The Impossibility of Language Imagine that you, by some cruel twist of destiny, have been placed in life’s circumstances that are not just hard to endure, but, to the rest of the world, are not viable to imagine and hardly ever possible to relate to. Being a rare survivor, you are faced with a task to deal with your exceptional experience and to communicate it to others; and in your attempt to do so you create a memoir to account for the events you have lived through. That is precisely the story of Primo Levi, who, at the age of 24, has been captured by Fascist militiamen and has gradually ended up in the worst of Nazi concentration camps – the Auschwitz. However, the attempt to describe Holocaust is difficult, because the language itself is unable to express the full reality of life in a concentration camp to those, who have not experienced it. The problem raised by the literature of Holocaust, therefore, is placed outside of the usual literary concerns, such as questions of style, or form, or creative processes. That is because most of the attempts to document Holocaust carry an effort to narrate an account of an event which, due to its enormous inhumanity, is unimaginable and, as an effect, is almost indescribable. The reasons are simple. Never before the human race has experienced such a resolute effort to get rid of “the other” kind of people, in this case – the “otherness” defined by a specific race, carried out through the most merciless and brutal methods. Since the language that we know is derived from our everyday experience, it is incapable to describe the Auschwitz’ atmosphere: feelings and emotions of its prisoners, who have been reduced to the state of being deprived of everything used to define an individual person. As Levi himself tells it, “Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom... Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name.”(Levi, 27) Simple words, such as “hunger”, “pain”, or “fear” simply lack meaning when it comes to describing the extremes that those states have reached at the places like Nazi concentration camps. In order to realistically portray such situation one must simply go beyond the familiar sense attributed to words and approach a new reality created by those extreme events, nearly inventing a new language, which would have to be somehow communicated to those, who have not lived through Holocaust. However, this remains impossible and the best thing that we are left with – is an existing, albeit not always successful, collective attempt of survivors and witnesses to communicate their experiences through the means available to them such as literature. Works cited: Levi, Primo. “Survival in Auschwitz.” Spokane Falls Community College Library. 6 June 2006. 7 July 2006.