Genocide

"A Good Day" takes place in the Auschwitz concentration camp during its final year of operation before being liberated at the end of World War II. While there had been many attempts to destroy entire ethnic or racial groups before World War II and have been several since, the Holocaust remains the most emblematic and terrible example of genocide in the popular imagination. The reason is that it was carried out through careful planning by the Nazi government of Germany, contributing a previously unseen breadth, efficiency, and coldblooded rationality to the goal of exterminating the Jews of Europe. As a prisoner of Auschwitz, Levi witnessed the daily horrors of Hitler's "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and the dehumanizing effects it had on prisoners, causing them to become like animals in order to survive. As Jonathan Druker describes in "The Shadowed Violence of Culture: Fascism and the Figure...