Survival in Auschwitz

“Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.” This short quote is taken from Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz”. It depicts a true story of Primo Levi during …

…was never the same before that. “He will be a man whose life and death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in the way that one can understand the double sense of the term, extermination camp, and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: to live on the bottom.