Primo Levi Prisoners In Auschwitz Summary

In the book, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli he tells us his story of his time in Auschwitz. In May of 1944 the author, a Hungarian Jewish physician, was deported with his wife and daughter by cattle car to the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz. Dr. Nyiszli is a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp which is located in Poland. Dr. Nyiszli eventually got separated from his wife and daughter, and volunteered to work under the supervision of Josef Mengele, the head doctor in the concentration camp. It was under his supervision that Dr. Nyiszli witnessed many innocent people die. Dr. Nyiszli did anything possible to survive and his main reason of survival was so he could tell the world what happened at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

From both the author’s preface and chapter one I was able to determine that the desired audience is anyone who has heard about the holocaust and knows the atrocities that occurred. With this in mind Levi hopes to “furnish documentation [ to understand] certain aspects of the human mind. ”(Levi9) His audience could also include young adults with the purpose of helping them understand the severity of it and understand it as a “sinister alarm-signal.” Moving on to rhetorical techniques, Levi’s tone which seemed to be full of emotion helped strengthen the overall purpose of the book.

On April 11, 1945, Harry J. Herder Jr. and his company discovered one of the many secret horrors of World War II that dotted the European landscape; the Buchenwald concentration camp. The battle hardened man who had seen his fair share of death and human suffering surveyed the camp with a sinking feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. Before his eyes lay human beings so starved they could not pick themselves up off of their bunks, children who had never seen the outside of the camp fence, partially clothed bodies and shaved heads. Shocked and disgusted, Harry J. Herder Jr. and two of his comrades then took a deeper tour of the camp. Eerie, and abandoned by the German soldiers lay the “medical rooms” with human organs floating in jars of liquid and the gallows where unruly prisoners were hung.

The Holocaust was a dreadful and truly awful time period, people were dehumanized, and shamed into losing their faith while they experienced tragic and awful death and pain. One Jewish survivor documents his experiences with death in his memoir, ‘Night’, Elie Wiesel. The novel is filled with his tales of death, dehumanization, and faith throughout the concentration camp, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the Jews lost their innocence that they once had. In the novel, Night, Elie, his father, and his fellow Jews lost their innocence through dehumanization, loss of faith, and experience of death and violence.

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when they were still being tortured in every way even after being evacuated. “The snow fell thickly. We were forbidden to sit down or even move (Weisel 92). Wiesel, the author shows how poorly the inmates were being cared for, treated worse than animals. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed.

The severely cruel conditions of concentration camps had a profound impact on everyone who had the misfortune of experiencing them. For Elie Wiesel, the author of Night and a survivor of Auschwitz, one aspect of himself that was greatly impacted was his view of humanity. During his time before, during, and after the holocaust, Elie changed from being a boy with a relatively average outlook on mankind, to a shadow of a man with no faith in the goodness of society, before regaining confidence in humanity once again later in his life. For the first 13 years of his life, Elie seemed to have a normal outlook on humanity.

Let this essay be a reminder to the world that totalitarian ideologies will bring forth catastrophe just as National Socialism did in Nazi Germany. The memoirs of Rudolf Hoss, Death Dealer, is one of the most detailed accounts of a man who was the Commandant of Auschwitz, and is known as one of the greatest mass murderers in history. In the forward Primo Levi wrote to Death Dealer, he stated that even though this autobiography is filled with evil and has no literary quality, it’s one of the most instructive books ever published because it describes a human life exemplary in its way (Hoss, 3). In this essay, I will argue that Primo Levi thought Death Dealer is one of the most instructive books because it seeks to explain how ordinary men

In the book Night by Ellie Wiesel a young boy describes his experiences as a Jew in the concentration camps during World War II. During this time, Wiesel witnessed many horrific acts. Two of these were executions. Though the processes of the executions were similar, the condemned and the Jew’s reactions to the executions differed tremendously. The first execution he describes in his book is one of many that occurred during his time in the camp.

Critical Summary Victor Frankl ’s “Experiences from a Concentration Camp” from his book Man’s Search for Meaning details the everyday occurances of the average prisoner in a concentration camp. Through a series of brief stories accounting his experience in concentration camps, Frankl vividly depicts the suffering that he and other prisoners experienced and how these experiences affected them mentally.

Elie Wiesel’s true story Night, is an intriguing story about the Holocaust. The guards and even veteran prisoners are cruel to others. The punishments, even for tiny faults, are unthinkably horrid. Man does not care how old or weak someone is; this makes the children and teens change and act inhumane towards other prisoners, even towards their own family. It clearly, and painfully, explains man’s inhumanity to man.

The Nazis were successful in fully dehumanizing Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. This brutal treatment often led to the loss of hope in these camps, part of the Nazis goal. In Night, Eliezer Wiesel’s memoir, he tells of the many instances where he experienced dehumanization during his time at several concentration camps. The Nazis eliminated people’s humanity in many ways, including starvation, nakedness, and taking away their names in exchange for a number. Starvation causes great suffering and deprives people of an essential part of life.

The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.

After going through so much, many people do not have the same mindset as they did before. Being tortured and watching others being tortured changes a person’s life, especially Elie’s, his father’s, Moshe the Beadle’s, and Rabbi Eliahou’s. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, shares his own experience of going through a concentration camp, and it is clear that many things in his life changed

The sheer amount of lives lost in this horrid time astonishes a large quantity of today’s population. Not only were people being tossed into the concentration camps, but soldiers and civilians were killed in the fight for their lives’. Human beings were given numbers and made to look like clones, as if to hide the misery of dehumanization. Loss of self and personal identity is shown throughout Night by Elie Wiesel. When hearing

Charles’ actions and qualities are symbolic of the notion and importance of humanity, helping Levi transition from a prisoner mindset to the mindset of a free man, therefore acting as a transitionary guide between oppression and freedom. The 10 days described in chapter 17, represent the rehabilitation period that Levi experienced before his emancipation at the fall of Auschwitz. For Levi, this chapter emphasises not only the importance of the last ten days and the importance of man but the importance of Charles as his saviour. For Charles, these actions are normal and expected, having only arrived a week earlier he maintains his humanity, still acting in the same way the men are meant to act. However, for Levi and the other prisoners, these