Journal #2: after reading Chapter Two

"This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips wyhile we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about? One cannot think any more, it is like being already dead. Someone sits down on the ground. The time passes drop by drop."
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Chapter two of Survival in Auschwitz was about Primo Levi's first impressions of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the few months after that. While I read this, I tried to put myself in their situation and I tried to imagine what it would be like if one day, everything that I had, and everything that I loved was taken away from me. To be honest, I think I would have blamed God. I think I would lose faith in Him, angered that he allowed this terrible tragedy to happen. I would have been convinced to think that there was in fact no God, and I had believed in a fake figure all my life. I would just be angry at everything around me.

What stil amazes me everytime I hear about the Holocaust is how the Nazis could be so cruel to another human being. Although the Jews were of a different race, it still didn't change the fact that Jews were equivalent human beings. Did the Nazi soldiers not feel guilty at night? How could they live on, knowing that they had teared up families and taken millions of lives? How could they stand to look at themselves in the mirror and see their own reflections?

It really scared me at how cruel and evil human nature could be.