15, 16 & 17 "Die Drei Leute vom Labor", "The Last One", "The Story of Ten Days"

• Engels
• Upper Secondary (Key Stage 4)
• GCSE

Goals for today 

Considering "Die Drei Leute von Labor" and survival 

The last ten days in the camp and reporting of the camp liberation 

Survivor's guilt and Levi's death in 1987

Extract analysis 

Concepts Literature HL

Concepts to consider in the memoir:

Identity, control, humanity, language and morality 

 

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Literary concepts Literature HL

Literary concepts to consider in the memoir:

Structure, tone, stylistic choices, rhetorical devices

 

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Conceptual question

How does loss of humanity through control affect our identity and morality?

"Die Drei Leute von Labor" 

Levi will be able to work in a heated laboratory over the winter, which will protect him and help to save him​

“the continuous dull underground rumbling of the front which is getting nearer”. Buna is dying: “silent and stiff like an enormous corpse”​

The camp is now filling up again with prisoners arriving from other camps in east Poland: most chillingly, “the majority leave immediately for Birkenau and the Chimney” 

The threat of death is now a constant presence:​

• The selections​
  
• Russian air raids​
  
• Freezing to death in the snow​
  
• Starving or working to death 
• Having the camp “liquidated”​
  

"Die Drei Leute von Labor" 

What are the benefits of working in the lab? 

Make a list in your class notebook. 

• Increase temperature in the daytime
  
• Protected from the weather during the day 
  
• Fresh clothes 
  
• Weekly shave 
  
• Can steal commodities to gain food and other items in the camp 
  
• Stealing also helps his friends Alberto and Lorenzo
  
• The work humanises him 
• He has the opportunity to write down his experiences this could help him to ease his trauma.

Are there any disadvantages? 

"Die Drei Leute van Labor" 

" My comrades in the Kommando envy me, and they are right; should I not be contented? But in the morning, I hardly escape the raging wind and cross the doorstep of the Laboratory when I find at my side the comrade of all my peaceful moments, of Ka-Be, of the rest-Sundays - the pain of remembering, the old ferocious suffering of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me like a dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom. Then I take my pencil and notebook and write what I would never dare tell anyone." 

Are there any disadvantages? 

"The Story of Ten Days" 

The BBC’s war correspondent Richard Dimbleby made a famously harrowing live radio report on entering the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 19th Apr 1945.

The BBC refused to broadcast it as it was so graphic. Dimbleby threatened to resign and this forced the BBC to relent. 

Read the article on the next slide and the transcript. We will listen to the report after you have read the article. 

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Survivor's guilt

Survivor’s guilt is a particular kind of guilt that develops in people who have survived a life-threatening situation. ​

• Some survivors feel guilty that they survived when others died. ​
  
• Others believe they could have done more to save the lives of others. ​
  
• Some feel guilty that another person died saving them.​
  

Survivor's guilt 

The features of survivor’s guilt are well documented and can include:​

anxiety and depression, ​

intellectual impairment, ​

social withdrawal, ​

sleep disturbance, nightmares and insomnia 

physical complaints ​

eventual suicide, often years after the event​

Many Holocaust survivors never wanted to see each other again as they could not bear what they had done to survive, and did not wish to be reminded​

Survivor's guilt 

Read the article titled " The Sense of guilt within Holocaust survivors​". To be found in the class notebook => content library => If This Is a Man

In this article, the author argues that there are THREE factors at work to create survivor’s guilt in Holocaust survivors; what are they?

Pay close attention to the examples of survivor’s guilt given​. How do they illustrate the symptoms of survivor's guilt. 

Lorenzo's survivor guilt 

Lorenzo, who gave Levi a portion of bread every day without asking for anything, survived the camps but could not cope with the horror of what he had seen, and he descended into alcoholism. Levi visited him several times to keep him off the streets, but Lorenzo died in 1952 of tuberculosis. ​

Out of gratitude for his kindness in Auschwitz, Levi named both of his children after him – Lisa Lorenza and Renzo.​

After his death, Lorenzo was recognised as one of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’ (an honorific used by Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust)​

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Levi's survivor guilt 

Levi’s first major bout of depression was in 1963. He was prescribed drugs but they had mixed results. ​His final bout of depression was in 1987. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: ​

“I have fallen into a rather serious depression; I have lost all interest in writing and even in reading. I am extremely low and I do not want to see anyone. I ask you as a 'Proper Doctor' what should I do? I feel the need for help but I do not know what sort”.​ 

On 11th April 1987, he fell from a third-floor landing in his Turin apartment and died instantly.​

Some have argued it was suicide, but he left no note, he had no will, and he had made short and medium term plans with others. ​

It has been argued that it was an accident. He was on medication that lowered blood pressure and can cause dizziness and loss of balance.​

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To bear witness

Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilisation.