Journal #10

“I took my degree at Turin in 1941, summa cum laude – and while I say it I have the definite sensation of not being believed, of not even believing it myself; it is enough to look at my dirty hands covered with sores, my convict’s trousers encrusted with mud. Yet I am he, the B. Sc. Of Turin, in fact, at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, as my reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after so long an inertia, responds at request with unexpected docility. And even more, this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize it, it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my examinations, that spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge, which my friends at university so envied me” (Pg 106).


Sometimes I wonder if the education in the high school is worth it. Some adults told me that they only remember about 10% of what they learned in “difficult” courses such as History, Trigonometry, Physics, and more. But we can see from this passage that the knowledge that he obtained in the past actually saved Primo Levi’s life and it helped Primo to have a special privilege. Thus we must have and crave for more knowledge and understanding but there is a counter affect on that. Often time, people with great knowledge becomes boastful and arrogant, and usually disdain others that has “lesser” knowledge than them. This creates a huge issue because I have seen a faithful Christian, who was erudite and brilliant, became aloof from God and started to live for himself because he considered himself “better” than everyone else. He didn’t respect others with any knowledge. He barely listens to other’s opinions since he believed that all his views, thoughts, and morality were the truth and correct. So we should be careful to be humble and glorify God for His mighty help on us to be bright and well-educated.

Journal #9

“They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post” (Pg 91)


I had a stereotypical view on the officers of the concentration camp that all of them were are sinful and I could not understand their behaviors to the Jews in the camp. But as I read this passage, I found out that some of them had to be cruel and brutal to the prisoners because or else, they would lose their “special” privilege and become like the every other prisoner in the camp. This also clearly shows the sinful nature of human beings. Wouldn’t we do anything to survive? For instance, the officers in the concentration camp were basically murdering others in order to save their own lives. If anyone offers a prisoner to either die in a crematorium or be the officer of the camp, who wouldn’t choose the role of the officer, who wouldn’t choose to kill the fragile and pathetic looking Jews over the death in the gas chamber?

Journal #8

“The news had immediate repercussions. All who illegally posseassed second shirts, stolen or organized, or even honestly bought with bread as a protection against the cold or to invest capital in a moment of prosperity, immediately rushed to the Exchange Market, hoping to arrive in time to barter their reserve shirts for food products before the flood of new shirts, or the certainity of their arrival, irreparably devalued the price of the article” (Pg 78)


In the world of Auschwitz, the existence of black market was essential to the prisoners. In our perspective, we see the black market negatively because it is obviously illegal. However, when we place ourselves in the shoes of the Jews in the concentration camp at that time, we would have been devastated if the black market didn’t exist. Would we even have cared if it’s an evil and illegal deed? Probably not. It was the matter of life or death. It seems like when we are at the edge of our lives, at the matter of life or death, we tend to lose our morality and honesty. This clearly shows that we do fear our deaths.

Journal #7

“For human nature is such that grief and pain – even simultaneously suffered – do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the grater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others” (Pg 73).

God created humans to consistently desire and crave for more things, so we are never satisfied with our lives. However, I don’t advocate the idea of man being never content about his life. It is true that there is not an absolute happiness in our lives through earthly objects or actions such as money, power, fame, and more, and also how humans have such a limited knowledge of anything. But humans can have the absolute happiness. In the Bible, it states that the only way we can have the absolute happiness in our lives is by glorifying and worshipping God. Even though I’m a Christian, I’m not content about my life maybe because I’m spiritually a baby Christian and my faith is not strong yet. However my mom, who is an extremely faithful Christian, told me that when God is in our souls, and when we glorify him, we’ll be fully satisfied with our lives. This is logical and makes sense because God is the creator of us, the whole universe. Therefore God created us to gain the unconditional happiness only when we are pleasing Him. If I were the creator, I would certainly do the same thing, making the humans to feel happiness when they are glorifying me. This passage definitely shows the fact that Primo Levi was an atheist. If he was a Christian, he would certainly admit that through God we can get the everlasting satisfaction of our lives.

Journal #6

“He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?” (Pg 65~66)

One of the differences between Christians and atheists is the way of viewing the life and the whole world. Christians believe that there is a purpose from God behind everything in this universe. On the contrary, atheist’s world view is that everything occurred through random chances. Since I’m a Christian, I believe that the holocaust was purposely happened, and this sentence “But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?” brought me the idea of the purpose of the most tragic event in the history.
To move people emotionally and to change their minds, sacrifices and tragedy are required. For instance, when I heard about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, how he painfully died on the cross because of our sins, I was emotionally moved and it deeply impacted me. Also Koreans are emotionally moved when they hear about the cruel and brutal treatment of Japanese to Koreans during the era when Korea was a puppet country to Japan. Many Koreans sacrificed themselves to gain independence, and still today, this brings deep impact to Koreans.
Through Holocaust, through the deaths of the millions of innocent Jews, I think God wanted to tell us something. Maybe God wanted us to change our minds and the way we view the world. Or maybe there were lack of incitement in the people, so God thought that Holocaust would move them emotionally and physically to reshape the corrupt world.

Journal #5

“He fights for his life but still remains everybody’s friend. He ‘knows’ whom to corrupt, whom to avoid, whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist. Yet (and it is for this virtue of his that his memory is still dear and close to me) he himself did not become corrupt. I always saw, and still see in him, the rare figure of the strong yet peace-loving man against whom the weapons of night are blunted” (Pg 57)

In statistics, there is something call a ‘Bell-curve’. A bell curve is a graph that looks like a bell and it shows the average of all kinds of things. For example, on a bell curve of the scores of SAT, the curve is at a highest point in the middle of the SAT score because most people get the average result of the test which is neither too high nor too low, and statistically about 95% get the average score. Yet, there is always an exception. Some people who are above and beyond, and receive extremely high or low scores; they are placed in the beginning of the peak or at the end of the peak on the graph. Since the two groups of extremely high score and low score makes 5%, the group with exceptionally brilliant and get high score will be only 2.5% out of the millions of people who took the SAT. Similarly this idea of bell curve is parallel to the corruptness of the people in Auschwitz at that time.
Before encountering this passage, I only thought EVERY SINGLE PERSON in this concentration camp were hostile to each other and were untrustworthy to other. Because they were so vulnerable, there was lack of trust but full of backstabbing. In fact, their minds were brainwashed to think that they would do anything even betraying their comrades in order to survive in Auschwitz. But only 95% of the people were corrupt, not all of them. There were few exceptions.
Alberto was different and he was one of the 2.5% people out of the whole Jews that were in Auschwitz, who were uncorrupt. Alberto was not deceitful like the rest of the people in that camp. I thought there was no such a thing as friendship in that predicament, but Alberto shattered my idea because he was a friend of everyone and loved by everyone, he created friendships even in that kind of situation. As I read this passage about Alberto, I asked myself ‘if I was in his shoes, would I be able to behave like how he did?’ ‘Would I be friend to everyone and care for others in that situation?’

Journal #4

“We know where we come from; the memories of the world outside crowd our sleeping and our waking hours, we become aware, with amazement, that we have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear” (Pg 55).

Whenever I’m emotionally hurt or discouraged, I tend to focus my mind on a task such as working and studying because when I study hard and focus only on studying, I stop thinking about what had happened. Or sometimes when I’m stressed out, I just go out and run. When I run, all of my worries and anxieties disappear, and I don’t think about anything but force myself to just run. If I don’t do these activities like studying and running, I can’t avoid the emotional pain. This is because when I don’t do anything, I start to muse and reflect on my life and myself. Consequently, I would regret myself and become more melancholy thinking that this emotional suffering won’t fade away that easily. So it is more painful to relax ourselves than to work physically because we think more and deeply about certain things when we are physically resting. Likewise, same thing was happening to Primo Levi when he was enjoying his resting period in Ka-Be. He started to recall everything from the past and began to consider about the reality and life. Primo Levi definitely suffered much more when he was cooling himself down in the infirmary than laboring outside under a bleak weather.