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.

"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/

I’ve read some other reviews on here expressing disappointment that Levi doesn’t write more impassionedly about the Holocaust. He’s so objective as to be almost too restrained, even chilly, as if he were writing about something outside himself. Lately, I’ve been reading quite a bit about the humanly inflicted catastrophes of the twentieth century and they make me wonder why I’m doing it—perhaps out of some deep-seated need for emotional intensity beyond the pale of my existence? I think it’s really quite remarkable that someone who went through what Levi did could write about the Holocaust this way. The only art to his treatment is to let the facts speak for themselves, to let the reader draw their own conclusions. Sprinkling with sentimental tears, coloring with melodrama—all that’s unnecessary. And besides, this is serious.

Instead of a chronological narrative, If This Is a Man is discontinuous with self-contained chapters that each develop a single topic. By blunting the sense of narrative continuity, Levi can turn to studying “certain aspects of the human mind.” But this timeless quality is also a fact of camp life itself: “hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the past, always too slowly, a valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought to rid ourselves as soon as possible. … For us, history had stopped.” On the train journey to Auschwitz, a threshold is crossed from mortal time to Timelessness. The realm of the dead, to which a “Charon” leads them, bears over its gate the inscription: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work gives freedom”), the synonym to “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Unlike Dante, who moves down through the various circles of Hell, Levi is already at the bottom of Hell at the beginning of the second chapter, beyond which there is no descending. “Every day, according to the established rhythm, Ausrücken and Einrücken, go out and come in; work, sleep and eat; fall ill, get better or die.” The prohibitions are innumerable; the rites (such as the “control of buttons on one’s jacket, which had to be five”) “infinite and senseless”—especially senseless since the SS guards are often invisible: camp administration is largely turned over to the prisoners themselves. Behind a double row of electrified barbed wire, prisoners are trained in apathy and blind obedience to authority. Levi recounts an episode that occurs soon after his arrival at the camp: he reaches out a window to quench his thirst with an icicle. An SS guard immediately snatches it away from him. “Warum?” Levi asks. The guard answers: “Hier is kein warum.” (“Here there is no why.”)

In the early days after his arrival at Auschwitz, Levi gets a first lesson in moral survival from Steinlauf, a former sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army (who will eventually be selected for the gas chamber), furious that Levi thinks it’s a waste of energy and warmth to wash without soap and with only brackish water:

[P]recisely because the Lager [camp] 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. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

Levi isn’t entirely convinced because, in this netherworld, he can’t accept a system created by others—especially since it’s this Teutonic rigidity of rule that underlies the camp itself. But Steinlauf’s lesson will always be of use to him, even after he’s forgotten the words.

Levi conceptualizes Auschwitz as a colossal scientific experiment, governed by the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, in the sense that Jews are fighting a war among themselves—not in the sense that those who survive are worthier of survival than those who don’t. Levi would certainly reject such a notion. In fact, he suggests just the opposite: that those who survive do so largely by sinking their teeth into the flesh of others. In an inversion of Dante’s moral hierarchy, Levi divides the prisoners into two categories: “the saved,” those who, like Levi, through luck or skill or both, never touch bottom, and “the drowned” (i.e., the damned), called Muselmänner:

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. 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, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, 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 a thought is to be seen.

Here, the real horror of Auschwitz is not, or not only, the mass production of corpses, but the production of a new—that is, modern—form of life: the Muselmann, the mere empty husk of a man with the soul entirely gone, fleeing aimlessly through a nightmare world as his very name is forgotten. It’s on the behalf of the Muselmann that the Holocaust survivor has to speak, even though he has no story to tell:

Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralysed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish.

[…]

During the night we listened carefully: … from Hurbinek’s corner there occasionally came a sound, a word. It was not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on a name.

[…]

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

As the souls of the drowned are destroyed, the souls of the saved are corrupted—especially if they’re privileged prisoners from the upper stratum of camp society, such as Kapos (trusties), who are rewarded for brutality against their fellows. You can’t exist in this system for long without being implicated, without “absorb[ing] its poison”:

The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the Prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge [prisoners], all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation.

For Levi, our humanity isn’t something to be taken for granted, as if it were a god-given gift, but something rather to be striven for, attained and maintained through ceaseless struggle against stereotyping, scapegoating, passivity in the face of evil, and conformity—although perhaps even this system needs to be constantly questioning itself and not taken as paradigm for its own sake.

Dante the pilgrim shades into Homer’s Odysseus in the second book The Truce, an account of his journey back to the realm of the living. What emerges from both books is a sense of how fragile our humanity is, how precious. And worth fighting for. But in a deep psychological sense, Levi, unlike Odysseus, will never be able to return home from Auschwitz:

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. 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’.

It is hard for me to translate my experience of this book to words. It's not that my feelings are ambiguous, or even that I can't find the right words; my problem is that it created such an emotional and intellectual response from me, that I'm finding it difficult to know where to start, or how much of it really belongs in a review.

This is actually two books in one: "If This is a Man" recounts Primo Levi's experience of entering and living on one of the Auschwitz concentration camps, and "The Truce" follows his struggle to return home after leaving the camp. Levi writes in a remarkably contained, almost dispassionate way, which, as he explains in the afterword, is not only a consequence of his analytical and scientific mind, but also an attempt to create a valuable and valid witness account, unaffected by strong emotions.

Primo Levi was twenty-four years-old when he entered the camp (or Lager, as it was known), which is how old I am at the moment, so I couldn't help comparing myself to him, and wondering how I would have reacted to what he and countless others went through. It's difficult to imagine. The whole of the "If This is a Man" book is filled with innumerable examples of the horrific events that took place, but the one that most profoundly affected me was the "treatment" they received on the day of their arrival. Here is a group of human beings, torn from their normal lives and homes, slowly being transformed into something that is only a shadow of themselves, at best. In a matter of days, what defines them as human is reduced to nothing. This was a deliberate effect from the Nazi's part, since it was easier to perpetrate unspeakable horrors to beasts, to shadows, than to something you could recognize as a human being. It's an honest, deep-felt and terribly empathic description of what he felt and what he saw in the eyes of others, and it's chilling to the bone.

After this first part, "The Truce" is almost a relief. Although also filled with a lot of suffering and miserable conditions, it is nothing compared to what went on before, and like Levi, I felt myself recovering, almost forgetting the most gruesome details of what I had just read before.

I guess that's the way the human mind works, and I really believe that, were it not from the survival's stories and the effort on the different nations' part to keep the concentration camps as a testament of those times, humanity would, sooner or later, forget what happened, or at least remember it like we remember the Inquisition, or the Napoleon Wars. Bloody events, but events that lack the human, individual side that is necessary for true empathy and understanding. World War II will remain as a terrible scar in history of the World, but the collective memory will dwindle, and we need books like this to remind us, those who weren't there, who didn't go through it or anything like it, of how low humankind can go, and has been, and will in all probability go again.

šausmīgi baisi cik pragmatisks, precīzs un neemocionāls ir šis pārstāstījums par nometnēs notiekošo
piekrītu levī teiktajam, ka baisākais punkts būs tas, kad mēs aizmirsīsim tās šausmas, kas tur notika
tāpēc arī ir vērts šo lasīt
kā arī viņa brīnišķigā rakstības spēja