An Italian Chemist in a Living Hell: An Inside View of Auschwitz скачать в хорошем качестве

An Italian Chemist in a Living Hell: An Inside View of Auschwitz

This talk revolves around Primo Levi's book, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf, and first published in English as If This is a Man. The original Italian, Se questo e un uomo, appeared in 1958; the English edition used here is from Collier Books, 1960. Auschwitz is, of course, the most notorious of the Nazi extermination camps; but Auschwitz has, over the years, come to stand in for all concentration and extermination camps, indeed for the Holocaust and for the very idea of evil. It is not only the sheer number of people killed in Auschwitz, well over a million, that makes Auschwitz a place of colossal evil; it is, as Levi describes in his memoir of life in the lager (camp), a place where one encountered "the demolition of man". It is not so much the Nazi machinery of death that is the subject of this book but rather the dehumanization of human beings. Levi was brought to Auschwitz in February 1944; he stayed there until the liberation of the camp in January 1945, being among those "fortunate" few who was not forced into the death marches which characterized the last phase of the Nazi assault on Jews and humanity. He describes everyday life in the camp, the extreme paucity of food, the struggles over mere crumbs of bread, the regimes of labor, social relationships in the camp, the role of the Kapo (the Jews who were put in charge of disciplining other Jews), and much else; but above all it is his description of the paradoxes of Auschwitz, a mini-city with its own industries and infirmary, where much attention was paid to senseless rules that were supposed to be observed by prisoners/inmates who the next day might be sent to the gas chamber, that makes Levi's book riveting. This is doubtless one of the two or three most famous of the hundreds if not thousands of memoirs by survivors of the extermination camps.