Survival in Auschwitz

by

Primo Levi

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Primo Levi Character Analysis

Primo Levi is the main character of the story and author the memoir. The story takes place when Levi, an Italian Jewish man, is 24 years old. He is arrested by Italy’s Fascist government and handed over to the SS, who take him to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. While of the Jewish people that Levi arrives with are immediately put to death, he and a selection of healthy men are instead put to slave labor in a camp of 10,000 Jewish prisoners. Levi is slight of stature, which causes him difficulty in the hard labor of the camp, but he possesses an uncommonly insightful and analytical mind, allowing him to make striking observations all the way through his narration of the horrors that he experiences. Although most prisoners die within their first three months, through a mixture of good fortune and shrewd organization, Levi manages to survive for over a year until the Russian army arrives and liberates what is left of the labor camp. Although he survives while so many of his comrades die, Levi constantly struggles to resist the dehumanization thrust upon him by the camp and its German operators. Levi’s struggle to remain human remains a dominant theme throughout the story, describing both the pain of slowly losing one’s humanity in the struggle to survive, as well as the pain of regaining it and realizing how brutishly one has lived for so many months. Along with Levi’s struggle to survive and remain human, he is plagued by a fear that the story of what was done to the Jewish people in Auschwitz will never be heard, which propels him to eventually write Survival in Auschwitz.

Primo Levi Quotes in Survival in Auschwitz

The Survival in Auschwitz quotes below are all either spoken by Primo Levi or refer to Primo Levi. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Dehumanization and Resistance Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1. The Journey Quotes

But on the morning of the 21st we learned that on the following day the Jews would be leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the children, even the old, even the ill […] For every person missing at the roll-call, ten would be shot.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

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?

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2. On the Bottom Quotes

And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Tattooed Number
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

And it is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at him, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:

And do not think that shoes form a factor of secondary importance in the life of the Lager. Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores which become fatally infected.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Alberto
Related Symbols: Shoes
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3. Initiation Quotes

Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place once can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Steinlauf
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4. Ka-Be Quotes

In this discreet and composed manner, without display or anger, massacre moves through the huts of Ka-Be every day, touching here or there.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:

We, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labours, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Tattooed Number
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5. Our Nights Quotes

A day begins like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separates us from it: so that it is better to concentrate one’s attention on the block of grey bread, which is small but will certainly be ours in an hour, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will form everything that the law of the place allows us to possess.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Bread
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7. A Good Day Quotes

At least for a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8. This Side of Good and Evil Quotes

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 […] how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Bread
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9. The Drowned and the Saved Quotes

We would also like to consider that the Lager was preeminently a gigantic biological and social experiment.

Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs, are enclosed within barbed wire: they live a regular, controlled life which is identical to all and inadequate to all needs, and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months this way.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

That they were stolid and bestial is natural, when one thinks that the majority were ordinary criminals, chosen from among the German prisons for the very purpose of their employment as superintendents of the camps for Jews; and we maintain it was a very apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the squalid human specimens whom we saw at work were an average example, not of Germans in general, but even of German prisoners in particular.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10. Chemical Examination Quotes

Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window an aquarium between tow beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Doktor Pannwitz
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:

Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, If someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Alex, Doktor Pannwitz
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12. The Events of Summer Quotes

More generally, experience had shown us many times the vanity of every conjecture; why worry oneself trying to read the into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the minimum influence?

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:

At Buna the German Civilians raged with the fury of a secure man who wakes up from a long dream of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to understand it.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

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 reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a 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.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Lorenzo
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13. October 1944 Quotes

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 again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14. Kraus Quotes

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

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Kraus
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15. Die drei Leute vom Labor Quotes

They construct shelters and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they command, they organize, they kill. What else could they do? They are Germans. This way of behavior is not meditated and deliberate, but follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen. They could not act different.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:

But in the morning, I hardly escape the raging wind and cross the doorstep of the laboratory when I find at my side the comrade of all my peaceful moments, of Ka-Be, of the rest-Sundays—the pain of remembering, the old ferocious suffering of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me life a dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16. The Last One Quotes

At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well-finished. The Russians can come now: there are no longer any strong men among us, the last one is now hanging above our heads.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Alberto
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
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Survival in Auschwitz PDF

Primo Levi Quotes in Survival in Auschwitz

The Survival in Auschwitz quotes below are all either spoken by Primo Levi or refer to Primo Levi. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Dehumanization and Resistance Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1. The Journey Quotes

But on the morning of the 21st we learned that on the following day the Jews would be leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the children, even the old, even the ill […] For every person missing at the roll-call, ten would be shot.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

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?

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2. On the Bottom Quotes

And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Tattooed Number
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

And it is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at him, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:

And do not think that shoes form a factor of secondary importance in the life of the Lager. Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores which become fatally infected.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Alberto
Related Symbols: Shoes
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3. Initiation Quotes

Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place once can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Steinlauf
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4. Ka-Be Quotes

In this discreet and composed manner, without display or anger, massacre moves through the huts of Ka-Be every day, touching here or there.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:

We, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labours, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Tattooed Number
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5. Our Nights Quotes

A day begins like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separates us from it: so that it is better to concentrate one’s attention on the block of grey bread, which is small but will certainly be ours in an hour, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will form everything that the law of the place allows us to possess.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Bread
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7. A Good Day Quotes

At least for a few hours, no quarrels arise, we feel good, the Kapo feels no urge to hit us, and we are able to think of our mothers and wives, which usually does not happen. For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8. This Side of Good and Evil Quotes

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 […] how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Related Symbols: Bread
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9. The Drowned and the Saved Quotes

We would also like to consider that the Lager was preeminently a gigantic biological and social experiment.

Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs, are enclosed within barbed wire: they live a regular, controlled life which is identical to all and inadequate to all needs, and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months this way.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

That they were stolid and bestial is natural, when one thinks that the majority were ordinary criminals, chosen from among the German prisons for the very purpose of their employment as superintendents of the camps for Jews; and we maintain it was a very apt choice, because we refuse to believe that the squalid human specimens whom we saw at work were an average example, not of Germans in general, but even of German prisoners in particular.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10. Chemical Examination Quotes

Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window an aquarium between tow beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Doktor Pannwitz
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:

Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, If someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Alex, Doktor Pannwitz
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12. The Events of Summer Quotes

More generally, experience had shown us many times the vanity of every conjecture; why worry oneself trying to read the into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the minimum influence?

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:

At Buna the German Civilians raged with the fury of a secure man who wakes up from a long dream of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to understand it.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

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 reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a 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.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Lorenzo
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13. October 1944 Quotes

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 again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14. Kraus Quotes

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

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Kraus
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15. Die drei Leute vom Labor Quotes

They construct shelters and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they command, they organize, they kill. What else could they do? They are Germans. This way of behavior is not meditated and deliberate, but follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen. They could not act different.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:

But in the morning, I hardly escape the raging wind and cross the doorstep of the laboratory when I find at my side the comrade of all my peaceful moments, of Ka-Be, of the rest-Sundays—the pain of remembering, the old ferocious suffering of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me life a dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker)
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16. The Last One Quotes

At the foot of the gallows, the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well-finished. The Russians can come now: there are no longer any strong men among us, the last one is now hanging above our heads.

Related Characters: Primo Levi (speaker), Alberto
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis: