If This Is a Man / The Truce by primo levi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Não vou classificar este livro.
É um testemunho real, cruel e devastador, logo não tem classificação possível.
Recomendo todas as pessoas a lerem este testemunho, não só para saber um pouco mais do quotidiano nos
campos de concentração, mas sobretudo saber um pouco mais sobre a condição humana.
É realmente deprimente saber o que um ser humano consegue fazer quando cego por algo, credo ou ideia, a pura maldade humana.
Também e não menos deprimente é a transformação dos seres civilizados e livres em animais grotescos e sem princípios capazes do impensável, quando privados das suas necessidades básicas.
Não há comparação possível, mas mesmo assim se olharmos com alguma atenção o mundo, por vezes basta o nosso pequeno "mundinho" podemos ver/perceber pequenos resquícios desses sentimentos mas em mínima escala.

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TatuSenhor

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

"You who live safe in your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening, hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman, without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold like a frog in winter."

If This Is a Man starts with this poem. It is a fitting prelude to the book, for it details the harrowing personal experience of the author, Primo Levi, in the concentration camp of Buna-Monowitz. Levi calls the camp an "extermination camp". "Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself...It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp’..."

If This Is a Man recounts the period from Levi's capture by the Germans to the time of their liberation by the Red Army. With an impassive voice, he narrates his transport to the concentration camp, his hellish life in the camp, the humiliation, the degradation, and the suffering he had to endure there. Although he is a victim of unjust hatred, Levi maintains a balanced account of his life in the camp. He is justly indignant but not bitter. Yet, it's a powerful account written with tragic beauty. Even with Levi's impassive tone, the account distresses and emotionally taxes the readers.

The history tells us of the Holocaust - the genocide of over six million European Jews - but it fails to emphasize the equally heinous crime of the subtle murder of personalities, for that's what happened in these concentration camps. Nazis killed the personalities of their victims way before they killed their persons. Levi's narrative unfolds how their personalities were destroyed like that of breaking horses. "To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement...That man must have been tough, he must have been made of another mettle than us if this condition of ours, which has broken us, could not bend him. Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue and cold, even if we return home...". My heart broke at these words.

Even after the liberation, Levi and the few Auschwitz survivors didn't have an easy time. The war had wrecked Europe. Everywhere there was damage, destruction, and disorder. So the journey back home was another trial for them. The second book The Truce recounts this trying time. To Levi, however, the journey home was a time for reflection and adjustment, for though they were free, they were still yoked to an invisible hell that lived through their thoughts and memories. "A dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation, of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home." One cannot even imagine the weight of the scars these survivors carried. They were never truly free from their horrific experience. And what retribution could avenge the monstrous crimes committed against them? "Now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever...It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it."

Levi's need to tell his story was urgent. While passing a part of German soil on his journey back home, he strongly felt the need to tell his story to the Germans. "We felt we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and we felt that every German should have something to say to us; we felt an urgent need to settle our accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at the end of a game. Did ‘they’ know about Auschwitz, about the silent daily massacre, a step away from their doors? If they did, how could they walk about, return home and look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If they did not, they ought, as a sacred duty, to listen, to learn everything, immediately, from us, from me; I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore." There was yet another reason for Levi to chronicle his Auschwitz experience. "The danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue and ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and by stages finally deny – actively or by default – the horror of the extermination camps and the witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who experienced them. The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually." I fully comprehend Levi's reasoning. Knowing full well that concentration camps existed and having visited Auschwitz, some of the accounts still felt too fantastic even to me. As Levi says, there is the danger of disbelieving. Not yet but in the future. By writing these two books, Levi is not only giving voice to the Holocaust survivors but also performing a historical duty.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

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Pancreso

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

I read this book as an undergraduate in 1992, and in those days had the luxury of suiting myself timewise... I started in the morning and read through the day: I don't think I moved from my sagging armchair until it was too dark to read, and I had to get another loo roll for soaking up the copious weeping.

Nearly twenty years on, the narrative still haunts me: it's every bit as breathtaking in translation as in the original, which is truly rare. This is a desert island book that I would never leave home without: a manual for humanity and a study in hope. Without compare.

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Laplace_kun

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

To say it is a "must read" is an understatement. I cannot think of what to say that has not been said before, but then I feel I should say something that would entice others to read it. Dr. Levi writes of atrocious facts with such moderation, fact based (his personal experience, what he witnessed) and at the same time with such profoundness, humanity and deep-rooted pain. It does not help, as nothing would, explain the whys and wherefores of that blackest of black periods in human history that is the Holocaust. Please read it.

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xxxATiON

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Неизбежен е паралелът с Ремарк. "Нима това е човек" и "Примирието" са като "Искрица живот" и "Обратният път" при Ремарк. Но още по-добри. Много по-добри. И брутални със своята автентичност. Примо Леви е великолепен разказвач!

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SenseiDaichi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Probably the best work about the Holocaust I have ever read. Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian, was captured while involved with a Resistance movement in 1944, and sent to Auschwitz. He was assigned to the work camp at Monowitz, and in If This is a Man he documents the brutality of the camp and the gradual dehumanisation of its occupants through cold, hunger, fatigue and its inhumane regime. In its companion volume, The Truce, Levi takes the reader with him on the bizarre and confused return journey to Italy.

Levi deliberately writes in a measured unsentimental way. He states his aim in the invaluable appendix to this edition “the calm sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge” This is far more effective in conveying the atmosphere of the camp than the sentimental and emotional tone so often used in modern Holocaust fiction, and provides a chilling and haunting account of this unimaginable cruelty and deprivation.

If This is a Man is an important and eye opening account, but difficult to read, particularly the final 10 days of the camp as detailed in the final chapter. The Nazis have fled, taking healthy occupants on a final death march, while Levi and his few healthy companions are scrabbling for survival in these hellish conditions amidst sick and dying people, filth and extreme cold. The Truce is a more uplifting work, full of mischievous humour. Despite the chaos of the journey from Poland to Italy, via Russia, the bunch of lively characters find ways to eat, drink and even occasionally be merry (there is a very funny account of a theatrical production in a Russian camp).

Definitely worth reading, and heeding the warning of someone who knew exactly what charismatic leaders followed by an adoring and unthinking populace can easily lead to.

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lemon_drops

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

A review of this dyad is not possible, at least not from me. Five stars are not enough. Read it and weep. Quite possibly the best book I have ever read.

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Blackjohn91

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Here is one of the most important books I have ever read. Philip Roth called Primo Levi “a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known”. Roth, as many others, including myself, truly admired the strength and composure Primo Levi possessed to write his recollections of his time being a prisoner at Auschwitz. Although he lived in hell, meters away from gas chambers, and witnessed a growing decay of humanity, Primo Levi never reduced to hatred. On this particular matter he says:”I believe in reason and in discussion as supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I repress hatred even within myself: I prefer justice. Precisely for this reason, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge”. You will rarely hear me say that, but this book I consider a must. Perhaps the only thing we could all do for the undeserved sufferings of the accused, tortured and murdered victims of the Holocaust is to read their stories, to become familiar with the possibility of human evil and avoid it at any cost.
“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. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains."

“Imagine how a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of pure judgement of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp’, and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: ‘to lie on the bottom’. “

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Auschwitz Trilogy #1-2

If This Is a Man / The Truce

primo levi stuart j. woolf

This edition

Primo Levi

Alberto (if This Is A Man)

Charles (if This Is A Man)

Arthur (if This Is A Man)

Jean Pikolo

Lorenzo Perrone

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