Primo Levi's memoir of his 10 months in Auschwitz is a masterpiece of Holocaust literature--not simply a recounting of personal tragedies and historical atrocities, but a remarkably clear-eyed and rigorous meditation on the fragile nature of human personality and identity in the face of systematic oppression. A 25-year-old chemist when he was arrested in his native Turin by the Italian fascists and deported to Poland's most notorious rail terminus, Levi used his observational skills and considerable literary gifts to paint a detailed portrait of the death camp. Yet, throughout this 1961 book, he scrupulously reminds the reader that no amount of writerly eloquence will ever do justice to the experience of those who suffered there.
             (This review was written under the original title of the book: If This is a Man followed by The Truce)
             Reading this book filled me with sorrow and horror. I was prepared for the horror but did not expect the crawling sadness of this impassive tale of improbable survival, of days and months of fear, hunger and torment that I devoured in astonishment but digested with a lot more difficulty. That there were millions of human beings that went through such systematic torture and annihilation and that this whole torment was inflicted by man. That others (all of us) should quickly declare it an aberration and fail to relate to it. Primo Levi talks of a nightmare common among concentration camp prisoners: they are telling their story to people from home, people outside the camps and no one is listening. Reading Levis tale of survival and lengthy repatriation, we come to understand the need for telling this extraordinaty experience. It is said that those survivors who chose not to talk were those who could not reconcile the shame and misery of the camp experience with their condition as human beings. They tried in vain to suppress a memory they could not assimilate. Others, like Levi, maitained the belief in his h...