Se questo è un uomo

1947

auschwitz (concentration camp)
world war, 1939-1945
italian personal narratives
german prisoners and prisons
concentration camps
biography
personal narratives, italian
prisoners and prisons, german
prisoners of war
personal narratives

The story

This book describes Primo Levi's experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camp alive. The average life expectancy of a new entry was three months. This truly amazing story offers a revealing glimpse into the realities of the Holocaust and its effects on our world. - Back cover.

What it’s like

Plain, unadorned sentences carry the weight here: Levi writes like a chemist keeping a precise record, every observation measured and every feeling held at a steady distance, so the prose reads as testimony rather than performance. The sensory world is cold and grey, with mud, frost, the stench of the camp, the rhythm of roll calls in the dark, and the hunger that organises every hour. Nothing is lush, and the restraint is what makes it land. The mood is bleak, lucid and controlled, a dread that settles in slowly rather than striking in bursts, and the book moves in short reflective chapters, circling back to questions of memory, dignity and how ordinary people are reduced. Its intensity is serious and sustained: brutality, starvation, humiliation and death recur throughout, described without gore for its own sake but with unflinching clarity, so it is not gentle and makes no concessions to comfort. Those who want an honest, deeply humane account of survival, read slowly and in a settled frame of mind, will find it here, along with its gravity and its careful moral attention.

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