A moving first-hand account of the Auschwitz survivor. Primo Levi, the chemist from Turin was one of the three from group of 650 who survived. This is actually two books- The first (If this is a man) describes his experiences while at Auschwitz while the second (The Truce) is his journey back home after being liberated. As a reader you will be numbed reading his hellish experience and the systematic degradation human beings were subjected to. Through a Q&A section in the end he tries to address some of the question’s readers may have after having read the book. The book will disturb you and force you to question- How could this really happen?

Se questo è un uomo - *****

Ci sono libri sui quali mi trovo in difficoltà a fare qualunque commento, perchè mi sembra di non rendere giustizia alla loro grandezza; è particolarmente vero per Se questo è un uomo dato che non si può tradurre a parole l'intensità di quest'opera, importantissima non solo come testimonianza sugli orrori della shoah ma anche dal punto di vista umano e letterario: non c'è rabbia in queste pagine, solo urgenza di raccontare; l'attenzione più che sulle atrocità (comunque sempre presenti e vive nella sua memoria e nelle nostre coscienze) è concentrata sull'animo umano, messo a nudo con una lucidità spietata ma mai cinica.
Insomma si potrebbe parlare all'infinito di questo libro e di tutto quello che ha significato e continua a significare, ma forse è ancor meglio restare in silenzio e lasciare che parli da se.
Una lettura imprescindibile, di sicuro uno dei libri della mia vita.

There are a lot of books, movies that cover the holocaust and life in the camps but I guess there aren't many, that cover what it was like returning home for people, after the liberation. And after reading The Truce, it now seems the return trip was nothing short of a challenge in itself, with the constant thought of "where to next...?"

In my understanding, there are usually two types of struggles - the first one in which, you voice your concerns, you retaliate, you even fight and try to take back what's rightfully yours. There's always this underlying notion that if you fight hard enough, if you mount a repression strong enough, and if you hit the enemy strategically enough, you will win.

And then there's the second type of struggle, in which, apart from not being able to do anything of the above, you're not allowed to speak, not allowed to have the basic freedom of will and not even allowed to ponder if anything is rightfully yours. The underlying notion in this case is that there could never be an end to this and you get up everyday with the thought that today might be your last.

While in the first, the hope of finally being able to win is what motivates most people to see it through till the end, what's peculiar about the 2nd type of survival is although you've two types of hopes to hang on to, they're mere abstract - you endure everything with the hope of seeing / meeting that one person after everything is over (incarnated by Viktor Frankl) or with the belief that no matter how worse, I WILL LIVE (personified by Primo Levi)!

Few excerpts from the book,

On Primo Levi's return to Munich after liberation, on the way to Italy.

“As I wandered around the streets of Munich, full of ruins, near the station where our train lay stranded once more, I felt I was moving among throngs of insolvent debtors, as if everybody owed me something, and refused to pay. I was among them, in the enemy camp, among the Herrenvolk; but the men were few, many were mutilated, many dressed in rags like us. I felt that everybody should interrogate us, read in our faces who we were, and listen to our tale in humility. But no one looked us in the eyes, no one accepted the challenge; they were deaf, blind and dumb, imprisoned in their ruins, as in a fortress of wilful ignorance still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still prisoners of their old tangle of pride and guilt. I found myself searching among them, among that anonymous crowd of sealed faces, for other faces, clearly stamped in my memory, many bearing a name: the name of someone who could not but know, remember, reply; who had commanded and obeyed, killed, humiliated, corrupted. A vain and foolish search; because not they, but others, the few just ones, would reply for them.”


On a response to a question about why there weren't any escapes / revolts from the camps.

“Fierce reprisals were employed to discourage escape attempts. Anyone caught trying to escape was publicly hanged – often after cruel torture – in the square where the roll-calls took place. When an escape was discovered, the friends of the fugitive were considered accomplices and were starved to death in cells; all the other prisoners were forced to remain standing for twenty-four hours, and sometimes the parents of the ‘guilty’ one were arrested and deported to camps. The SS guards who killed a prisoner in the course of an escape attempt were granted special leaves. As a result, it often happened that an SS guard fired at a prisoner who had no intention of trying to escape, solely in order to qualify for leave. ”


On the will to survive,

“After only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness completely disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) “but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. 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? I would probably live a shorter time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth… We will all die, we are all about to die… Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson… This was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.”


On Lorenzo,

“An Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward… His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.”

The Idolatry of Power

Levi reports a recurrent dream that he and many others had in the camp: He is at home among close family and friends to whom he is speaking about his life in the camp; but no one is listening. A realisation perhaps that his experiences, the intensity of his suffering, are not merely inhuman but ultimately uncommunicable or at best inexpressible. No one who hasn't been present could appreciate the extent of loss of oneself, the reduction of a person to a consciousness of utter hopelessness, pure pain in its infinite variations of distress, hunger, exhaustion.

Nevertheless these two books are protests against this very hopelessness of the incomprehensible. In this they are paradoxical. How can his cool description of the atrocities that he endured do anything but provoke despair for humanity while simultaneously demanding admiration of Levi's immense personal humanity?

There is no heroism here - no one could willingly undergo such torture - but there is some sort of life-persistence (it cannot be accurately called courage) as pure as the pain that it accompanies. The fundamental instinct to survive as it confronts what is an absolute, opposing power, a universe composed of only these two essentials.

The camp becomes then a sort of theological enactment of the idolatry of power. Theological because absolute power is how God is defined in all Western religions; idolatrous because if this is so, the only response possible is relentless (and ultimately futile) participation in the hope of stealing the smallest bit of this power in order to survive.

The camp creates, or merely shows, an ontological reality from which there is no escape so long as power is the essence of being. Getting and keeping power is all there is. To refuse participation - if indeed that verb isn't too active a description of the act of withdrawal - is to become an unresponsive 'musselman', one merely awaiting death.

This is a system of enacted metaphysical nihilism. The title of the piece therefore becomes ironic. It could equally aptly be 'If This Is God'. Could it be that our idea of God as absolute power creates the idolatrous ideal of the deification of man through power; and through that ideal fosters the camp as its apotheosis?

Mankind as the object of infinite power to which submission (in form but not an impossible substance) is required. To become part of this society is to accept death; to refuse is to merely accept a quicker death. Which could be called more courageous?

If there is any hope within the hopelessness of the universe that Levi describes, and he makes this our universe if we can overcome the indifference of his dream-characters, can it be other than the rejection of the quest for power, the ability to coerce, by those who are without power as well as those who have it?

Of what use is Levi's witness unless we appreciate not just his condition in the camp but our own as trapped by a system of power that we impose and have imposed on us? What would the world be like if God were weak, weak to the point of complete passivity to human action? (This is, I suggest precisely the point of John Caputo's theology which is also reviewed on GR; see The Weakness of God: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

Διάβασα μόνο το "If this is a man/Εάν αυτό είναι ο ανθρωπος". Το βρήκα εξαιρετικό. Γραμμένο με σκοπό να ενημερώσει, να μιλήσει στον αναγνώστη για την ζωή στο στρατόπεδο συγκέντρ��σης και όχι για να σοκάρει και να κερδίσει την συμπάθεια μας. Η γραφή είναι πολύ καλή, βρισκεις συχνά λυρικές προτάσεις κρυμμένες μέσα σε παραδοσιακά γραμμένες παραγράφους.

Συμπάθησα πολύ τον συγγραφέα. Μου άρεσε πολύ η στάση του να δικαιολογεί κάποιες πράξεις των φυλακισμένων λέγοντας πολύ σοφα πως κανεις δεν μπορεί να μιλήσει για ηθικες πράξεις στην αντίθετη πλευρά του συρματος.

Το προτείνω.

Beklager den på forhånd lange tekst. Det giver ikke rigtigt mening at reducere denne bog til stjerner.

Primo Levis oplevelser i Auschwitz er gruopvækkende. Og her er det beskrevet i en grad der har påvirket mig som sjælendt før. Den skal læses - særligt i en tid hvor erindringen om KZ og nazisternes forbrydelser bliver svagere, og udfordres, eller relativiseres, af en stigende konspiratorisk antisemitisme.

Bogen er rekreativt kort, men alligevel fyldt med indsigtsfulde beskrivelser af mennesketyper der kan overleve og dem der ikke kan, forskellige folkeslag, sprogudfordringer af babelsk karakter og en utrolig interessant beskrivelse af den innovative mikroøkonomi i en koncentrationslejr.
Desuden er der også tanker om livet og menneskets natur. Passager der grundet Primo Levis forfærdelige oplevelser er befriet fra filosofiens spekulative forestillinger om livets karakter i yderste konsekvens. Et eksempel kunne være denne:
“Før eller senere i livet opdager alle at den rene lykke ikke eksisterer, men kun få standser for at tænke over set modsatte: at det gør den rene ulykke heller ikke. Menneskets indbyggede protest mod alt hvad der er uendeligt holder disse ekstreme sindstilstande på afstand. Vores evigt utilstrækkelige kendskab til fremtiden protesterer, og det kalder man i én situation håb, i en anden usikkerhed over for morgendagen.”
Der leder til Primo Levi i den isnende regn og kulde, trods forfærdelige anstrengelser ikke springer i det elektriske hegn - for tænk sig hvis der straks efter stopper med at regne.

Håber I vil læse bogen og diskutere den med jeres venner.

I have no idea how someone can write like this about an experience like this. Primo Levi has the sharp inquiry of a journalist, the melancholy wisdom of an old philosopher and somehow through it all a wonderful wit and dry, pitch-black humor. One of the most ferocious, incredible books I’ve ever read.

"Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions"

Everyone should read this. No words ... I'll just leave you with a quote from the afterword that sums up what to me was the most chilling part about reading this book. "In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move towards the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt." It should be our common duty as human beings to remember the atrocities of Auschwitz and make sure history doesn't repeat itself ... A last word of warning from Levi: "It is [...] necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their splendour or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion, and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated. "

Foi um dos livros mais duros que tive a felicidade de ler. Sou "fã" de livros que me mostram os vários lados da Segunda Guerra Mundial; tenho um carinho enorme por Anne Frank e o seu diário; mas este, talvez por a ação ser dentro de um campo de trabalho, tocou-me de uma forma que outro livro há muito não o fazia.

É a história de Levi. É a sua vida, naquele ano em que teve a (in)felicidade de ser mandado para um campo de trabalho. E conseguiu sobreviver, contra todas as expectativas. E apesar de nós colocar a pergunta várias vezes, este é sem dúvida um livro muito humano.

Podem não ser homens que nos são descritos - foram desprovidos de toda a sua humanidade - mas a sua natureza existe. E perceber como outros homens foram capazes de gerar tal condição, faz-me pensar que muitos de nós, Homens, devíamos olhar para a História com atenção. Porque pode repetir-se, e já estivemos mais longe.

Eles são homens, escondidos por baixo de uma pele ir deixou de ser sua. Mas conseguiram renascer.

Vital reading for all humans.

I have wanted to read Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (If this is a human being) for a long time, and it has not let me down. This is the account of an Italian Jewish intellectual who spent the last year and a half of WWII in Buna, a camp near Auschwitz, and describes the ways in which Levi attempts to maintain his vitality and dignity in the gruesome conditions of Nazi suppression. There is a constantly sharp division but also correlation between physical duress and mental endurance, as well as between social stress and mental resilience, which makes the book simply concrete and concretely simple in all sorts of ways that are humbling. Not only is this never to happen again, it also relativizes all current western preoccupation with wealth, luxury, comfort as well as cultural security.

An Italian classic. The chronicle of almost two years of internment at Auschwitz between 1943 and 1945 by one of the very few survivors. Nothing to say, except maybe for this: it helps to have my memory refreshed about those horrors, as I believe it would help most people. It helps me feel even more grateful for all the blessings I have. I say a prayer for the souls of the victims of Auschwitz, and of any other Lager, and for all the people for whom every day is deep and constant suffering, because of illness or any other reason. A very important, useful book.