QUOTE: Norman Geras has a very nice post at A Fistful of Euros abot Primo Levi:
"Once again there is here, I believe, the mutual illumination of uncommon and common experience. Everyone wants to be lucky enough not to have to wake up, ever, to what the prisoners at Auschwitz daily faced; yet, except for the very, very fortunate if there indeed are any this fortunate, most people know on some level what it means to wake from 'the illusory barrier' of sleep to a heavy, unresolved burden, an enduring pain or trouble. The knowledge informs our understanding of what Levi recounts, and is also deepened by it."
and I found The Drowned and the Saved to be incredibly moving, which is the normal reaction, I suppose. Nevertheless, I still prefer Viktor Frankl, perhaps because he makes statements like these:
"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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