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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Value of Life
Statistics can create distance from tragedies. Genocide numbs one’s moral sensibility with the enormous toll of innocent human lives. The historical record of the Holocaust is incomplete, because prisoners whom the Nazis selected for immediate extermination on arrival at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps were not given numbers and their identities were not documented. Hitler’s Final Solution was a state secret veiled in code names and cloaked in euphemism. As it became clear the Nazis were losing the war, they began destroying documentation and physical evidence of mass murder.
Primo Levi throughout his memoir numbers the living and the dead. At every turn he accords significance to every single person’s death. By regarding every life as sacred, Levi tries to keep his humanity. Owing to the tattoo system, the prisoners can track the death rate in the camp as they watch the rising numbers read in IDs compared with the dwindling prisoners at morning roll call. By recording the names and locations of murders that he witnessed, Levi hopes to sear the facts into the consciousness of his readers. To counteract the campaign of disinformation and the whitewashing of German war crimes, Levi entrusts readers with understanding their magnitude.
The Fragility of Identity
The incarceration of innocent people for the purpose of forced labor served to supplement the German workforce economy as German citizens were conscripted into the war effort. Nazis knew that to make a slave, they must reduce a person to helplessness. Breaking a person of their sense of control over their life means taking away their identity. The intake procedure was appropriately aimed to destroy the sense of self. The confiscation of all of a prisoner’s belongings, including the sweeping away of their all-important protection of shoes, represents the break with civilization as they know it. Naked from head to toe, shorn even of the warmth and protection of their hair, and the replacement of their names with tattooed numbers strips away all shreds of identity. As a countermeasure, Primo Levi gives names back to all of the characters who populate his story, with one exception. Null Achtzehn is referred to only by his number because he has ceased to show any human characteristics. He lives only as a slave to the will of the Nazi masters and gives no thought to freedom and self-direction. Among the prisoners dedicated to survival, giving up and giving in are not options.
The Importance of Stories
In the world of the concentration camp, the prisoners all dream a recurring nightmare: they have returned home and nobody wants to hear their stories. Primo Levi’s epigraph that begins the book presents an impassioned plea. From his vantage point a year after his release from Auschwitz, he now experiences the comforts and security of home. He recognizes how normalcy gives rise to complacency, and complacency to forgetfulness. In the aftermath of World War II, the international community adopted into law the offense of a crime against humanity in response to the Holocaust. However, guarding against the creeping erosion of decency requires constant vigilance by every individual. Forgetting that an Auschwitz can happen in the modern world, aided and abetted by normal people who turn a blind eye, can bring about the very destruction they try to avert. Stories represent the uniqueness of every individual and counteract the nationalistic fever that objectifies a race or nationality as the stranger, the other. Assumed dominance cannot function where people see themselves in others’ stories.
