Reading through the final chapters of Survival in Auschwitz.... wow. It's hard to say I have any one defining thought regarding the writing as much as I'm just shocked by how depressing and awful it was. I can't begin to place myself mentally in Levi's situation. The ways he speaks on hope and looking toward the future in the closing sections are impossible for me to imagine and speaks incredible volumes on just how horrible his trials were. A few separate lines or pieces stood out to me:
"...it did not seem possible that there could really exist any other world or time other than our world of mud and our sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now incapable of imagining." Not only that part, but also a previous paragraph details how it was so mentally pointless to imagine the future and the changes it could bring. That's honestly crushing to try to understand. This line also ties in to Levi marking the Ten Days as "outside world and time", equally surreal and genuine in that no man could have dreamed the horrors of Auschwitz and those days, but they happened, and they didn't seem to shock Levi.
"The fact that I was not selected depended above all on chance and does not prove that my faith was well founded." This quote and the paragraph preceding it are honestly chilling.. knowing that you could die at any moment for essentially no reason is awful enough. But Levi being essentially completely acceptable of that fact shows just how terrible the entire ordeal was.
It was also interesting to see Levi suggest that if he had simply possessed a dry rag during the rain, he could have been completely and perfectly happy, contrasting that with his statement earlier in the book regarding how one can never be completely happy or completely unhappy.
Edit: I commented on Jamie and Caroline's posts.
"...it did not seem possible that there could really exist any other world or time other than our world of mud and our sterile and stagnant time, whose end we were by now incapable of imagining." Not only that part, but also a previous paragraph details how it was so mentally pointless to imagine the future and the changes it could bring. That's honestly crushing to try to understand. This line also ties in to Levi marking the Ten Days as "outside world and time", equally surreal and genuine in that no man could have dreamed the horrors of Auschwitz and those days, but they happened, and they didn't seem to shock Levi.
"The fact that I was not selected depended above all on chance and does not prove that my faith was well founded." This quote and the paragraph preceding it are honestly chilling.. knowing that you could die at any moment for essentially no reason is awful enough. But Levi being essentially completely acceptable of that fact shows just how terrible the entire ordeal was.
It was also interesting to see Levi suggest that if he had simply possessed a dry rag during the rain, he could have been completely and perfectly happy, contrasting that with his statement earlier in the book regarding how one can never be completely happy or completely unhappy.
Edit: I commented on Jamie and Caroline's posts.
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