Primo Levi Character Analysis

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.