The holocaust testified that morality is adaptable under difficult conditions. Traditional morality has ceased to be contained by the barbed wire of concentration camps. Inside the camps, prisoners were not treated like humans and therefore adapted the animal behavior necessary to survive. The “ordinary moral world” (86) to which Primo Levi refers in his autobiographical novel Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz) ceases to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge, and the differences between these opposites become vague. Maintaining existence in Auschwitz required the abolition of self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to endless dehumanization certainly pushes a person to be dehumanized, causing them to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve their life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line between good and evil begins to distort. Primo Levi, a survivor, recounts his incarceration in the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp. Departing from his arrest by the fascist militia in December 1943, the text conforms to Primo Levi's experience over the next twelve months as an inmate in the National Socialist Monowitz-Buna concentration camp, seven kilometers away. east of Auschwitz. Upon his arrival in the camp, the first-person narrator, Primo Levi, holder of a doctorate in chemistry, embarks on a world that astonishes him; by simply taking literary notes on Dante's Inferno, he manages to draw its outlines. After the degrading reception procedures, he realizes that the goal of the place to which they have been brought is the psychological and physical devastation of the inmates. Inmat......middle of paper......sions essential to survival. To live in peace, you must adapt your social and behavioral needs. Like the “literal” survival stories of Jean Améry or Elie Wiesel, If This Is a Man has served as a reference for numerous interpretations and reflections in the fields of cultural studies and philosophy.ReferencesPrimo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) [first published as If This Is a Man], p. 86.Ibid. p. 67Ibid. p. 130Idem. p. 47Ibid. p. 44Primo Levi: Excerpt from a letter to the translator of the German version, reproduced in The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 174.Ibid. p. 83Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) [first published as If This Is a Man], p. 62.Ibid. p. 59