Primo Levi Quotes

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Auschwitz exists because of politicized science.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million.

So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

I have recurring nightmares about being in a Nazi concentration camp with all my family and constantly being sent to solitary confinement.

There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.

Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

The sights I have just seen [at Buchenwald] are so unbelievable that I don't think I'll believe them myself until I've seen the photographs.

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

But there's something about the simplicity of Auschwitz... there's just nothing. There's just photographs, there's a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.