Primo Levi’s Freedom Through Work

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Primo Levi’s subject was not death but survival, not the triumph of evil but the defiance of evil. He was a man who lived through Auschwitz and emerged a humanist. Yet his writing about the camp focuses less on ideas than practicalities, and this concrete, pragmatic focus helped him survive. A chemical engineer, Levi believed work makes you free—which is exactly the message that greeted prisoners at the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei. Levi insists that those words contain a great truth, which is no less true because it was perverted and parodied by fascism. Purposeful, skilled, and freely undertaken work is the opposite of the torture-labor of the concentration camp.</jats:p>