Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Two Memoirs [Hardcover]

Primo Levi (Author), Stuart Woolf (Translator)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 397 pages
• Publisher: Summit Books; 1st edition (1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671605410
• ISBN-13: 978-0671605414
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,405,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Experiences and Reflections of an Italian Jew at Auschwitz, July 16, 2008

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Two Memoirs (Hardcover)

Primo Levi wasn't sent to or near the gas chambers and crematoria. Instead, he was diverted into forced labor in the sub-camp of Monowitz (p. 386), some 7 km east of Auschwitz proper. Poles had to wear a large "P". German political prisoners got various privileges, such as food and clothes from home, and exemption from the dreaded "selections". (p. 183) He saw the bombed-out ruins of the Buna synthetic rubber plant. (p. 137) He predicted that, in the winter of 1944-1945, 7/10ths of the prisoners like him will die. (p. 123)

The reader may not realize that western European Jews commonly looked down upon eastern European Jews as "backward". These feelings were fully reciprocated. Levi comments: "The Germans call them [the Italian Jews] `zwei linke Hande' (two left hands) and even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not speak Yiddish." (p. 49) After his release from Auschwitz, Levi ran across Polish Jews who couldn't believe that Levi was even possibly Jewish because he didn't speak Yiddish. (p. 279)

Unlike most Auschwitz survivors, who traveled west, he traveled east and then south (for map, see pages 178-179). He saw for himself the victimization of the Poles: "In Katowice, and in all Poland, there was a shortage of men; the male population of working age had disappeared, prisoners in Germany and Russia, dispersed among partisan bands, massacred in battle, in the bombardments, in the reprisals, in the Lagers, in the ghettos. Poland was a country in mourning, a country of old men and widows." (p. 239)

In the AFTERWORD, Levi said that, whereas the Nazi concentration camps had 90-98% mortality, the figure for Soviet concentration camps was 30% maximum (p. 389). This is incorrect. Slaves toiling in the gold mines in the Soviet Far East faced close to 100% mortality. And, of course, particular groups targeted for annihilation experienced 100% mortality, be they Jews sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis, or the Polish officers and intellectuals sent to the killing forests near Katyn by the Communists.