Throughout Primo Levi’s book, Survival in Auschwitz, Stacy Cretzmeyer’s book, Your Name is Renée, and Thomas Blatt’s book, Sobibor: The Forgotten Revolt, various methods of resistance are mentioned and detailed. Yet resistance serves a different role for each survivor: Levi foregoes resistance because it seems a faster way to his own demise; Ruth is sheltered from anti-Semitism and unaware of a need for resistance until after the war, and Blatt embraces resistance while accepting his actions could well cost his life.

Levi often chooses survival over resistance during his stay in Auschwitz.  When Steinlauf, a stoic World War I veteran, lectures Levi over his poor hygiene, Levi inwardly asks, “Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer?” (40). Levi decides that wasting energy in a futile attempt to keep clean will only rob him of precious energy and further his demise.

In contrast, Ruth’s childhood in Southern France lacks anti-Semitic encounters, because members of the French resistance protect and hide Ruth and her family.  Her fear is not attached to being a Jew, and Ruth only discovers that she is truly a target of racism and hatred after the war: “I go to the elementary school, and they call me ‘sale juif’ in the playground after school.  It means ‘dirty Jew.’ Now I know what anti-Semitism is. . . .  I join Les Petites Ailes [The Little Wings]. It is a Jewish Scout Organization” (191-192). Her new life begins where she resists by learning and embracing her heritage, and she abandons her French name.

On the other hand, Blatt (a Sobibor survivor) surrounds himself with resistance and joins a plot to kill German guards and escape the death camp. On the day of the attack, the dead guards are discovered by SS-Oberscharführer Bauer. Suddenly, “from the midst of the assembled Jews a single, strange and impatient voice was heard: ‘FORWARD! HURRAH! HURRAH!’ In a flash, the entire camp resounded with the defiant call” (79). Blatt and many other prisoners move as a unit towards their escape and many die while reaching for freedom.