This Man

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The introduction of my edition said something along the lines of there being a danger that people not only forget, but become complacent when talking about the holocaust.

Following the noise of the train, I arrived at the railway before nightfall; then I kept to the glinting railway lines, . In the first chapter, "The Journey", Levi describes his experience as a partisan and his capture by fascist militia in December 1943. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of pure judgement of utility. Although also filled with a lot of suffering and miserable conditions, it is nothing compared to what went on before, and like Levi, I felt myself recovering, almost forgetting the most gruesome details of what I had just read before. As a reader you will be numbed reading his hellish experience and the systematic degradation human beings were subjected to.Now it is up to him to do what he can to help his wife find all of the memories that she lost, and if he can’t, do everything that he can to make her fall in love with him again. Reading this book and books such as Fateles by Imres Kerstz give an incomparable picture of the atrocities commited in Germany and Poland by the Nazis.

No one knows the exact day on which it will take place; the prisoners reassure each other that surely it will not be they who will be selected. I guess that's the way the human mind works, and I really believe that, were it not from the survival's stories and the effort on the different nations' part to keep the concentration camps as a testament of those times, humanity would, sooner or later, forget what happened, or at least remember it like we remember the Inquisition, or the Napoleon Wars. We felt we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and we felt that every German should have something to say to us; we felt an urgent need to settle our accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at the end of a game.They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.

I could forget my past and move forward with Ava at least with the comfort of knowing that I could be the man she needs.Levi and two other prisoners set about helping the other patients in their barrack, scouring the abandoned camp for provisions.

The realm of the dead, to which a “Charon” leads them, is marked at its gate by the infamous inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work gives freedom”), the synonym to “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. In Se questo è un uomo si testimonia com'è possibile annientare tutto ciò che di umano c'è in un uomo: sentimenti, empatia, dignità, coraggio, desideri, speranze. Fully aware of the fact that This Man is trouble, she does her best not to be attracted to him, despite being overcome by his charm. All the musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea.There are a lot of adventures and the book is more light hearted in tone, the will to live/to feel was more powerful, even in the direst situations, than the memories of Auschwitz. Here, the real horror of Auschwitz is not (or not only) the mass production of corpses, but the Muselmann, the man whose soul is so corroded that even his name is forgotten and nothing is left but the shell of the man he once was. Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never, seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. This part is just as compelling as the first with the same running theme, a man trying to find his way whilst being bombarded with obsticles at every corner.