"We talk about these things, stumbling from one puddle to the other, between the black of the sky and the mud of the road...."
"...This year has gone by so quickly. This time last year I was a free man: an outlaw but free, I had a name and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile and healthy body. I used to think of many far-away things: of my work, of the end of the war, of good and evil, of the nature of things and of the laws which govern human actions; and also the mountains, of singing and loving, of music, of poetry . . . the future stood before me as a great treasure . . . I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself."
I find this story ironic. As one people sought to prove the others as beasts, they became beasts themselves. The Germans stole everything from the Jews, not only their possessions and family, but their bodies, minds, and spirits. These had drowned.
It is insane to think of the depths of human depravity, and how the seed of which is planted in each of us. We have it in our blood, the fall of man, sin. Primo spoke his story, not as a tale of survival, but as a deep analysis and immortalizing retelling (in which it could never be forgotten) of how and what the human is when they are stripped of everything. Hope, kindness, charity; any goodness that can be expressed was taken, as every man was a lone and broken vessel.
It is a sad reality indeed, the hopelessness and malice that sin brings, and how demonizing and beastial it makes even the kindest man. It makes us lie without guilt, spy without regret, torture without remorse, and kill without conscience.
"Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter."
It is a miracle that there were even survivors.
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