I'm great for making reading plans and awful for carrying them out, but I have been reading the books Caroline chose for her year long Literature and War Readalong. This month is Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. Much like last month's The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo, reading Levi has been difficult and uncomfortable. It's not the style he uses, which is straightforward and somewhat unemotional. He writes about his experiences matter of factly. It's just the fact that these things occurred, which are so shocking. I've read quite a few books about World War II and about survivors of the war, but as I get older it almost seems more difficult to do so, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just disappointing to think we don't learn from our experiences and atrocities keep happening, simply in a different guise than before. The folly of man will never cease to amaze me.
So I read Primo Levi's words with a heavy heart. I can only manage a few pages at a time, so I have once again missed Caroline's discussion. I think it's important to read books like this, to know the facts, though I think I will not ever really understand the 'why'. I plan on writing about this properly next weekend (if I set a date then I will finish in a timely manner, right?), but until then I wanted to share a short excerpt from the book.
"Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. 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 a pure judgement of utility, It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term 'extermination camp' and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: 'to lie on the bottom'."
Reading books like these certainly put normal everyday life in perspective. All the small problems and annoyances seem so small and unimportant. It's just a matter of keeping this in mind, though, which isn't always so easy to do.