This essay will attempt to explore the role of the individual in the larger historical event of the Holocaust carried out by the 1933 Nazi Germany. Explicitly, this paper will make an effort to further examine Primo Levi’s classic memoir of the Holocaust, The Reawakening. The contention here will be to look into the role of the individual, both as victim and as persecutor, in which is paramount in historical events of major magnitude. Additionally, several correlations and important references will be made to Primo Levi’s first “ouvrage,” Survival in Auschwitz, the companion volume to “The Reawakening.” Equally, “The Reawakening / The Truce, “is a deep echoing reminder of the humanity we must share with others despite atrocity.
The Nazis evacuated the Auschwitz camp in the face of the Red Army in January, 1945. Levi, however, survived due to
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A true human tragedy. Whom, better than George Orwell could have described the poignant state of Europe and is people? April 8th, 1945 – right after Primo Levi been unshackled by the Red Army and taken along by the Soviet Union’s military forces – Orwell depicts, “the frightful destructiveness of modern war” and the long period of reconstruction that lay ahead. He begins the final paragraph with the arresting sentence: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization as a whole.” Clearly, he is referring not just to the work of the allied air forces, but to the whole scope of destruction inherent in modern warfare, as subsequent sentences show: “The desolation extends all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad. Where there has been ground fighting the destruction is even more thorough than where there has merely been bombing.” Orwell, at this very moment was seeing the magnitude of the war, when millions of others were defining the horrors before his eyes as just another day- life. He was Primo