Abstract
This chapter examines the conditions created by the Italian anti-Semitic racial laws (1937) and the concentration camps, which provide the most extreme context for examining compassion. Although scholarly studies generally approach Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Smoke over Birkenau by Liana Millu as Holocaust art, these texts clearly incorporate key components of neorealist aesthetics. In order to analyze Levi’s text, the following themes are examined: the relations between compassion and imagination, national and ethnic differences. The critical works of Richard Wollheim and Daniel Putnam are employed in analyzing compassion’s relation to imagination and thought.
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- 1.
See Pugliese’s “Prologue, Answering Auschwitz” 1.
- 2.
Se questo è un uomo is the original Italian title of Survival in Auschwitz.
- 3.
See Branciforte for a discussion on the differences among prison camps, working camps, and concentration camps.
- 4.
Amy Simon underlines the shame of the world produced by deteriorating human cohesion presumed by Levi.
- 5.
For further insight on this topic, see Brenner 5.
- 6.
Henri is the sixteen-year-old Paul Steinberg, deported to Auschwitz and assigned to work in the camp’s laboratory with Levi. After 50 years, he clarifies Levi’s opinion of him in Speak You Also: A Survival Reckoning.
- 7.
According to Gabriel Motola, the author does not want to meet Henry again “because he had betrayed the scruples Levi saw necessary to maintain oneself as a man” (2).
- 8.
In La Tregua (The Reawakening or The Truce), Levi states that although he will not forgive the Germans, he does not hate them because to hate another ethnic group is to imitate the Nazis.
- 9.
Levi provides further information about Lorenzo in an interview with Nicola Caracciolo. When asked how Lorenzo Perroni ended up at Auschwitz, Levi states, “In a manner of speaking he ended up there because he volunteered. He was a bricklayer for an Italian firm that did work in France, and when France was occupied, the Germans took over the entire firm en masse. They transferred the operations to Germany, to Auschwitz, in order to build this immense factory about which I spoke to you and where I worked. At that time it was still under construction. There were twenty, thirty construction enterprises there, many of them German, naturally” (82). Levi also expands on Lorenzo’s life in Moments of Reprieve. A Memoir of Auschwitz, in which he describes Lorenzo as someone who, though not a survivor, “had died of the survivor’s disease” (118). Meeting him again in Fossano, Levi finds “a tired man; not tired from the walk, mortally tired, a weariness without remedy” (117).
- 10.
Levi narrates the events that accompanied his escape from Auschwitz in his second book, La Tregua ( The Reawakening), which Francesco Rosi made into a film, The Truce, in 1996.
- 11.
According to GianBiasin, to address the consequences of the Holocaust, Levi uses a distinct narrative technique that combines the different genres of autobiography, historical memoir, travelogue, picaresque story, and moral reflection (7).
- 12.
For more information about the function of memory in the autobiographical narrative, see James Olney 19.
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Milli Konewko, S. (2016). Compassion in Survival in Auschwitz . In: Neorealism and the "New" Italy. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52416-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52416-4_15
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