This study will examine the role of the individual in the larger political event of the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany. Specifically, the study will analyze two books by Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening. The argument here will be that the role of the individual---both as victim and as victimizer---is paramount in political events of minor or major magnitude.
Levi's Preface in Survival in Auschwitz almost off-handedly takes note of the significance of the individual in the day-to-day life-and-death decisions of the Holocaust. He speaks in that Preface of his "good fortune" in being sent to the concentration camp at the end of the war when "killings" were "suspended at the whim of individuals" (Survival 5). In other words, whatever the Nazis' claims that they were merely following orders, there were times when individual Nazis had the opportunity to decide not to kill without themselves being punished.
Also, if Levi believed the opposite to be true, he would not have written the books with the hope which he obviously holds for changing the minds of individual readers. In the poem which opens the same book, Levi addresses directly the individual readers in an attempt to reach them in their individual hearts and souls, referring to their houses, their hot food, their children. He offers these individuals a friendly warning that if they do not act in accordance with their freedom and with compassion for others less fortunate, they too may one day suffer horribly as a result. The message is clearly that if freedom is not exercised by individuals, one day that freedom will be taken and they will lose their individuality to some sort of mass totalitarian regime.
Of course, from the point of view of the Nazis, one of the first purposes of the concentration camp was to take away the individuality of the Jews and the others imprisoned therein. Just as Hitler wanted to take away the individuality of the Ge...