Robby McElhaney post 2

While reading Levi’s piece I was really taken back by what he had to say about suicide among holocaust survivors. He discusses the rarity of suicide while imprisoned. “First of all, suicide is an act of man and not of the animal. It is a meditated act, a noninstinctive, unnatural choice, and in the Lager there were few opportunities to choose: people lived precisely like enslaved animals that sometimes let themselves die but do not kill themselves” (Levi 76). It’s very interesting and painful to think of how the victims were living so instinctually within those fences that they did not even have the time to think about death, seemingly the only thing that could save them from their torture. They were suffering to such a high degree that survival was all they could think about. The prisoners lived like dogs. All dogs care about is finding food to eat to live on to the next day. If you take two starving puppies from the same litter and throw a piece of meat between them they will instinctually fight over it regardless of the relationship they had between one another. They live very much in the moment worrying more about satisfying the hunger they feel in their bellies than anything else. It’s unfortunate to compare the prisoners to this animalistic behavior. The instinct to survive consumed every fiber of their being. Levi quoted the Confessions of Zeno, “When one is dying, one is much too busy to think about death” (Levi 76).  One would think that a person who is suffering as their lives tick away would hope for death. The concept that they could not even hope for death is traumatizing.