Survival in Auschwitz

The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is both long and short, plain and enigmatic...

In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.

[...]

However little sense there may be in trying to specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.

The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.

But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed to not forget that I myself was a man.

-- Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Survival in Auschwitz reminds me of why I'm often tempted to give up reading fiction entirely. It is one thing for a trained writer to turn in a masterpiece, and quite another for the man on the street to tell the story through his eyes; there is something even more exquisite when that story is able to delocalise itself -- to transcend beyond a single time and place.

I'm generally aware and at least somewhat understanding (even if not always in agreement) towards good and bad critiques of any piece of writing, but I cannot comprehend the label of "boring" that I've heard slapped onto this book. Perhaps the fact that Levi was a chemist by training makes it even more intriguing a read for me. I'm no scientist, and my linguistic abilities are largely inadequate, but Levi gives me hope that you don't necessarily need to excel in either fields (not in the academic sense of the word, anyway); in this small way, at least, Levi is my Lorenzo.