Survival in Auschwitz

Last week I read the book Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi. It's a good book. I read it in 2-3 days. Although it's good, at the same time it's a hard book to get through. I remember feeling numb during the days I was reading it. Levi was an Italian Jew, writing about his experience at the concentration camps in Auschwitz, Poland, during 1944. The period of time he covers is little over a year (part of one winter and into a second), yet the experience changes his life irrevocably. As I read it, I thought to myself, "Did this really happen? Did people really treat other people like that?" So often when I read a book there's an emotional disconnection, it feels like fiction--too surreal to have actually happened.

And yet it did happen, and makes us stare wide eyed and unblinkingly at what we're capable of, both in the ability to degrade other humans once we no longer see them as human, and subject them to living conditions that are hell and strip away any sense of humanity, freedom, or soul. It also shows us the will to survive, at all costs, and the benumbed expectation and resignation to death, and yet the will or momentum to keep moving, one more hour, one more day, without hope, without food, and without the belief that tomorrow will get better.

Maybe it was a social experiment, to see what happens when you put a group of people together under impossible situations and see who survives. It's the survival of the fittest, the will to power, social Darwinism at its cruelest and most intense. Some do survive, but to do so you have to strip away civilization, morality, and the expectations of human behavior that exist in the outside world.

This is still happening today: in the battlefields, whether it's Iraq or the civil war in Uganda, or a number of other unnoticed places around the world, or in homes where there's physical or sexual abuse, or systemic poverty, or drug addiction. We have an incredible capacity to survive, to "shell up" inside ourselves, waiting for the outside world to blow over us. We become numb emotionally to our feelings because all that remains is hurt and anger. We become numb to the circumstances of others: it's hard enough to survive, let alone worry about another's survival, and yet some do, thinking past themselves, for a moment, sharing bread, carrying the day, at least for a moment.

How many Auschwitz's exist, unnoticed, unnamed, while prisoners huddle inside hoping for a rescue party, someone to throw over the bread or throw down the oppression? How many are invisible? How many prisoners sit feet away from each other and yet worlds apart? Survival may be possible, for another day, but survival isn't living.