My expectation of “Foe” was that it would feature Susan Barton’s time on the island with Crusoe and Friday for the majority of the novel. In reality, Susan’s time on the island takes up less than half of the whole novel, and most of it is focused on Susan’s time with Friday in England. I think it’s better this way, because her time on the island really was boring. Crusoe hardly had any depth and personality to him, and Friday seemed more of an ornamental figure than an actual person. It’s only in England that Friday becomes a little interesting, because of the number of unanswered questions that only he has the answer to. Not that he ever answers them.

I thought “Foe” was more about how stories and language shape our identity than it had to do with Susan’s “adventure” on the island. Starting on page 132, Susan explicitly voices aloud that sometimes she has no idea who she is, because:

a) Foe has distorted her story so much

b) The girl who showed up claiming to be her daughter isn’t her daughter.

The fact that Susan feels a certain dissolution of her identity brings to mind this philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make it sound? In this case, Susan does have a relatively boring adventure on the island with Crusoe and Friday, but no one knows about it except for her (and Friday, but he doesn’t count because he has no concept of language anyway). Did it really happen? After all, Daniel Foe is going to distort it so much that what actually happens is lost amidst an ocean of words that tells of things that did not happen. Is Susan trying to say that because of Foe’s distortion of events, even she is unable to pick up what is reality and what isn’t? Or is she complaining because Foe isn’t doing his job correctly? She thinks he is the intended one to write her story, but he won’t write it the way she would like him to write it. I’m still confused as to why Susan didn’t write down her own story, or why she thinks Foe is the intended one. If this is her story, and if she was physically and intellectually capable of writing, why shouldn’t she be the author of her story? This was a question that lingered in my mind.

Oh, another question: Who is Susan Barton junior? I highly doubt she is actually Susan Barton senior’s daughter. But why does she persist in thinking Susan Barton senior is her mother?

Like many other people have said here,  I also have some background with the history of WWII and the Holocaust. Going into Levi’s text, I probably had more background with the issues and themes at hand than any other texts, and perhaps this is the reason the text was so touching to me. Being half-German myself, I spent a lot of my childhood listening to stories told by my dearest Oma, who was one of the lucky Jewish survivors from the Holocaust. She had thankfully escaped before the camps had began processing at the immense rates they did at Levi’s time, but she still had stories of being locked in her house’s basement eating nothing but potatoes for weeks on end until her escape. To this day, she can’t stand the starch-rich food.

One of the things that most intrigued me about this text was the amount of optimism and humanity that Levi kept throughout his experience at Auschwitz. At the core of his experiences he still believed that Nazi’s were humans like him, not monsters. He recognized that an event like this could happen to anyone; with the right amount of brainwashing, anybody could become a fascist or even a communist. What is also surprising is how quickly he published his thoughts and experiences, seemingly clear of any debilitating trauma that would have prevented most people from writing a text like this. His intellectuality shines through with his interesting recounting, his literary references and once again, the undertone of optimism that peaks through every now and then through the narrative. He also stresses the importance of certain characters he met in the camp; both good and bad, and as an audience, I connected and felt moved by characters like Alberto, Lorenzo, and Charles – they evoke a sense of reality into the camp which is staggering. All the characters also serve to represent certain idea; For example, I correlated Elias with how madness could be consequently magnified within the camp.

There is so much more I could discuss about the text, but from a first impression, it was overwhelmingly amazing. This is a masterpiece of a text and I am very glad to have read it.

            The Holocaust is a period of history of which I have some prior knowledge as my schools have taught me about World War Two and the Holocaust. However not only did I learn about the Holocaust in school, outside of school it was also easy to continue learning and widening the spectrum. The tales of experiences of the Holocaust, both in the concentration camps and trying to escape the fate of the camps, are in a variety of mediums and are not only exposed in documentary or textbook form, but also in books, like the work Survival in Auschwitz and Anne Frank’s Dairy; movies, like Schindler’s list and Life is Beautiful; and graphic novels, like Maus. Compelling tales that, despite all look into the Holocaust with different views and perspectives, personalizes the horrors, fears, and survival nature of the Holocaust rather than looking at World War Two more clinically with statistics and dates. Which no matter when I’ve been exposed, all of which are stories I remember today. And in addition to learning about World War Two and the Holocaust in schools and from other media, there are also many monuments and museums around the world that further knowledge of the period and life in the camps and outside the camps. I enjoyed the book. “The Journey” as the first chapter gives the readers an entrance into the camp with Levi. The use of jumping from him and his own thoughts to observations of families and people around him paint a picture of what it was like. This was particularly a good way as the pictures of the different reactions stitched together gave a feel for the story ahead, as everyone went to the camps together, but all went differently (some packing and preparing, some praying, some drinking). The first chapter brings not only Levi, but the reader, into the unknown as Levi travels to an unknown foreign place. The book looks at the Holocaust in a different light that is interesting and makes it stand out from other stories. Though I feel as though all the stories I’ve watched/read/listened to, were all different and went on to depict different aspects of human nature and what it means to be human. 

Reading If This Is A Man (which I’m going to call this book rather than the disgustingly simple title of our book) impacted me in a new way that I hadn’t experienced before when reading about Auschwitz and the Holocaust due to two things: 1) the way that he is dissociated from everything around him 2) While travelling, I visited Auschwitz.

Before I started travelling, I knew that for my own growth and some other unkown reason, that I wanted and needed to visit the Auschwitz camp. The majority of the shoes, clothing, suitcase, eye glasses and hair, are still at the camp in an area called Canada. I know the name and placement and relation of the places/camps he is talking of, and the photo I have attached to this blog is the one photo of the camp that I felt inclined to take. The photo is a memorial that someone (I’m not sure who) created and left at the end of the train tracks in the Auschwitz camp, very close to the cremators, where millions of people were sorted into prisoners, or people to be killed. In the center of the photo, in the distance, you can see the watching towers that have/had a complete view of the camp, where guards watched 24/7. But there is something more that is still in the camp; there is an essence of the suffering of thousands of people, that lingers on the cobblestones and dirt in both Auschwitz and Birkenau (the women’s camp). Just walking through, I experienced a difficult internal fight to not dissociate from what I was seeing and experiencing, because that would defeat the point of going to the camp.

While reading Levi’s work I was reminded of this dissociation through his own struggle for survival and himself. At first, it is almost angering how dissociated he can appear through this autobiography. There are lines such as “of all the others [(prisoners on the train)], more than five hundred in number, not one was alive two days later.” (p.21) where he states the fact with no follow up, and no outrage, that it made me outraged and depressed.  How could he be so dissociated from that knowledge that there is no response from him? Then I remembered my own experience and understood that what I experienced, in a minute way  (I am in no way trying to say that I understand what he went through), he comes to a point where he can’t emotionally respond to this information in order to stay sane. With this understanding, the autobiography became more depressing and left more of an impact, than if I had just read it with anger.

I’m interested in talking about our responses to this autobiography, in relation to how he responds to his surrounding.

I come from a Jewish family, and I regularly attended synagogue and services when I was younger. Because of this my parents and grandparents have always placed an importance on learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, and have had me read quite a few books about the Holocaust in the past. Most notably I have read the story called Night by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor quite a few times. A few years after first reading his story he came to my synagogue as a guest speaker and it was incredible to finally see and hear the  man whose story hit me so hard in person. He had spent time in the grueling camps of Auschwitz and Buna, as well as Buchenwald.  Being able to put a face and a voice to the words that I had read previously was an indescribable experience, and it made me even more disgusted by, and interested in the Holocaust. There are not many Holocaust survivors still alive today, and I’ve been fortunate enough to hear a few of them speak about their tragic stories. Primo Levi was one of a very small amount of people contained in Auschwitz that survived, and he was able to survive due to a number of circumstances. Children, women, and the elderly were usually killed very early, leaving mainly young healthy men to work in the camps. As well as being a young healthy man, Primo was able to use his education to his benefit by gathering extra food rations to stay as nourished as possible. And he also was fortunate enough to fall ill at the perfect time, which actually ended up saving him, as Auschwitz was abandoned right around that time. I look forward to speaking about the story in class, as the Holocaust is something that I feel should be taught about in all schools.

In school, over the years, I’ve ready many books and storieS about the holocaust and it’s victims and survivors. There have been countless movies and the like which also depict this period in history however Levi’s biography is a startling example of how, even after having read many books and seen movies this subject is still able to induce horror and sympathy. Levi’s way of writing and using words is remarkable and fascinating because just for a moment you are transported into the “hell” he is in because of his use of language. Some of the phrases he uses are haunting and remain in your mind even after the book is finished and the last page is turned. Levi’s words manage to recreate the reality of his time spent in the death camps of Auschwitz without sounding as if he is trying to recreate something from his memory instead the whole book feels real and disturbing. 
One of the interesting things about Levi’s book is his use of a ancient Greek mythology in order to explain the feeling of being without food. Tantalus was a mortal who offended the gods and was kept in Tartarus in a pit of water he could not drink below a branch of food he could never reach. In this way Levi has taken something cruel and terrible and made it work with some of the most incredible historical fiction. The story of Tantalus was in reference to the power of the gods and the cult of the gods because Tantalus was cursed to remain in that position forever without any hope for redemption. However, one key difference was that Tantalus actually did commit a crime whereas Levi himself did not commit any crime other than the fat that he was born into a certain race and part of the world. I think Levi manages to juxtapose the idea of the animal like cruelty which the people are subjected to with the example of Tantalus which is not a subject or idea everyone knows about making the injustice he faces even more upsetting. 

If there’s anything that Survival in Auschwitz emphasizes is that not only the importance of the physical survival of man, but the mental and moral survivability of man.

Auschwitz’s as Levi emphasizes is completely different from the outside/normal world.  It has its own rules.  Its own society in a sense.

As shown in the several inmates who are surviving   They in a sense, become monsters in  order to survive in this monstrous war.  They do so by various ways.  The physical, the mental, invoking pity, invoking fear.  In a sense, even Levi becomes monstrous, stealing in order to stay alive.  The horror of Auschwitz, isn’t meerely contained to the physical, it is also the mental and the moral.  In a world that is monstrous, that pushes man to his limits, a man has to become essentially a monster, or take up monstrous abilities to survive.  He instead becomes an outcast, stealing to keep himself alive.  Taking advantage of the system and pushing it to the limits.

This brings up a critical question.  Do we have to turn into a monster when we are confronted by a monstrous situation?

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.