📖 Survival in Auschwitz summary.
🔖The autobiography’s author and subject, Primo Levi, was detained in December 1943. He was an anti-Fascist Italian Jew who was sent to Auschwitz in February 1944 after being committed to an Italian prison camp. Levi was able to survive in Auschwitz partly because, by 1944, the Nazis had chosen forced work over full-effort slaughter. Levi was left behind after the camp was evacuated in January 1945 as a result of having scarlet fever. He was freed by the approaching Soviet Army after living for ten final days in the abandoned and quickly degrading camp. After spending several months in a Soviet detention facility for former prisoners of concentration camps, Levi eventually made his way back to Turin in October 1945.

📖 Survival in Auschwitz plot.
🔖Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and 24-year-old chemist, gets captured by the fascist militia in 1943 while hiding with a group of anti-fascist resistance fighters. His original resting place is a camp in Italy named Fossoli, but in January 1944, he and 650 other Jews are sent to Auschwitz in Poland. They are split apart when they get there. 29 women and 96 men are not slain right away. One of the 96 men, Levi, describes the process of dehumanization. They are required to remove their clothing and shoes, get shaved and horned, and then wait naked. The inmate numbers are also tattooed on the inmates. Levi describes the camp, describing its extreme starvation and congested prisoner housing (who slept two to a narrow bunk). He describes the camp’s structure and daily schedule. He meets Steinlauf, another prisoner, who talks to him about the value of attempting to be polite, the likelihood of surviving, and testifying. According to Steinlauf, the power individuals do possess comes from refusing to submit to the powers in charge of them.

📖 Survival in Auschwitz main themes.
🔖In his autobiography Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi identifies and investigates the following key themes: Dehumanization, Resistance, Adaptability, Chance, Survival, Moral Relativity, Racial Hierarchy, Oppression, Power, and Cruelty.

📖 Message Of Survival in Auschwitz.
🔖 As many thinkers have observed, power has the tendency to corrupt any individual, but Levi, the author and a former prisoner at Auschwitz labor camp, notes that this seems even more true when that individual has known what it is like to be powerless

source