This book immediately made me think of a movie called La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful). It’s a heart-wrenching movie about an Italian-Jewish family who is taken to a concentration camp. I highly recommend it, although it is almost guaranteed to make you cry. I watched it in high school with my class and we were all crying by the end of it.
Movie recommendations aside, this book is both hard and easy to read. It’s hard to read because of the subject matter; it’s a tough subject. And yet Levi makes it easy to read with the style he writes in. From the first page, he sets the tone of both caring and not-caring. What I mean is that he cares about the little details, adding the fact that refugees came searching for “a hiding place, a fire, a pair of shoes” (3). He cares enough to include small details like this, but he does it in such a nonchalant fashion. He doesn’t seem to care that much about what is happening. It seems like he has accepted it and that’s that, this is the way the world works now.
Something else I noticed is the fact that he often refers to what is happening as nonsensical, incomprehensible, mad, crazy, strange, etc. In this way he is showing that, even though he has accepted this as the way his world is now, he still knows that it’s not right. People should not be treating other people this way. And that’s another point of the book: the prisoners aren’t human anymore. The Germans have taken their humanity from them. Now they are animals at best, lifeless pieces of a machine at worst. This is why we have the subtitle of the book: Survival in Auschwitz: If This is a Man. I’m interested to see how this theme continues to play out.
P.S. I commented on Osten’s and Caroline’s posts.
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