Primo Levi on Concentration camp

“We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”

“''5. Why do you speak only about the German camps and not the Russian ones as well?''''' I do not want to, nor can I, evade the duty which every man has, that of making a judgement and formulating an opinion. ...The principal difference lies in the finality. The German camps constitute something unique in the history of humanity, bloody as it is. To the ancient aim of eliminating and terrifying political adversaries, they set a monstrous modern goal, that of erasing entire peoples and cultures from the world. Starting roughly in 1941, they became giant death-machines. ...Certainly the Soviet camps were not and are not pleasant places to be, but in them the death of prisoners was not expressly sought—even in the darkest years of Stalinism. ... It was a very frequent occurrence, tolerated with brutal indifference, but basically not intended. Death was a byproduct of hunger, cold, infections, and hard labor. In this lugubrious comparison between two models of hell, I must also add the fact that one entered the German camps, in general never to emerge. Death was the only foreseen outcome. In the Soviet camps, however, a possible limit to the incarceration always existed. ...[A] hope—however faint—of eventual freedom remained.'''”