Like all Holocaust stories, Survival in Auschwitz sparked many emotions within. At times it was shock, others despair, and never really was there a lot of happiness. Many of us are very familiar with the events of the Holocaust, the tragedies and unthinkable cruelties often times being used for film plots. However, when I hear or read written accounts from those who actually were in these prison camps, it really makes you realize that these events aren’t just something that happened in the past. For instance, one of our close family friends told us that if you go to Dachau, one of the concentration camps, you’ll find his name etched into one of the bunks. Hearing this, along with reading Primo Levi’s work kind of take the theatrics out of it. I feel as if we often view events such as the Holocaust as something in the past, distant and far away. However, it really wasn’t that long ago, and many individuals are still dealing with the aftermath.

In terms of the actual work, I looked it up online shortly after reading it and found that it was originally called, If This is a Man. I think it more accurately describes the nature of not only those imprisoned, but those who imprisoned them as well. This work really portrays Hobbes’ state of nature. Theses people were placed in this state of pure survival, and thus, individuals became focused on staying alive. There was no government, it was simply a matter of living. Many of these poor interned individuals lost their civility as they simply attempted to preserve themselves. They did what they had to do essentially. Could we argue that they became monsters, losing their touch with humanity? In truth, I don’t believe so, because I feel that we all have this animal instinct of self-preservation lurking inside. We all fear death, and thus we do whatever necessary to survive. It only takes the right conditions for this nature to emmerge.

The real monsters were the Nazis. This endless tormenting and unnecessary cruelty show the disgusting nature of humanity. How can anyone look at a fellow human and regard him as anything less than a man, simply based on religious and ethnic origins? The fact that these humans were treated as laboratory mice, slaves, and regardewd in a manner far less than even the lowliest of creatures deserve is horrifiying. How can someone sew two people together without anesthesia, force men into hours of slave labour, only allowing them to eat scraps, and even turn humans into soap? What causes this complete lack of compassion in humanity?

All in all, Survival in Auschwitz made me feel the same way I felt when I went to the Holocaust Memorial in DC. No wonder these people became so focused on survival. I just cannot comprehend how no one realizes, or speaks up against, the atrocities being committed against a fellow man.

Reading the back cover of this book, I see among generally accurate praise the statement that “Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit”. I’ve clearly read a different book. 

In my eyes, If This Is a Man remains a lasting testament to the laughable frailness of the human spirit. It is an observation of an experiment—an experiment to see just how far and how quickly a “human” can go to not being human. And it was pretty quick. From the moment the inmates are thrust into the room that barely fits them, stripped naked, and shaved, they degenerate into “phantoms,” “hollow”. They start out as naïve gentlemen and, if they don’t die, transform into ruthless beasts. This is not just a state of nature as Hobbes would image it; it is a regulated state of nature. It is as if the Nazis threw the uncountable numbers of inmates into a huge yet cramped arena, gave them barely adequate provisions and inadequate necessities, and told them to fight to the death. In a sense, this is exactly what they did. Those who did not quickly adapt to the situation died, those who couldn’t discriminate between friends, enemies, and useful tools died, those who stubbornly held on to their “human” spirit died, and a lot of other people died for no particular reason. Only the adaptive, the clever, the ruthless, and, most of all, the lucky, survived. Levi portrays himself as the lucky. He shows many situations throughout the book in which he, in the face of absolute despair, manages to wiggle out due to situations which he had little to no control over (i.e. chance). He gets friends at just the right time, goes to the hospital at just the right time, and has a lot of other things happen at just the right time, the starkest of which is when he lives through a selection with the knowledge that his ticket was probably switched out with someone else’s, whom was then doomed to die because he…was out of luck.   

Near the end, we see one of those individuals who, going by that one line in the back cover, possessed an indestructible human spirit. This man was apparently connected to a group of inmates who were still human, a willful few that had somehow managed to actually sabotage a part of the camp. And what happened to this individual and his spirit? He was captured, hanged, and made a show out of as the crowd was forced to march by his corpse. If there was a hero—a Man—in this book, that would probably be him; but he was definitely not a survivor. 

After reading Survival in Auschwitz for a second time, I have to say this is one of the best texts we’ve read all year. It’s the only true work of non-fiction (Columbus you were lieing through your teeth!)  we’ve read throughout this entire course, and it makes me incredibly disappointed. This retelling made me remember how vivid and encapsulating true stories can be, and how it can makes events that occurred in our real world so physically real. Through Levi, I can it least be given a portion of the experiences of the grottoes of the German concentration camps, and the embodiments of the men running them. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to the experience of time travel. Arts 1 needs more non-fiction, and from a first-hand telling!

Enough of that, the first idea that comes to mind is the title: Survival in Auschwitz. This title is far too literal to only the context of the story, not the brilliant telling or insight that Levi gives us. Some of his sentences really make me stop for a moment and think hard. Many of them come passing through my mind days later. The Italian Jew’s life in the Polish ghettos give him an experience and perspective that most men couldn’t gain within a lifetime, and he gives such strong resonance to his readers. Blame this incorrect cover on American publishers for trying to make such a compelling tale’s title another alteration based on commercial appeal. Levi’s real title from its Italian print is “Se questo è un uomo or in english “Is this a Man?”, which resembles and signifies his struggles and consistent emasculation throughout the text to a infinitely greater extent. What have the German people made him, what have they distorted his self-reflection to?

The most interesting aspect of the story is it’s lack of linear format. Within the center bulk of the autobiographical recount, all events lack firm dates, in fact Primo openly states that majority of the events told are in no particular order. The reasoning behind this has to be that Levi cannot recall which events happened in which order. The labors done each day is endless, and lacks difference or significance of the days before. Almost everyday is relentlessly replayed and painfully similar to the ones preceding it. Levi openly reminisces that the following days are nothing to look forward to, he’s trapped in an endless loop of torture! And we the readers are given a false and bias perspective upon reading his account. We know he enters Monowitz in the starting months of 1944, less than a year before the Soviets would invade the heartland of Poland. Thus he only needs to survive eleven months of the death camp to survive, but he certainly doesn’t get this blessing of foresight.  Within those camps who knew how long it would be until the war ended? Remember when George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in 2001? I do, I remember televised he said they’d be out of there within months. Look where the troops are still stationed eleven years later! It’s only within the final 30 pages that we see any signs of the Red Army’s approach, but even then who says Levi will survive the labor in the Winter’s cold, or that he won’t be chosen for the furnaces? Who says that even days before the Soviets arrive he won’t be forced to walk the infamous death marches? The eleven months he spent there toiling in the dirt, crushing his back and starving day to day without any clear light to the end of his pitch-black tunnel is the worst kind of torture I could ever imagine. This man is our modern Dante, he’s been through the Seven Rings of Hell and back.

Alright, since there were quite a few stories to read on this week, I’ll go over some of my select favorites from each author (Borges being the only one with multiple…).

The Cooked Cat:

This stood out as a very weird, fragmented story to me. The nature of the characters are sadistic, and the writing style he had seemed very chaotic – I can visualize all of the characters and spaces in the story to be rugged, messy and unorganized – it’s just the general feeling I got from the narrative. Don’t get me wrong – I did enjoy it, but why we studied it, I’ll never know… I could name a collective of stories that have similar themes, like Story of O or any number of episodes from Ulysses. Also, just when I thought we hadn’t had enough translated texts in the course…

Daisy Dolls:

This was yet again another odd piece.  I derived the theme of deconstructing expectations from this, as we find ourselves reading about a man, Horatio, quite bourgeois, recreating pornographic scenes with dolls. In what seems to be yet another sadistic piece, I want to believe that it has to do with the staleness in Horatio’s life that makes him accountable for his weird tastes. The narration doesn’t even give the protagonist a name until part way into the story, perhaps illustrating a lack of self-identity in the household? Whatever way you want to look at it, Daisy Dolls is worth a read – perhaps one of the most obscure short stories I’ve read in recent memory.

Borges:

Now, with Borges, it’d be unfair to talk about just one of his stories… at least that’s how I view it. It’d also be rude to try and summarize his writing style, as quite a few of his stories are completely contrasting to each other. However, probably my favorite two from the lot would be Lottery in Babylon and Library of Babel, as they seem to share the same type of intense, critical imagery that Borges is most likely infamous for – many of his ideas are so abstract that I think the only way to process them would have to be through the medium of a short story – trying to understand any sort of message or implication from something like film or a picture would be confusing. There’s this looming discussion of infiniteness throughout his stories, and specifically Library of Babel, which I really enjoyed. These discussions are infinite in themselves, and I had a great time trying to understand what the stories were all about. But perhaps that’s the point in itself – why do are we pre-occupied with always finding answers for things?

Why can’t we just bask in the mystery?

The Metamorphosis has now become one of my top 10 favorite short stories of all time. Yes, I absolutely loved it. The story hooks you in from the very first sentence, and it brings clearly to light one of the big themes of the entire work in that opener – the absurdity of life. It’s a tragic story in parts – from the cruel rejection by his family (..and thus the ‘monstrous’ themes come into play), to Gregor’s overall inability to find self-identity… I really enjoyed it. It benefits from interesting, captivating narrative, which I think a few literary classics in this course have lacked (namely Frankenstein). I think it could have actually been presented without any form of dialogue too, since that in itself doesn’t add too much to the story – however, it isn’t that big of a concern.

As for the Yellow Wallpaper, which I didn’t like as much, it felt much more like a slog through the text… I’m not sure if I get the format, which is line after line… (might have just been the online version I read. Sure, it offers some dynamic of suspense, but other than that I can’t really think of a reason for presenting it. The visuals in it were pretty haunting to say the least, and I like how the narrative style changes as you discover her (the narrator’s) spiral into the depths of insanity. I guess overall I didn’t really like the message that I got out of it, which seemed to be a critique about the conventions of women in traditional marriage. My problem more has to do with my loathing of discussing the subject – especially nowadays, where discussion over hegemony seems to only result in an unstoppable argument with no intention of mediation.

Overall though, I did enjoy the collective of these two texts. I’m glad that we’re covering many different types of texts in this course at this point – long, enveloping novels, historical texts, discourses, essays, and now we seemed to have switch gears into short stories!

After reading Kafka’s short story I wasn’t expecting to like these short stories as much I did. The story about the cooked cat was one of the weirdest stories I have ever read – it seemed to be about nothing and everything at the same time. It’s not about telling an actual story or teaching us a moral instead its just about punishing an animal for behaving like its meant to. Borges’ short stories are interesting and intriguing – they are about normality things which turn into supernatural ideas, alternate universes and the like. The a library of Babel, Hakim and the circular ruins are my three favorite short stories. The story about Hakim is interesting Because it takes a diseased man and turns him into a legend and a demon, at the end when the mask is removed and you see that he has leprosy it makes the fact that he welcomed the other leprosy victims make more sense. The circular ruins kind of remind me of the movie inception, it’s like one dream within another without the inhabitants knowing that they are being dreamed up and are not actually real. This kind of inception like short story is weird and one of the most interesting stories I’ve read. The Circular Ruins is a strange and fascinating short story. However I don’t think that his stories are meant to make sense – they are not about telling moralistic short stories, or about having an actual purpose. Like Kafka, I think they exist just to exist, and that they are not there to show the reader anything but to take them on a journey to different worlds, just because.

Daisy Dolls was one of my favorite short stories – mainly because it was so strange and confusing and awkward that it was that much more intriguing. The idea that the dolls and the scenes drove the protagonist to the end it did is fascinating. In my mind whenever I think of him running towards the machines I think about him a) running into the room with the scenes and pulling at all apart, or b) managing to somehow kill himself within the scenes  because the scenes kept coming to life, even though they were his wife’s actions, the scenes kept smudging the lines between dreams and reality and he just couldn’t take it anymore and in the last scene where his wife is in the scene is like the last time he can take the fact that because of these dolls he is unable to distinguish between dolls and humans, between dreams and reality.

Prior to reading “Survival in Auschwitz,” I always thought Freud had a point when he said we repress our most traumatic memories. While that may be true to some extent, I found that for the majority of cases, we don’t repress our worst memories- and this autobiography, if you believe it to be a true account, is proof. And I believe that everything that happens in Levi’s book is a true event of what actually happened. Levi’s memory of events is excellent. He remembers all the details. While I personally have a very good memory (it’s true, I can still tell you who was in my Kindergarten class and what they were like), I find that the majority of people I know don’t have very good memories. Some can’t even remember past Grade 7! Anyway, Levi’s great memory for events was the first thing that stood out for me while I was reading his book.

Another thing that stood out was the fact that Levi writes with little to no self-pity. I have read other Holocaust memoirs that were very emotional and full of phrases like “WHAT KIND OF WORLD IS THIS?” or “HOW CAN THEY DO THIS TO ME?” Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the treatment they went through was horrific and they are entitled to ask such questions. And Levi does quietly, in a subtle manner, question whether the camp he lives in is even fit for humans. My point is that he doesn’t show self-pity. He writes as if he were a roving camera that simply captures what he observes as a camp inmate. This is not a book that goes along the lines of, This is what happened to me and it made me feel horrible so I want sympathy from you people. Rather, this book is more about what Levi observes and how he has kept in contact with other camp inmates after they were liberated. I admire Levi for the fact that he was able to calmly, as well as simply, state what happened to him during the years he spent in Auschwitz. I don’t think he ever succumbs to hysterics or breaks down either.

I noticed that, in some ways, Levi’s reserved manner of narrating makes him, as the narrator, seem like a lifeless shadow. He can feel emotions, but he doesn’t outwardly fly off into a fit of passions, condemning his living conditions. Of course, all camp inmates will eventually become shadows of their former living selves over time. Levi’s method of narration emphasizes how the people in the camps are slowly stripped of their former hopes and ambitions, because even living to the next day is uncertain. He gives me the impression, through his way of calm, outwardly emotionless way of speaking, that he is a very tired individual. He tells you what happens, but he leaves out how he feels about the events (but there are some cases in which he does, I admit). It’s almost as if, as time progresses, his emotions are dying. His spirit self is leaving him. And undoubtedly, this is true for perhaps all camp inmates.

Amongst the well-known works of Borges, I’m glad we got the chance to read “The Cooked Cat” and “The Daisy Dolls”. These two were definitely my favorite, and probably rank within the top five of the whole Arts One reading list from this year. I liked them both for different reasons though, they were two different types of stories which left a very solid impression upon me.

“The Cooked Cat” is a story which shocks you. It doesn’t shock you with the actual cooking of the cat (considering it’s revealed in the title), but it shocks you because from the way this family is described, the idea of Aunt Pepa cooking a cat is completely possible. It was in the little things which the cruelty really got to me. The scene with the pharmacist, where he would flaunt his earnings, for absolutely no gain to himself. And maybe because it’s something to do with the people I’ve met in Italy (old ladies very similar to the likes of Aunt Pepa), or maybe it’s the way the story was written, but it was all incredibly realistic to me.

So while “The Cooked Cat” is a story which shocked me, “The Daisy Dolls” really made me reflect and think. While I may be completely wrong, but I felt like a large idea of the story was the idea of impressions. What I mean by this is more like “first impressions” or what you could call “judging something by the book of its cover”. Our protagonist, Horacio is a man who continuously does just that. He’s always trying to judge these scenes, interpret what they could be from just a single impression, only to often find out his first impression is wrong. Perhaps it ties in with the whole idea of dolls, and the way we would judge someone who has dolls and treats/loves them the same way Horacio does? I’m not sure about that point, but still, the rest isn’t so bad.

Perhaps what’s the most prevalent element within these stories is a heavy sense of darkness. And by darkness I mean sadness, desperation, and the idea of violence Jon mentioned. They seem really prevalent within south-american/spanish/italian writings, whereas novels and stories from other regions tend to have a bit of a lighter air. I don’t think this really says anything about the cultures, but rather is just a characteristic of their writing culture.

Sorry for the late post, my computer has been prone to random spazzes lately…

Anyways, with regard to the works, my favorites were without a doubt those of Borges. I found that the prose flowed beautifully, and at the end of most I was left with a complete mind f*ck. My favorite of these has to be “The Circular Ruins.” It completely reinvoked in me memories of my childhood, where two of my friends and I would sit and ponder whether or not we were part of some huge cosmic video game. We would ask whether or not everything was planned, and if there was some massive universe out there where we were just pawns in a game of chess. No, I’m not kidding. We were very philosophical eight year olds. The story continues with the classic Borges idea of chance being turned into fate. Everything that the sorcerer dreams of his son has such painstaking detail put into it, taking years to complete. It brings into question our own existence. Were we simply the result of years of evolution, or were we each individdually thought out by a higher power? How can we be sure that what we are experiencing is our own reality, or rather a world dreamed up by our subconcious, or the subconcious of another? In other words, this story tripped me out. It completely fascinated me and bent my mind in a refreshing way that it has not been bent for ten years (like I said, we were really messed up kids).

The story of “Hakim, The Masked Dyer of Merv,” however, was one that just sent shivers up my spine. The moment when the mask is ripped off and the lepersy-ridden face is exposed is the stuff of nightmares. I cannot tell whether or not Hakim was an actual religious figure, or a demon in disguise. Either way, it brought about the question of what we can and cannot believe. So many times, humans are tricked into belief, such as the Jonesboro masacre. What drives us to these people? Is it supposed authority, or just a want for something to believe in? How can we sort out reality from falsehood. In the end, Hakim appeared demonic instead of a religious idol. Was it all a facade, or was it a message regarding the fact that the truth comes from the strangest places? I have no idea, and I realize that I’m kind of rambling, but the fact of the matter is that Borges tripped me up…