What would Sisyphus do, who would Sisyphus be, at Auschwitz? One wants to say Primo Levi, but that doesn't quite work. Sisyphus, at least as interpreted by Camus (1955, 123), is the hero capable of creating meaning out of the absurdity of his own situation. This was widely held to be Levi's achievement as well. As one critic said, Levi's is:

The internal quote comes from “The Canto of Ulysses,” a chapter in Survival in Auschwitz (1996), in which Levi struggles to translate a passage from the Divine Comedy into French as he walks through half a mile of snow with Jean, the Pikolo (or youngest inmate), to collect the day's soup ration for his work group. The publisher's blurb on the jacket of The Drowned and the Saved (1988), in many ways an even darker book, goes further:

No wonder Levi's suicide was such a shock. As Elizabeth Macklin (1987) said in The New Yorker, “our fear was that the efficacy of his words had somehow been cancelled by his death – that his hope, or faith, was no longer usable by the rest of us.”