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.