In the Holocaust during WWII, victims were taken from their homes, separated from their loved ones and shipped off by train, to concentration camps. They were told that work would lead them to freedom. They were often starved and beaten. If one was too weak to work efficiently or at all, he was killed. On the Bottom by Primo Levi, The War by Marguerite Davis and Never Shall I Forget By Elie Wiesel, are texts written by survivors of the Holocaust. They work together to express the brutality and dehumanization that took place, along with the idea that human nature led victims to lose faith in their belief systems, governments and even the desire to live… Even after the day of liberation.
It takes extreme circumstances for people to hit sincere ‘rock bottom.’ The Holocaust accomplished this with ease, the first night for some prisoners. Levi is trying to convey how mortifying and dehumanizing the Holocaust …show more content…
They will even take away our name…” (Levi, pg. 1056).

Personal belongings do not necessarily define someone… But clothes, shoes, hair and names express individuality. If one loses all of these things, it takes away their ability to express themselves, to feel that they are a person. Without individuality, what would one feel they have to live for? By the time Nazi camps were liberated, there were not many survivors. The few who made it though, were hardly recognizable, and had to be eased very slowly, back into regular life. Survivors that ate too much right away often got sick or died, because they had been malnourished for so long, their bodies would go into shock. This led them to feel as if they were still imprisoned.

“A great silent pain spread over his face because he was still being refused food, because it was still as it had been in the concentration camp” (Duras,