Survivor Guilt Motif
One of the things that compelled Levi to write this book decades after his original memoirs was a sense of guilt that he had survived when others had not. In order to present this to himself as something other than completely random, he uses the book as a way in which to look back over the events of his imprisonment at Auschwitz to see if there were indications that some men might survive the ordeal whilst others might not. Most of the chapters of the book adhere to this study, particularly the study of the gray areas of those who worked for the Nazis against their own.
Violence Motif
One of the things that Levi has struggled with is the concept of violence. Is all violence created equal? Is violence that is excessive and unnecessary an indication of a psychological or mental illness?
Throughout the book Levi tells of the unimaginable violence that occurred in the camps, where the guards seemed to delight in trying to outdo each other in the most senseless and gratuitously violent ways possible. However, he considers also the violence that one prisoner might mete out against another, for example, for a piece of bread fallen to the ground. All of these actions are violence but there are many different reasons for them and deciphering the differences between them is one of the key motifs in the book.
Divide and Conquer Motif
One of the motifs in the book is the way in which the Nazis divided the prisoners by favoring some over others. Levi returns to this motif many times, most strongly within the chapter about the prisoners who worked with the Nazis against their fellow prisoners, but also throughout as he details the many insidious ways in which one man might be inexplicably raised up over another.
Importance of Language Motif
There was a language barrier inside the prison camp; Levi and his fellow Italians spoke their native tongue and a little English, but no German. This therefore made it hard for them to understand orders that the guards were barking out. The German prisoners spoke German only, the guards, German, and the Polish prisoners spoke Polish and English. This meant that there was a geographical divide based on language, with the Italians and the Poles managing to communicate with each other in a way that the Germans could not participate in. Levi's motif highlights the importance of language for survival and also shows how the language barrier was yet another way in which the Italian and Polish prisoners were in greater danger of abuse from the guards.
Arbeit Mach Frei Symbol
Above the gates of Auschwitz was the mantra "Arbeit Macht Frei" which translated from German means "work means freedom". This was a symbol of the way in which a man at the camp would be able to make it out of the camp alive. A prisoner was useful whilst they could work for the Nazis. When their ability to work came to an end, so did their usefulness, and consequently they were murdered. The exhortation above the gates is true in that if a man could keep working he could make it to the end of the war and find freedom. Levi returns to the enforced working to exhaustion policy that the guards imposed
