Strange, unintelligible languages, brutal acts of violence by his German overlords, and the extremely intricate and complex social fabric of the camp and its inmates. Levi quickly learns the rules and regulations, spoken and unspoken, required of him in his new life, but he learns early on one of the most important lessons for survival. "It was better not to think". (Levi 1979 p.43).
But it is perhaps the wisdom of one man that most benefits Levi in his early days at the camp and ultimately his ability to survive, the message that one of Levi's friends a fellow prisoner by the name of Steinlauf imparts on him after he has become resigned to life in the camp, no longer caring about his personal hygiene or appearance, "the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts; that even in this place one can survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die." (Levi, 1979 p 47).
Levi soon becomes accustomed to the harsh realities of his new life, the constant battle with starvation, the back breaking toil and the constant shadow of extermination by gas chamber. Levi meets many different people, all with their own secrets to survival, these include Elias, the Herculean dwarf of whom Levi states, "Elias has survived the destruction from outside, because he is physically indestructible; he has resisted the annihilation from within because he is insane he is a survivor: he is the most adaptable, the human type most suited to this way of living".
