Journal Entry #12

Journal Entry #12
Chapter 12 : The Events of the Summer

This chapter explains the values of time and one's identity to the readers. While time can be gold, we try to use our time wisely in order to achieve our goals. In the camps, however, time is just a matter of schedule. Time is a painful factor that continuosly goes on to torment the prisoners for another day of hard labor. As time passed by in the camps, Primo survived the camp for five months, and he is now a veteran of the camp. Levi is fully in the concentration camp world which was very different from the real world outside. The outside world is all but gone meaning that all confines of the outside world are likewise gone. He does not have the things that he once had, like freedom. In fact, he does not have any attatchment from the outside world that are considered important. Integrity, honesty and bathing which are taken for granted by other people outside of the camps are all but forgotten. In other words, Levi considers himself as a dead man and the people outside as living.
Under such dark thoughts, however, a man named Lorenzo seems to give hope to Levi. Lorenzo is a man who constantly portrays goodness in his characte, even when he is physically struggling. Even though everything that mattered in the outside world didn't matter in Auschwitz, Lorenzo's behavior made prisoners think once again that just still existed outside their own. Since prisoners were so exhausted just by the fact of trying to survive, they were getting dirty on the outside, and well as in the inside. Lorenzo was the one who helped the prisoners that goodness actually still existed, and that it did matter. I think Lorenzo's good soul helped prisoners to have hope once again, and motivated them to care for others also and not be so egoistic.