The Gray Zone by Primo Levi Essay

The article, “Teens Who Fought Hitler,” by Lauren Tarshis describes many hardships Ben,a teenage Jew who with his family, faced, just like thousands of other Jews who were forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. The Jews were terribly treated everywhere in the ghetto. Each person was allotted only one tenth of food a day that they should be eating. Many diseases including typhus spread. Before the Warsaw Ghetto, no Jew could be at libraries or public parks and were not allowed out of their house after five o'clock.

almost half a million Jews dies at the Auschwitz camp. Death was everywhere you turned in the

However, thousands still died every day at Treblinka, a concentration camp in Poland. “At the peak of operations, 15,000 men, women and children died there each day. Death on that scale took enormous labor, and towards the end, when the SS began to fear discovery, the mass graves were opened and the rotting bodies burned.” The Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners, were responsible of disposing bodies of other prisoners. The purpose of surviving till the end was to tell

Survival in Auschwitz written by Primo Levi is a first-hand description of the atrocities which took place in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. The book provides an explicit depiction of camp life: the squalor, the insufficient food supply, the seemingly endless labour, cramped living space, and the barter-based economy which the prisoners lived. Levi through use of his simple yet powerful words outlined the motive behind Auschwitz, the tactical dehumanization and extermination of Jews. This paper will discuss experiences and reactions of Jews who labored in Auschwitz, and elaborate on the pre-Auschwitz experiences of Jews who were deported to Auschwitz and gassed to death on their arrival, which had not been

Treblinka was a german work camp during the holocaust, jews sent there were not to come back they would work in gravel pits until they couldn't any longer. They were then sent to treblinka II,a death camp complete with a furnace designed for jews. Many died in treblinka over 900,000 jews were sent to treblinka, leading to about 900,000 deaths. Through treblinka's terror rain, only about 63 jews survived. Treblinka was one of the worst chapters of the holocaust many thousands died in this near unimaginable way.

At the entrance to each death camp, there was a process of Selektion or selection. Pregnant women, small children, the sick or handicapped, and the elderly were immediately condemned to death. As horrific as it was, it didn’t surprise many that Hitler had the audacity to do these terrible things. The Holocaust was an act of genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany killed about two thirds of the population of Jews in Europe from 1941-1945 but the trouble started brewing much before that. Though there were only a small amount of survivors, very few alive to this day, there are many pieces of literature that help prove that this in fact happened. Literature can help us remember and honor the victims of the Holocaust because, it gives different

Life during the Holocaust was a grim, harsh time. While many deaths during the time period was the cause of the Nazi association, many ended their life on their own terms. A quote from Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, “To die, it’s easy, but you have to struggle for life,” describes the mental and physical struggles each Jew, and any other person targeted in the Holocaust, went through. Physical conditions, mentality, and the blissful promises of death took a toll on the bodies and minds of the victims of the Holocaust.

Have you ever had a family member murdered? You probably felt extremely sad and depressed, maybe even mad. Well imagine 6 million murders. This is what we call the Holocaust. One of the first concentration camps was established in Germany. It was soon after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. After a couple weeks of Nazi’s forming into power, the SS(Protection Squad), elite guards, the police, and civilian authorities organized multiple concentration(detention) camps to follow Nazi Policy. There soon were camps all over the land of Germany. Bigger cities had bigger camps, smaller cities had smaller camps. They were all still camps, though. SS units wore skull and bones symbols on their caps to identify. Inside camps were concrete boxes, gas chambers, side by side, deadly. People disposed in each. Packed into a box, naked, rubbing with other naked people. Stepping in the mud barefoot constantly. Eating bread constantly and not very often. Dead corpse’s just lying around, being picked up as food is being handed out at the same exact time. Your toilet was also your bowl to eat out of, and to clean the feces off of it, you used your urine. Your body was constantly dirty. And then the thought of depression? It was just terrible inside these camps.

Friendships were based on pragmatism and selfish interest. Faced with utter solitude, many prisoners would lose all motivation for survival. Out of the thousands that entered Auschwitz weekly, only a few hundred would survive. These usually included the most valuable of prisoners, such as doctors, tailors, and shoemakers. Levi and many other camp veterans understood this and reacted to make themselves appear useful and not to drown in their detestable conditions.

Life for the Sonderkommando during the holocaust was different from other inmates. Survival came with a different meaning. Both the film Son of Saul and the reading This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen gave an inside look on their means of survival, resistance and the effects it had on their human dignity.

In 1939, Hitler was unsure of what he was going to do with the Jews; the Nazis were tossing around options and ideas with the goal of removing Jews from the population. The German invasion into Poland, allowed for the first ghetto, regarded as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews. Ghettos were enclosed, isolated urban areas designated for Jews. Living under strict regulations, with unthinkable living conditions, and crammed into small areas, the ghettos destroyed all hope of retaliating. In this paper, I will discuss what life would be like to be a Jew inside one of the 1,000 of ghettos within Poland and the Soviet Union. I will imagine myself a member of the Jewish council, describing the

In “My Life as a Muslim in the West’s Grey Zone” written by Laila Lalami in The New York Times Magazine on November 20, 2015, she discusses the “grey zone” which is the group of Muslims who are not extremists identify as, they are not involved with Isis or The Crusaders. Lalami’s argument throughout her article is that the grey zone is diminishing due to Isis attacks as well as the western polarized thinking about the Muslim community. If the grey zone completely disappears Isis will win and become a bigger threat to The West.

Throughout Primo Levi’s, The Drowned And The Saved, Levi reflects on his experiences during the Holocaust in an attempt to convey the tragedies suffered. In doing this, he touches upon his findings of what makes human’s human. He then shows how the Lagers were intended to systematically strip these traits from their prisoners. Overall, he notes two main characteristics of humans: a need for distinction and from this stems the desire for power. First, on the idea of a need for distinction, Levi immediately notes a need throughout all history for separation of good and bad, a “we” and “they” mentality (Levi pg 36).

Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the

When in the extreme situations such as those created by the two World Wars, humans are often pushed to the brink of both mental and physical. “Survival in Auschwitz”, subtitled and originally titled “If This Is A Man”, is a novel written by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi detailing the measures he took to survive ten months in Auschwitz. Published in 1959, it was written shortly after World War II and serves as a primary source to its events. Contained in those pages are discussions of the human mental condition when stripped of the conditions and items that create a person’s identity and dignity. Upon entry to the concentration camp, all personal effects were taken away - including clothing and shoes. The prisoners were given the camp uniform and shoes with wooden soles. While the first World War asked its soldiers to abandon their personal identity to devote themselves to the cause of their country, Auschwitz demanded that its prisoners give up their personal identity in favor of becoming a cog in the machine of the concentration camp. Within “Survival in Auschwitz”, the concept of what makes a man is questioned and picked apart by Primo Levi.