If This Is a Man • The Truce

Levi’s book is a testimony of his year at the Buna Arbeitslager, part of the Auschwitz network of slave labor and extermination camps. The first words of his preface “I was fortunate to be confined to Auschwitz” set the stage for him to yes, tell us the horrifying, dehumanizing treatment he suffered at the hands of the Germans and Poles that ran the camp, but also his continuous effort to keep the spark of his personality and soul alive under those circumstances. He can’t make the “glass half full” but he does give us enough drops to let us consume a story that we need to know. To survive we must want to survive, as Steinlauf tells him early in his internment, and Levi tells us all the ways he remained engaged in the struggle to survive, and avoided becoming one who surrendered. Heartbreaking, important, significant.

This isn't really a book that can be rated. However, since that's how we catalogue our books here on Good Reads, I'm giving it 4 stars - not 5, but just because I wouldn't want to read it again and I can't honestly say it's one of my favourite ever books. Otherwise it's 10 stars.

I was going to start this review with quotes from the book. However, after telling my Mother how good it was when she called round this afternoon, she appears to have left with it. I text her that its like living in Auschwitz, not being able to put anything down without it being stolen. Obviously a direct comparison with life in the camp.

So how do you review a book like this? If you pick it up, or think of picking it up, or even decide not to try it, I think that decision is based on the content. A book about a concentration camp survivor is never going to be light reading and some people don't want to tackle such heavy topics. Understandably so.

If you choose to read this, then you know what sort of book you're getting into from the outset. You're reading because you want to learn more. Yet what if it doesn't interest you? The introduction of my edition said something along the lines of there being a danger that people not only forget, but become complacent when talking about the holocaust. Everyone in this day and age knows what occurred and so much has been said about the war and concentration camps, that I think we become immune to the horror. We know what happened, we know that many died, we know it was horrific. So why read about it? In Primo Levi's words -

“It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist"

Yes this book is one man's memoir of 11 months spent in Auschwitz and the follow up story of his long journey home, but it is more than this. Primo Levi purposely wrote with an impassioned voice, so that he could document a true account of conditions, without seeming emotionally biased. He wrote 'If This is Man' within the first year of returning home. Why he decided to write and how he was able to do this, is amazing in every sense of the word. He was not a writer, but a chemist, yet the writing style in this book is extraordinarily beautiful and eloquent. If you have read it, I suspect that you found it tough going at times, it's not a book that can be skipped through in one sitting.

If you haven't read it, for whatever reason. Here's some points that I hope encourage you to pick it up

- The chapters are nice small bite sized chunks
- While harrowing in content, it is not gratuitously graphic
- The writing style is beautiful
- There are interesting facts about camp life, not usually documented
- Characters are well written and fascinating

The second part of the book, Levi's return journey, is an aspect that I had not read about before. I knew that many people were stranded in camps after the war, but the journey home, documented in The Truce, was of a more mammoth undertaking than I had considered. In fact for many of the miraculous survivors, this next stage was even more hellish than the camps.

This book was gruelling to read at times. It was also fascinating, educating, heartbreaking and absorbing, to name but a few adjectives. I would recommend the first story - If This is Man - to everyone who is human. To those who want to know more, continue by reading The Truce.

I want to end with my favourite and most thought provoking passage from the book. I found the quote on GoodReads and 'liked' it, which doesn't seem to quite do it justice -

“It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

Primo Levi's first-hand account of the horrors of Auschwitz in 1944 and then the story of his return to Italy in 1945 are absolutely essential reading. The writing is beautiful and also brutal. I feel this is the gold standard for all memoirs about surviving the unsurvivable. A must-read if you truly want to attempt to understand what happened in the camps and how hard it was to come back afterwards.

This volume consists, in fact, of two books otherwise titled Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening when sold separately.

The first book, If This Is A Man is the harrowing story of his capture, the journey to Auschwitz, his life in the camp and how he survived until the Liberation of 29 January 1945 by the Russians. It is all described with a detached humanism, never flinching at the violence, but with a gift of description and analogy. Primo Levy arrived at Auschwitz and was transferred by truck to a worksite, Buna-Monowitz.
[ Note that Auschwitz was not one specific place but actually several: Auschwitz I (with the Arbeit Macht Frei sing) was the central processing and original camp built on a pre-existing Polish military camp, starting in 1943 the much larger (400 hectares vs 30 hectares for Auschwitz I) Auschwitz-Birkenau was built with four massive crematoria (and two smaller original ones used to "perfect" the dosage of Zyclone B), the IG Farber chemical factory at Buna-Monowitz, and 50 other smaller work camps. One needs to understand how critical slave labor was to the economy of the Third Reich to fully appreciate the scale of what was attempted in and near the Polish town of Oświęcim (transformed into the more pronounceable Auschwitz by the Nazis).]
While the truck bumped along the Polish roads between Auschwitz I and Buna (about 10 kilometers away - absolutely nothing left today), the soldier asked them courteously one by one, in German and pidgin language, if [they had] and money or watches to give him, seeing that they would not be useful to use any more. This is no order, no regulation: it is obvious that it is a small private initiative of our Charon. The matter stirs us to anger and laughter and brings relief. (p. 27)

Once in the Lager (the German word for the camp that Levy uses), We have learnt that everything is useful: the wire to tie up our shows, the rags to wrap around our feet, waste paper to (illegally) pad out our jacket against the cold. We have learnt, on the other hand, that everything can be stolen, in fact, is automatically stolen as soon as attention is relaxed; and to avoid this, we had to learn the art of sleeping with our head on a bundle made up of our jacket and containing all our belongings, from the bowl to the shoes. (p. 39)

During his first week, he meets and befriends Steinlauf, an ex-sergeant of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Iron Cross of the '14-'18 war who teaches him a lesson of survival: 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 are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. (p. 47). I found this one of the most powerful passages of this remarkable book.

He describes the endless nights of terror thus: The dream of Tantalus and the dream of the story are woven into a texture of more indistinct images: the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear and promiscuity, turns at night-time into shapeless nightmares of unheard-of violence, which in free life would only occur during a fever. One wakes up at every moment, frozen with terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood. (p. 68). One wishes that this was fiction, but, of course, it is the real, lived experience of Primo described with such startling realism, written in the year following his return to Italy.

One of the most piquant chapters (which lent its name to another book by Primo Levy, The Drowned and the Saved describes those like Primo that survive but also the vast majority of inmates who did not. The name in camp for the endless masses of people that were visibly unable to cope and were certain to die was "musselman" or literally "muslim":
On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen. (p. 96).

Levy is luckily assigned as a "chemist" to clean the doomed factor at Buna. It was created to create synthetic rubber for the German army (because after the Afrikacorps of Rommel was defeated in '42, they lost all access to African rubber plantations), but in fact never produced as much as an ounce of rubber (while killing probably 60-70k people in the process). But the Germans are deaf and blind, enclosed in an armour of obstinacy and of wilful ignorance. (p. 147)

Of course, the camp was bombed by the advancing Russians and the Germans put to flight. Levy was saved because he was sick and in the infirmary. His friends that were force-marched out of camp with the SS towards Germany all died (over 30% of the 60,000 during the Death Marches never made it to the next camp marching in pajamas in sub-zero weather without shoes.) During the bombing, those who were safe in the infirmary bolted themselves inside: Two huts were burning fiercely, another two had been pulverized, but they were all empty. Dozens of patients arrived, naked and wretched, from a hut threatened by fire: they asked for shelter. It was impossible to take them in. They insisted, begging, threatening in many languages. We had to barricade the door. They dragged themselves elsewhere lit up by the flames, barefoot in the melting snow. Many trailed behind them streaming bandages. (p. 163)

With painful precision, he describes the desperation after the Nazis left and the survivors had to scrounge for food to eat, and wood to light fires to melt the dirty snow for water. Of the over 100,000 prisoners in Auschwitz, only 7000 were still alive (many critically ill or seriously injured) when the Russians arrived on Jan 27, 1945.

The next section, The Truce describes Primo's long strange journey from Auschwitz, into Ukraine and Russia and then finally across Hungary and Germany back to Italy. It took nearly ten months for him to get back, all the time fighting for his survival day in and day out. It is full of adventure and colorful characters. It demonstrates that after Liberation, things did not suddenly go from awful to wonderful for the few survivors. There was a continuous struggle to keep hope alive to get back home. Primo was somewhat lucky, because he had family to go back to. Many were completely lost having no family left at all. On arriving and seeing his family again, the memories of hell are still there. I am alone in the center 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. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, 'Wstawàch'.

This is the most powerful book I read about the Holocaust and is perhaps the best way, before visiting one of the camps and in particular Auschwitz, to understand and imagine the horror of life there.

Fino's Reviews of Books about the Holocaust
Nonfiction:
If This Is A Man/The Truce by Primo Levy
The Periodic Table by Primo Levy
The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levy
The Night by Elie Wiesel
Auschwitz by Laurence Rees
Fiction:
The Tatooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris
Travel to Krakow to visit Auschwitz:
Krakow:City Guide [Blue Guides]

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?

After having read the book a couple of times, it is still difficult for me to translate into words my experience. I tried in English, in Spanish, in Catalan. I just couldn't do it, no matter how much effort I put on the fact of writing. Words didn't come to me. The only thing I was only able to do was to jot down a couple of phrases:

Raw. Terrifying. Harrowing. Heart-breaking. Inspirational. Full of resilience. A chant to the beauty of life. A must-read for anybody over 18.

"se questo è un uomo" è il libro di un grande uomo sulla più grande tragedia del XX secolo; ma a 15 anni, non amavo sentirmi istigato moralmente... mi chiedevo cosa avesse a che fare con la letteratura "se questo è un uomo". poco o niente, mi dicevo. A distanza di anni, la penso ancora un po' così. sarà perché il primo levi che amo è quello delle storie naturali, di vizio di forma... una letteratura che ha la sua radice e il suo cuore nel fantastico.
considerato questo assunto: 3 stelle.

An unflinching and detailed account of his time in Auschwitz. Levi reflects on the nature of evil, the psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressors, and the broader implications of the Holocaust. Herein he describes the ways in which individuals maintained their humanity and dignity, even in a place designed to strip them of both. The writing is precise and evocative, a timely reminder of the human capacity for both cruelty and resilience.

Non è uno di quei libri che si possono definire "belli" o "brutti" perchè non sono fiction.
Questa è la storia vera di Primo Levi, raccontata in maniera puntuale e precisa, quasi distaccata, dal momento in cui entra a Monowitz, campo satellite di Aushwitz, fino alla liberazione del campo.
È un libro duro, che fa venire i brividi e le lacrime agli occhi. Non è per nulla pesante, è una descrizione senza fronzoli, diretta e non edulcorata.
Ed è un libro necessario per capire.
Perchè è stato necessario per Levi "tornare mangiare e raccontare" e per noi è necessario mantenere la memoria di quegli orrori per non ripeterli più.