He adds that he never stopped recording the world and people around him, so much that he remained forever to have a distinct image of them. Much of this had to do with his scientific mind. Somehow he had to make sense of what was occurring, despite the fact that it all seemed completely inane. He states he had "the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous but new, monstrously new." However, he agrees with Roth that he "thought too much" while in Auschwitz, which only made him continually vacillate from hope to despair and hope again.

             Through a series of connected essays, Levi relates a continuum of events that occur in the Lager. First comes getting ready for the move and the arrival. After entering the camp, there is a separation of the healthy from the old and infirm and the parents from their children. Next, Levi relates his time in the in Ka-Be, the appalling infirmary where he is admitted first with a swollen foot and, at the end of the book, with scarlet fever. Then there are his experiences as a scientist and teacher. Finally comes the extermination of so many prisoners, the assemblage for the march and the last days of suffering before the troops arrive.

             Throughout all of this, Levi continues his note taking and scientific analysis for rational answers, to no avail. Regardless how hard he tries to find the answers to the cruelties, there are none. When one of the guards denies even an icicle to decrease a child's thirst, Levi asks in his broken German, 'Warum?' (why?). The guard replies, 'Hier ist kein warum' (there is no why here). .

             Levi starts Survival with the scene in the train that brings the Jews to Auschwitz. His descriptions, although almost clinical in nature, are so well written that they bring the reader directly into the action.