As we once again face genocide head on, this time in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, we are forced to contemplate the horrors committed by human beings onto other human beings. Levi tells a story of survival under the most inhumane conditions. This truly is a story about survival: what would it take for a person to survive such atrocities? At the end of the book, there is an interview between Philip Roth and Levi, in which Levi contributes his survival to luck: the luck in getting sent to Auschwitz in 1944, when the life span of the worker was lengthened; luck in knowing German, luck in getting sick only once, at the "right moment." Certainly, these factors worked in his favor, but I wondered at the mental capacity it takes to endure such hardships without giving up.
On page 129, Levi writes: "Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live ... as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence ... then it would stop raining." This describes not only the various "fortunes" one could attribute to their survival, but also of the (however small) desire to live that prevents inmates from going over and touching the electric fence, as it were. I find that will to live, to conquer such atrocities, to be an interesting aspect of the horror of genocide. How much can a human endure? What are the limits of a man's desire to live? At the point of suffering in which a human ceases to feel like a human at all, but rather, becomes something less, something not quite real - and still he strives to survive, what does that mean about him, about humanity in general?
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