Primo Levi: Survivor of Auschwitz, Move Forward, But Never Forget the Past
Born in 1919 as the son of an electrical engineer and his wife, Primo Levi and his family enjoyed a pleasant middle-class life in Turin, Italy. Levi then entered the University of Turin as a chemistry student in 1937, a year before all Jews were segregated, persecuted and banned from public schools due to the Fascist "racial laws. Although he was able to complete his college degree in l941, his diploma included the exclusionary phrase "di razza ebraica" ("of the Jewish race"). Thus not even seven years later, Levi joined 6,400 other Italians who were being sent to concentration camps in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Mathausen. At the end of the war, he was one of only 23 of the 650 Auschwitz prisoners to survive. As described in his book Survival in Auschwitz, Levi witnessed and somehow lived through one of the most terrifying and brutal times in all of human history. He wrote this book to be a spokesperson for the millions of those who died without telling their story. More so, he wrote it to try once again to explain to himself how humans could be so ruthless. As a scientist, he continually searched for an answer to this question. Regardless of his efforts, he never found a reason. In 1947, when Levi wrote If This Is a Man (later ca
Dante's Virgil forces Ulysses to narrate the story of his last voyage: You who find, returning in the evening, Then of that age-old fire the loftier horn Levi says to Pikolo, "open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake": language, the tip of it flickering to and fro As Levi recalls the words to Dante, he actually forgets who he is and where he is. Like Ulysses, he also he sees the mountain of Purgatory looming before him and knows he is drowning with everyone else before reaching their destination. At the end of the chapter, Levi is also swept back into reality, when the type of soup is announced: "cabbages and turnips." Levi, like Ulysses' men, cannot continue man's goal of searching for knowledge.
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Approximate Word count = 3113
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)
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