Journal #10: after reading Chapter Ten

"The examination is going well. As I gradually realize it, I seem to grow in stature. He is asking me now on what subject I wrote my degree thesis. I have to make a violent effort to recall that sequence of memories, so deeply buried away: it is as if I was trying to remember the events of a previous incarnation."

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As I read this, I tried to connect it to the many times that I felt my knowledge being tested. In a way, I think all humans feel their worth and gain self-esteem through the words of other humans. Despite God always telling us that each one of us is unique, and that we should love ourselves for who we are, for most people, our confidence depends on how others judge us. In the book, before going to the chemical examination, Levi continuously describes how he felt like he was a not good enough human being by how the Nazis treated him. However, when he goes into the examination, and the examinor questions and talks to him like a fellow human being, he regains his sense of pride and proudness. Before, on his own, he could have never achieved this. This still applies to modern day life. Humans like to hear compliments about themselves, and the more they hear it from the people around them, the more they gain self-esteem, and "grow in stature," as Primo Levi puts it. Maybe the reason why concentration camps were so unbearable for the Jews was because they were deprived of their self-worth. Even now, there are people who get bullied and they are miserable, because they never hear anything good about themselves, and this leads them into the mind set of thinking that they truely are useless.

Words of others has an astounding impact on the way we look at ourselves. It seems like we have turned ourselves into the kind of people who depend and live on the thoughts of others, and without them, we cannot survive.

Journal #9: after reading Chapter Nine

"But in the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to extend a helping hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one's interest that there will be one more 'musselman' dragging himself to work everyday; and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest work, a new art which yields him an ounce of bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive, person benefit; he will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival."

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To be honest, I have always thought of myself as a helping person. Whenever someone asks me for help, no matter how busy or tired I am, I always try my best to help them out with their problems, whether it be advice, a question on the homework, or just simply asking me what the homework is. Although there are times when people asking me for continuous help frustrates me, I calm myself and try to give aid, always reminding myself that by being a helpful person, maybe one day, if I need help, they will help me out the same way that I helped them out. Then, I tried to picture this in Auschwitz. Maybe there is one person who is always naive, to the extent of being naive. Whenever someone asks this person for help, they will always give it, with a smile. The things asked might include "lending" some possessions, doing the hard labour work that no one wants to do, and going first in the soup line and getting all the liquid part of the soup. Normally, helping people out is regarded as a good thing, and the person who does it, purely out of the goodness of their heart, will be rewarded and blessed. Will the helpful person in Auschwitz be blessed? Will others always be grateful to that person and return the favour? I doubt not. More or less, they will probably rid the person of everything that they can, and when that person is being punished by the SS guards, no one will come to help the person, despite the many things that the person has done for them. In Auschwitz, it is not good to be nice. Nice does not bring anything to a person. Being nice is being stupid. People will take advantage, and when there is nothing to take, they will abandon and never take another glance at the person. On the contrary, it is being sly and cunning that one can achieve the ultimate power in Auschwitz. Enemies need to be made in order to gain greater allies. Then, in the end, is there any point in being nice? Nice doesn't feed you, it doesn't dress you, it doesn't save you... Why be nice when you can get so much more by being the complete opposite?

Journal #8: after reading Chapter Eight

"In conclusion: theft in Buna, punished by the civil direction, is authorized and encouraged by the SS; theft in camp, severely repressed by the SS, is considered by the civilians as a normal exchange operation; theft among Haftlinge is generally punished, but the punishment strikes thief and the victim with equal gravity. We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust'; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outline and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire."

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Out of all the chapters of the book, I think this chapter showed the most to the readers about the reality of the inside of the camp, and how corrupt life was. By the descriptions used in the book, the Buna sounds like some sort of business, or a trading zone, in which higher rank people have the good products, while those below have to steal and cheat other people into getting the goods that they want. Some people, when they think of the Jews in the Holocaust, think of innocent victims who were cruelly punished by the Nazi. In a way, although they were innocent in the fact that they had done nothing wrong to deserve punishment, they were definitely not innocent enough to be willing to bond together and help one another out in camp situations. Although some part of human nature makes us naturally competitive and fight for survival, some of the hostility created towards one another even by the Jews in the camp has to be blamed by how cruel the Nazis were to these people, and how they had succeeded in making them feel as low as any human being could possibly be. By what Primo Levi says in this chapter, even the simplest concepts of good and evil, just and unjust were distorted in the camp. Generally, in a situation when someone steals something, normally, the thief is punished for his actions. This is not the case in Auschwitz. The thief and the victim are both equally punished. Is this fair? Even though it's not, there is nothing the Jews can do. When victims realize that they will also get punished for "losing" their possessions, not only will they not reports actions of crime, they will become suspicious of everyone, continuously thinking, "What if that person steals my cloth while I wash? I really need that knife that so-and-so has, how can I get it?" In an environment like this, right and wrong cannot be distinguished, because there seems to be no 'good' as we consider good right now. Maybe the reason that people say that concentration camps were a place in Hell is because even without the physical suffering, all our general, broad concept things that we knew and lived by break down, and without these beliefs, there seems to be no point in living for anything.

Journal #7: after reading Chapter Seven

"Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white and distant, and only warms the skin, but when dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes, I understood how men can worship the sun."

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Everyone knows that we have many things to thank for. Just as I sit here, right now, writing this journal, I know that I have to be thankful that I have a computer to write this in, a brain to think of what to write, two working hands that can type what I think, eyes to read what I have typed, a book to read and write a journal about, a teacher who will read this, etc. There are so many other things that are present all around us, which we take for granted. I guess if one goes to Auschwitz, one begins to realize how precious everything around one is. In this chapter, Primo Levi describes a good day that he had, and how lucky he felt that he could have this happy day. When I first read it, I thought it wasn't very good at all. It sounded like what my bad day would be like. However, because Levi had suffered through freezing weather, when the first sun appeared, although it did not instantly warm the land, it was a relief to know that there still was a sun, amidst the cold winds of winter. Levi also praises that he received more soup than usual. All the times when I had just thrown away my food because I didn't like it all came back to me. I had never learnt to thank anything that God had prized me in my life, and only by reading upon the misfortunes of others did I finally realize this to the fullest extent.

Journal #6: after reading Chapter Six

"Oh, if one could only cry! Oh, if one could only affront the wind as we once used to, on equal terms, and not as we do here, like cringing dogs.

We are outside and everyone picks up his lever. Renyk drops his head between his shoulders, pulls his beret over his ears and lifts his face up to the low grey sky where the inexorable snow swirls around: 'Si j'avey une chien, je ne le chasse pas dehors.'"

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Chapter six describes the everyday labour work in Auschwitz. Just reading the various sufferings that Primo Levi had to go through emphasizes how lucky we are to be living in a world where everything would be a luxury, compared to the situations of concentration camps in WWII. Just yesterday, while I was busy doing my biology homework at three o'clock in the morning, I remember complaining about how my back ached, how tired I was, and how much I wanted to go to sleep. I wonder how these people felt while they were doing their work. They probably wanted to stretch their backs, get some food and a sip of water, and rest. Perhaps maybe they were so tired that thoughts of "I'd rather die than continue doing this," ran through their heads. But, camp life does not allow any of that. The Nazis had managed to reduce the Jews as small as possible, so that they could do nothing without permission; permission to rest, permission to eat, permission to stop, permission to when to go to bed, etc. In a way, they were dogs, and the SS soldiers had become their masters.

Why bother to think? Why bother to complain? Why bother to do anything except what they tell us to do? What's the point? Complaining and whining never helped anyone. It just earned more slaps. It won't help. Nothing will anymore... We are doomed to do this until we die. Death... We cannot even choose when to die. It might be tomorrow, a few weeks later, or maybe a year. They choose. We have no choices. We are left in this hopeless camp, and no one will help. No one will care. No one will know...

If I was a Jew, I would have thought like that.

Journal #5: after reading Chapter Five

"A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one's early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim once again up to the surface, but this time I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me of being effectively awake."

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In the book, Primo Levi describes the night; the sleeps that were uncomfortable, and the terrible nightmares of the blissful outside world. For me, I understand the fears of the night. Although it is quite shameful of me to admit it, I still fear the darkness. Being alone in the dark allows my mind to walk around endlessly, bringing back memories of all the scary movies I had watched in my lifetime (which isn't that many!). However, there are times when I am in the mood to stay up at night, with all the lights off. This is when I want to allow my mind to wander off. In a way, I think I have the ability to conquer night. When my mind begins to wander when I don't want to, I just shut it off and try to force myself to go to sleep. Eventually, I end up falling asleep and I no longer have to fear for unpleasant memories. When I'm in the mood to think deeply, I can allow the night to carry my thoughts on, until I am ready to shut them again. Unfortunately, while in Auschwitz, Primo Levi could not control the night. Auschwitz had made everyone exhausted and devastated that no one had the strength to conquer the darkness, and use the darkness to their advantage. When I think of what I would have felt like if I was left alone every night, and I couldn't control the straying of my thoughts, I think I would have gone crazy. Although thinking is good, some thoughts in my head brought horror, and to imagine facing that horror every night............ It would have been unbearable for me.

Journal #4: after reading Chapter Four

"But life in Ka-Be is not this. It is not the crucial moments of the selections, it is not the grotesque episodes of the diarrhoea and lice controls, it is not even the illnesses.

Ka-Be is the Lager without its physical discomforts. So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, and how much they have taken away from us, what this life is."

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Ever since I was young, I wanted to become a doctor. It seemed like a perfect profession for me. I had always been fascinated by the sciences, and I was always more than welcome to help someone out. Also, it seemed 'cool' to be the person who saves lives of other people. That was my idea of what a doctor was, and to me, that was how a doctor should behave; always smiling and being the person who gives hope to sick people. However, in Auschwitz, my idea of a doctor was apparently starkly different from what the doctors at the Ka-Be were like. As Levi describes, doctors there were just as corrupt as the Jews stealing in order to survive. Once a Jew was admitted into the Ka-Be, all his possessions that he had brought along with him were taken away for the doctors to use. The doctors took these and used it for their benefit. When I was reading this, it made me angry at how the doctors misused their positions. They were supposed to be symbols of hope and love to their patients, yet they were abusing their high rank for their benefit. It made me feel betrayed and ashamed that I wanted to have the same jobs as these people. I continuously reminded myself not to become like them, no matter how much power I gain from my position.