability of survival, rather than personality or value. Nasty things that Germans inflicted on the prisoners made their lifestyle, value, and personality readjust to the Auschwitz. That is the most humiliating part of it.

Journal #12

Chapter 12. The Events of the Summer

"Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man."

I read many novelss that talk about brainwashing and losing one's sense of humanity. 1984 by George Owell and The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley were two of the most impressive books I read and, still, I didn't really believe in the idea that people can forget about they are and how they are supposed to behave, nor did I consider the effect of brainwashing possible. I found some connections between these books and the Survival in the Auschwitz, because the sense of humanity is an important motif in all three books.
After reading the Survival in Auschwitz, especially this chapter, I realized that it is very easy to lose one's humanity unless there's something that keeps reminding him/her of it. Lorenzo is a symbolic person who represents the pureness. He is a man who keeps his morality whatever the circumstances are. He does not try to just get him out of the agony, he cares about others. This taught me how we are affected by the people around us. Should Lorenzo was a pessimistic, selfish person, Primo Levi might have forgot who he was - that is, to lose his morality.

"I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today"

Journal #11

Chapter 11. The Canto Of Ulysses

This chapter was not very important in the plot itself, but still was very impressive. It was somewhat hard to understand because there were so many references to Dante's Divine Comedy, and I had to do read over and over again to understand. Basically, Primo Levi translates the Canto of Ulysses in French to teach Jean Italian.While he teaches French, he finds that his language had certain characteristics that French could not convey.

"I can point out why 'I set forth' is not 'je me mis,' it is much stronger and
more audacious, it is a chain which has been broken, it is throwing oneself on
the other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well."

His pride in Italian is more of emotional and exuberant, but I have the same experience with him, too. There are so many words in Korean (and it does not confine only to Italian and Korean, it's something that every single language has) that cannot be translated perfectly in other languages. There's always something missing in translation, which, I guess, is called nuance. What Primo Levi describes is meaningful - if it were not, this whole story about Italian couldn't be a chapter by itself - because we see how he appreciates the beauty of things in spite of all the disasters around him. It is not his optimistic personality that enables him to do so, it's the human nature that always does that. We always find hope in the hopelessness.