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Exposure To Dehumanization In The Lager, By Lev Levi

441 Words2 Pages

To survive in a concentration camp one must lose all sense self-respect and human pride. Exposure to continuous dehumanization unavoidably leads to one being brutalized, forcing one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation in order to hold on to one’s life and personality. It is this process that cases the line between right and wrong starts to blur. In the face of stark hopelessness, retaining one’s mental strength becomes overwhelming. Living in such grotesque circumstances and being exposed to brutal beatings damages one not only on a physical level but on a physiological level as well. To dwell on the wrong being committed would be a worthless attempt as the word “fair” has no application in the “Lager”, a German word Levi used to refer to the concentration camps, literally meaning "warehouse". …show more content…

For example, to dwell on hunger and to hope for food is to put oneself thru mental torture as satisfactory food would have never been accessible. However, distracting one’s mind with minor goals, such as surviving until spring, can help one to let go of improbable desires: “… as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we became aware of our hunger ...” (74).To express himself in a balanced, clear and collected way indicated Levi’s moral victory over Auschwitz and gave an extra dimension of cogency to his survival. The serenity and flow in his writing demonstrated that, besides surviving, he had been able to rise above the chaos and turmoil of that hellish place and had not yielded to the Nazis' plan of

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