"Thanks to my by-now long experience of camp life I managed to bring with me all my personal belongings..." -Pg. 151
"...I learnt much later that, unable to continue, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the beginning of the march." -Pg. 154
"We were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accomplished something useful - perhaps like God after the first day of creation." -Pg. 161
"...to stay in bed under my blankets and abandon myslef to a complete exhaustion of muscles, nerve and willpower; waiting as indifferently as a dead man for it to end or not to end." -Pg. 163
"I never understood so clearly as at that moment how laborious is the death of a man." -Pg. 171
"Arthur has reached his family happily and Charles has taken up his teacher's profession again; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day." -Pg. 173
Primo Levi now experiences freedom and independence from the concentration camp. His memories and his life stays in the Auschwitz and his friendship and all the painful memories hinder and support his future. The last ten days before the Americans come in and rescue, although his friends would be seperated and even though he hated some of the people, sometime in his life he would remember and miss the people he met in the Auschwitz...
"...the band began playing again and we were once more lined up and filed past the quivering body of the dying man." -Pg. 149
"To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick], but you Germans have succeeded." -Pg. 150
When the German SS killed a dying man or any man, Primo feels the guilt and the painful shame of murder. However the German soldiers were trained to have no mutal emotions of killing people. Primo describes the brutality of the German soldiers with their killing methods with people. The German soldiers didn't value life.
"The Ka-Be is overflowing, the E-Haftlinge have brought scarlet fever, diphtheria and petechial typhus into the camp." -Pg. 139
"...if you wound the body of a dying man, the wound will begin to heal, even if the whole body dies within a day." -Pg. 141
"This year has gone by so quickly." -Pg. 144
Primo is now working as a chemist assistant and had a privilege to shave and receive new clothes every Wednesday. He says an irony that wonding a dying man would heal and even though the body dies within a day. I think what he means is that when you die you get to go to heaven with a healing body even though the man has a dying body. Primo Levi starts to feel the end or the end is near for the conentration camp since the year had gone so quickly in a concentration camp which is impossible for a normal man to experience the end is near.
"Our world today is this hole of mud." -Pg. 132
"...the more one works the more one earns and eats." -Pg. 132
"If he only knew that it is not true, that I have really dreamt nothing about him, that he is nothing to me except for a brief moment, nothing like everything is nothing down here, except the hunger insider and the cold and the rain around."
-Pg. 135
Raining for ten days and the whole concentration camp turned into a world of mud. The prisoners had to work in holes of mud and dig up graves for other people. People in the camp only think working harder gives you more food but the SS didn't care if they had the best worker or the hardest worker. It is either you die or work.
Kraus, a prisoner just like Primo, talks with Primo with relaxation but Primo had no feelings for him but only hunger and cold was brought to Primo to suffer.
"Wounds will open on everyone's hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one's feet in the snow and wind." -Pg. 123
"...I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen." Pg. 129
"If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer." -Pg. 130
Everybody has injuries in their hands after work or before. Whenever prisoners have to get a band aid they have to wait for hours just to get one and it shows how cold waiting outside the Ka-Be just to get a band aid. Primo Levi no notices the difference between a real and fake prayer. Apparently, Kuhn was praying just for his safety and Primo was thinking about Kuhn's death, Primo was mad at Kuhn. Any Christian would be upset looking at Kuhn's prayer just for himself. Everybody deserves a second chance but Primo's perspective was different than others.
"...and all the rest so unreal, that it did not seem possible that there could really exist any other world or time other than our world of mud and our sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now incapable of imagining." -Pg. 117
"...I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his prescence, by his natural and lain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving." -Pg. 121
"Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man." -Pg. 122
Primo gave up living up his life and he almost gave up on everything but Lorenzo helped Primo from his burden and Primo realized that justice still exists in the world. Lorenzo made Primo realize that he still was a man and there are good reasons to exist in the world.
"The powder of the rust burnt under our eyelids and coated our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood." -Pg.109
"As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am." -Pg. 113
"...something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today..." -Pg. 115
Now Primo is working with iron and suffering from the iron rusting and the blood tasting like iron. Moreover, showing the hard working conditions. Primo Levi hears the bible everyday from other people but this time he hears like a blast of a trumpet and felt the deep voice of God calling him. Primo Levi didn't anger or expressed sorrow but he knew it was a fate to be in the concentration camp and he starts to realize God.
"...we are capable of waiting for hours with the complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs." -Pg. 104
"...I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere." -Pg. 108
Primo Levi is now taking the Chemical Examination checking once a year. Primo himself was a chemist and knew what the SS were doing. However, he couldn't help not taking the test and waiting for hours. The prisoners were used to waiting hours and expresses the spiders moving in the webs showing how long they had to wait in line. Alex, a prisoner in the Auschwitz, was wiping his hand on Primo but Primo didn't care at all suprising him. Primo judges other as well as everybody else showing that nobody is trustworthy
"...for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful." -Pg. 88
"...one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand." -Pg. 90
"...to insanity and to deceitful bestiality. All the other roads are dead-ends."
-Pg. 98
Primo is saying a wise man is the most powerful character of the weak and the powerful. Since wisdom can control the weak and the power it prevents from being too weak or too powerful. He is expressing the feelings toward the SS, weak prisoners, and strong prisoners. When one hesitates to call death for their death, Primo is describing some prisoners sick of their life and didn't care if they died or not. All the other roads are dead-ends. Primo Levi is telling the readers that anywhere or whatever you do your life in the Auschwitz would lead to a dead-end.
"This high margin of profit is correlative to the gravity of the risk of leaving camp wearing more than one shirt or re-entering with none." -Pg. 81
"We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust'; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire." -Pg. 86Primo talks about the small economy in the Auschwitz and it is an irony "re-entering with none" that strong comrades take over new shirts and steal from the new or the weak. He has a sense of humor even in the darkest times in prison and shows the survival in the fittest. Sometimes Primo thinks the SS are the good instead of evil. Primo describes that the concentration camp is not an ordinary place and ordinary morals wouldn't work for the people in the camp. Showing how brutal the place is as well as every chapter has the brutality of the camp.
"Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud"
-Pg. 71
"For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men." -Pg. 71
Now Primo Levi starts to feel the good days in prison comparing to the other days the SS wouldn't beat them and the sun is representing the new life and reborn of Primo. The sun comes up bright for the first time perhaps representing the independece of a day. Starting with the breakfast, the food ration was higher and the prisoners were able to satiate. However, being in the bright side is not always a good thing. Nobody knows the consequence of good conditions, there might be a following of a bad tragedy.
This Blog is made for Jason and his response of the Book "Survival in the Auschwitz" by Primo Levi
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Da Galvanizing Class of 2008
