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Levi Vs. Survival In Auschwitz By Primo Levi

1067 Words5 Pages

Identity is the unique characteristics, beliefs, and personality traits of an individual that distinguish them from others. Some aspects of identity are chosen, such as clothing or where you live, while others are out of your control, such as skin color or country of origin. Every identity has a multitude of different facets that all come together to form a single person. In psychology, there are two main types of personality tests: typology tests and trait tests. Typology tests have been proven time and time again to be inaccurate in comparison to trait tests because they categorize peoples’ personalities into simple dichotomous splits, meaning you either are or you aren’t something, no in between. Trait tests, on the other hand, show to what …show more content…

My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.” No matter how Levi identified previous to this, all he was seen as now was a Jew, and therefore a prisoner. A baptism in Christian faith symbolizes the death of an old life and the beginning of a new life. In a much more morbid sense, this use of the word baptism is a symbol of the death of who the prisoners were before, and the beginning of their lives as an unjustly tortured criminal. Later in the text, Levi says, “‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), [the guard] replied, pushing me inside with a shove.” The guard’s abrupt answer demonstrates the complete lack of humanity shown to the prisoners in concentration camps. The Nazis believed the Jews to be inferior to them, labeling them all as “bad” and therefore preventing themselves from making any personal connections with them. Because it was not personal, they were able to treat prisoners as subhuman without their consciences weighing on them. Even outside of concentration camps, people were discriminated against for being Jewish. Ruth Kluger explains that whenever she left her house she “wore a Judenstern to alert other pedestrians that [she] wasn't really white,” because to the Nazis her religion outshone her physical appearance. Though her family was not very religious, only participating in high holidays, their religion was the only thing others saw. Kluger writes, “Now that my tentative faith in my homeland was being damaged by daily increments beyond repair, I became Jewish in defense.” Her identity was forced to shift from one of patriotism and love for her country to her religion that she knew little about. Describing the wall built between Aryans and Jews, Kluger writes that “The girl had asserted the superiority of her Germanic forefathers as opposed to the vermin race I

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“Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss, Gunter Grass.” In Peter Gay’s memoir, My German Question, he articulates what it was like living in Germany with the presence of the Nazis or in his own experience the lack there of. Peter lived in a family that didn’t directly practice Judaism and most German families didn’t perceive them as Jews until the Nazis defined what a Jew was to the public. The persecution of other Jewish families in Germany where far worse than what Peter experienced growing up. There was a major contrast between how Gay’s family was treated and how other Jews who actively practiced the religion in Germany were treated which played a contributing factor for why the family stayed so long before they left.

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“Meir Katz was moaning: Why don't they just shoot us now?” (Wiesel 103). This shows how the harsh conditions and punishment of the Nazi officers dehumanize the jewish prisoners in concentration camps. It is the process of dehumanization that made possible the evils of the Holocaust and makes possible the smaller evils that occur on a daily basis. The Nazi guards, as revealed in the Elie Wiesel memoir, Night, were able to victimize their prisoners because the process of dehumanization desensitized them to the evils they inflicted.

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Weisell explains what life was like in a concentration camp; “ Hunger- thirst- fear- transport- selection- fire- chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times they meant something else (Weisellix).” The Jews were treated not as humans because they were not viewed as such in the eyes of the Nazi’s.

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Throughout all the terror and dehumanization the Jews faced, their real human relationships with others were what kept them truly living. While the Nazis attempted to turn the Jewish people against each other and diminish them to animals, the basic human relationships formed between prisoners, and their continual acts of kindness were the true act of Nazi rebellion and what kept them sane. While “Help was often of a minimal and/or symbolic nature… ability to retain part of his personality and self-respect, and this is given considerable importance in relation to the capacity for survival” (Davidson). The dignity that the Jewish prisoners fought to maintain came from their inclusion and importance in their social group. Therefore, while they attempted to, the Nazis could not steal their dignity.

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Jews had the same experience during the Holocaust and the quote is evidence of how they were mistreated by the Nazis. The Jews were mistreated and sent away for being Jewish and not German. In the Holocaust, Jews were sent to concentration camps where they were burned to death and had to work for Germans because they were Jews. The Nazis believed they should be excluded from the German race because they were not like them. The people who were living their lives differently, in both events, were found excluded, judged, and killed because they lived differently than

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In the beginning of Kluger’s “Death Camp” chapter, she immediately alludes to the idea of Jewish hope: “During the entire Hitler period I never heard a Jew voice the opinion of the Germans could be victorious…to hope was a duty” (89). This seems, of anything, to be a last, desperate attempt at holding onto the life European Jews once knew – one entirely estranged from the dehumanizing and prejudicial actions of the German Nazi regime. It also may begin to justify why may Jews did not leave Germany (as well as surrounding countries) as the former’s social, political and economic agency quickly faded, entering the death camps. Although Kluger describes significant financial restraints -- chiefly the Reichsfluchtsteuer – she also implicitly describes

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From then on the Nazi’s treated their prisoners like objects rather than people. They dehumanized and desensitized them, thinking of them as machines that could only complete simple tasks and required a small bowl of broth with a single slice of bread to function. The Nazi’s took the victims of the Holocaust and stripped them of their identities, violated them beyond their breaking point, and wiped them clean of all emotion. First of all, the SS dehumanized the prisoners of the concentration camps by stripping them of their identities. The Nazi’s infringed upon people’s everyday lives and deprived them of their originality.

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The Jews were seen as the route of all their problems, and they were deeply convinced most everything was this one race’s fault. With trials such as selection, countless Jewish lives were ended because they were considered too “weak” and did not meet the required expectations. Jewish children were traded through a pedophiliac trafficking scandal and most women were sent to the crematorium immediately as observed by Wiesel by a SS officer, “He gave the order: ‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’ Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion.”

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During the Holocaust, prisoners were dehumanized and weren’t seen as the people they were, they were recognized as numbers and any form of identity they previously knew was stripped from

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Many Germans, during WWII had started to take on the ideology of Hitler – that Jewish citizens in Germany were the cause of their poverty and misfortune. Of course, many knew that this was merely a form of scapegoating, and although they disagreed with the majority of Germany’s citizens, many would not speak up for fear of isolation (Boone,

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Identity is something people tend to think of as consistent, however that is far from the case. The Oxford English dictionary states that the definition of identity is “ The characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is.” The allegorical novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding tackles the issue of identity while following young boys from the ages twelve and down as they struggle with remembering their identities when trapped on a deserted island. Identity is affected by the influence of society and how individuals influence society based on their identities. By looking at Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and Sigmund Freud 's philosophical ideas, it becomes clear that identity is affected by society through peer pressure and social normalities.

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In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.

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What is Identity? Identity is like a fingerprint; it clearly determines who people are. Identity is something that people are not born with, it is an act people do that classifies their identity. People need to act upon their own choices to determine their own identity rather than being influenced by the choices of others. So, people must follow their own path in order to keep their own unique identity.

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In many ways, Nazis had physically, mentally, and emotionally dehumanized their victims. The Jews were treated so badly by the Nazis that they felt as if they weren’t even humans; they felt like animals. For example, the Jewish prisoners were always being yelled at with harsh tones. Eliezer only remembers one time when a Polish

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I was only 10 years old, sitting in a warm classroom in late May as my fifth-grade teacher taught us a lesson on human anatomy. At first, the out pour of information made me stressed and overwhelmed, but something deep inside me sparked. Once school let out, I was left on an edge of a cliff with hundreds of questions, but no answers. After fifth-grade, I become intrigued by the world of medicine.

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