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If This Is a Man • The Truce

(Auschwitz Trilogy #1-2)

Primo Levi,

Stuart J. Woolf (Translator),

Paul Bailey (Introduction)

4.57 · Rating details · 15,712 ratings · 818 reviews

'With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human event ...more

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Paperback, 453 pages

Published 1987 by Abacus

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Jul 05, 2016 BlackOxford rated it it was amazing

Shelves: italian, holocaust-modern-diaspora

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 utte 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...) ...more

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Oct 09, 2007 Paul Bryant rated it it was amazing

Shelves: holocaust-literature

“However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed – they will say they are th ...more

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Aug 11, 2009 Sofia rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Everyone

Recommended to Sofia by: André

Shelves: memoir, favorites

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 Tr 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. ...more

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Feb 06, 2020 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing

Shelves: italian-20th-c, holocaust-literature, autobiography, non-fiction

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 Reawa ...more

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Jun 16, 2011 Jan-Maat added it

Shelves: autobiography-memoir, 20th-century

This pair of books are the Italian Primo Levi's autobiographical account of his time in the Auschwitz complex of camps in If this is a Man which was written soon after his return to Italy. It is as harrowing as The Truce, covering his liberation and roundabout return to Italy, is cheering. That journey undertaken at a time when Europe was covered in refuges and displaced persons. First task - find shoes you can walk in, second task - find a market.

Completely captivating and heart wrenching writi ...more

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Jan 05, 2008 Elena added it

This book is beyond any possible rating. It is, I believe, the book that says the definitive word about holocaust and about human cruelty. After this, nothing else can be said and no explanation can be given to what men can do to other men.

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Feb 18, 2017 Ammara Abid rated it it was amazing

Sorrowful turmoil ......

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Apr 04, 2013 Pink rated it really liked it

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 Aus ...more

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Feb 27, 2011 Shovelmonkey1 rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: everyone - we all need to read this book

Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by: 1001 books list

Shelves: read-in-2011, 1001-books, bookcrossing-books

Philip Roth called this "One of the century's truly necessary books". Primo Levi's description of surviving in the arbeitlager at Auschwitz-Buna is the story of human tenacity and the determination to find a way to survive in the face of incomprehensible and overwhelming odds. Reading this book and books such as Fateles by Imres Kerstz give an incomparable picture of the atrocities commited in Germany and Poland by the Nazis. These activities were facilitated in part by a Europe which couldn't o ...more

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Sep 28, 2010 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Shelves: bio, germany, austria, history, soviet-union, 2012-read, religion, kirkus, poland, italy

This book includes the two books Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening by Primo Levi. The American and European publications have employed different titles. The book ends with an excellent "Afterword". This too is written by the author. I recommend this edition.

This book is quite different from other holocaust books, by its very lack of emotion. It is a clear statement of what exactly happened to the author, both in the camp (If This is a Man) and afterwards on his travels home to Turin, Ita ...more

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Dec 26, 2012 Vicky "phenkos" rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

One of the most important books in post-war literature. It's vital to keep in mind what happened in Auschwitz because Nazism is not dead and buried, far-right groups spring up everywhere nowadays. Unbelievable as this may seem, some people have either forgotten or never cared to find out. I read this in conjunction with Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (which I haven't finished) where Arendt describes the reasons why Jews were singled out by the Nazis. Another important book! ...more

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Jan 09, 2021 Vikas Singh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: owned-book, review-of-the-year

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 ...more

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Nov 10, 2009 Arjen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-dutch

Impressive recount of a Jewish prisoner's days in Auschwitz and his journey home. I liked the dry, observant style. The author does not show hate for his tortures, just describes the facts. The reader is the judge.

The passage which made the biggest impression on me is where Levi talks about the camp musicians, playing the same songs everyday when the slaves go out to and come back from work. Levi writes that even years later, hearing these innocent songs made the blood freeze in the bodies of th ...more

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Oct 03, 2009 Smiley rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

Reading this epic-like memoir, his first-hand accounts as one of the prisoners-of-war detained in a camp at Auschwitz as a legacy of World War II by Primo Levi was stunningly descriptive, inhumane and hopeful. My background reading was that I nearly finished reading its first part, "If This is a Man," depicting his arrest in late 1943 and his life along the ruthless route to the notorious camp at Auschwitz where he survived because the authority there needed his expertise as a chemist. Then I qu ...more

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Jul 08, 2014 Iris rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own

Vital reading for all humans.

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Sep 09, 2011 Tom rated it it was amazing

I was bought this as a Christmas present from a friend and was told simply: "No one should go on without heaving read this book". Now, I've read a few books on concentration camps (and have also visited Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland) and wasn't convinced that another account of this atrocity should be on my 'to read' list.

I did, however, give it a go and I'm so glad I did. From start to finish Primo kept me drawn in by his fantastic use of language and the way he can put a very human face to ...more

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Sep 16, 2020 Antonia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, memoir

Here is one of the most important books I have ever read. Philip Roth called Primo Levi “a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known”. Roth, as many others, including myself, truly admired the strength and composure Primo Levi possessed to write his recollections of his time being a prisoner at Auschwitz. Although he lived in hell, meters away from gas chambers, and witnessed a growing decay of humanity, Primo Levi never reduced to hatred. On this particular Here is one of the most important books I have ever read. Philip Roth called Primo Levi “a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known”. Roth, as many others, including myself, truly admired the strength and composure Primo Levi possessed to write his recollections of his time being a prisoner at Auschwitz. Although he lived in hell, meters away from gas chambers, and witnessed a growing decay of humanity, Primo Levi never reduced to hatred. On this particular matter he says:”I believe in reason and in discussion as supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I repress hatred even within myself: I prefer justice. Precisely for this reason, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge”. You will rarely hear me say that, but this book I consider a must. Perhaps the only thing we could all do for the undeserved sufferings of the accused, tortured and murdered victims of the Holocaust is to read their stories, to become familiar with the possibility of human evil and avoid it at any cost.
“Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains."

“Imagine how 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. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of pure judgement of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp’, and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: ‘to lie on the bottom’. “ ...more

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Jan 28, 2018 Book rated it liked it

Shelves: holocaust

This is a powerful story of Primo Levi who was imprisoned in Auschwitz. I’m giving it 3 stars, since I felt that his writing style was confusing and tedious.

I believe that this is the first holocaust account that I have read that has been written from an objective, rather detached and unemotional point of view, or at least the first that I can remember. I know that if I had gone through all those horrors, there is no way in God’s green earth that I could have felt the same way. No way.

Some of ...more

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Jan 22, 2017 Sahel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: holocaust-literature

Before reading this, I had read Night by Elie Wiesel. I love both of these novels as they are somehow one but on totally different perspctives.

The great thing was that, near the end of the novel when Wiesel was in the hospital and there was an order of camp evacuation Wiesel had gone along with the other camp prisoners and somehow regretted having done so because the hospital would have been found by the Russians. On the other hand, Levi here is exactly the person who has remained in the hospita ...more

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Jan 25, 2013 Faith McLellan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: world-war-ii, biography

The second or third or fourth time I have read it. One of the most important works of the 20th century. Still stunned by how people keep on going, in the face of a bottomless abyss. Exhilarating, inspirational, full of an unfathomable spirit.

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Sep 16, 2012 David Thrale rated it it was amazing

Shelves: shoah, history

How can I even think that I can pass judgement on this in a literary sense? It would be wrong.

Quite simply the rawest and most moving book I have ever - and probably will ever - read. Not just because of the personal experiences that Primo describes, but also for the inconceivable way in which he rises above the inconceivable evil.

The end of the books contains a list of the questions he was often asked after writing the book and his answer that he doesn't hate Germans because that is the root of ...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Julie Rylie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: strongly-recommend, favourites, changed-me

This book is one of the best books I’ve read so far, and every day you just want to get more and more involved with Levi. As he said, this book is not only a way of stating the atrocities committed by the nazis in the WWII but also to show us the life in the Lager and how to survive, or not, in it.
And the most interesting part is something that I’ve not seen so far in books about concentration camps… He tells us about how people, when faced with such difficulties, become animals.

First you star ...more

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Oct 13, 2010 Charlotte rated it it was amazing

Shelves: can-t-leave-home-without

I read this book as an undergraduate in 1992, and in those days had the luxury of suiting myself timewise... I started in the morning and read through the day: I don't think I moved from my sagging armchair until it was too dark to read, and I had to get another loo roll for soaking up the copious weeping.

Nearly twenty years on, the narrative still haunts me: it's every bit as breathtaking in translation as in the original, which is truly rare. This is a desert island book that I would never le ...more

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Jul 24, 2017 sevdah added it

Only a small handful of books, if I had to choose a list of fundamental reads. This is one of them.

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Dec 02, 2016 Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: authorness, r-goodreads, non-fiction, 4-star, italian, 1-read-on-hand, antidote-think-twice-all, person-of-everything, antidote-think-twice-read, reviewed

4.5/5

'Hier ist kein warum' (there is no why here)

It was a naïve hope, like all those that rest on too sharp a division between good and evil, between past and future, but it was on this that we were living.

For reasons obvious to those who have been paying attention, I've been focusing more on Jewish people in my reading than I had been previously. This particular dearth in the past has everything to do with my continued fumbling through the biases of my appetites when it comes to the written word, as sweeping through and categorizing my shelves with the labels of 'people of color' and 'women' left no room for what antisemitism has wrought for millennia. The United States is no Europe, but when looking to its regional history, the concrete if seemingly disparate existences of a settler state, slavery (still legal if one is incarcerated), concentration camps (try 'immigration detention' on for size), the MS St. Louis, WASPS, Catholics, eugenics, and the El Paso 'disinfection' plant make for a potential that, in the century of the drone and the DNA databases, beats the best of both dystopia and science-fiction. There is no 'if' here. There is only a when.

In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of [humanity], and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.

He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, and the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible., But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?

If humanity ever figures out a way in which to manipulate a brain into never forgetting without resort to externalized processors, it won't be without breaking most, if not all, of the other functions the average neurotypical takes for granted. As such, I don't understand how Levi remembered all that he did, in such detail, in such times. Research and cross collaboration were not forbidden once a semblance of home had been achieved once again, of course, but as the author stated many times, the vast majority of those who shared his story are dead, and not every survivor wishes to remember what they survived.

Now I do not know Polish, but I know how one says 'Jew' and how one says 'political'; and I soon realized that the translation of my account, although sympathetic, was not faithful to it. The lawyer described me to the public not as an Italian Jew, but as an Italian political prisoner.
I asked him why, amazed and almost offended. He replied, embarrassed: 'C'est mieux pour vous. La guerre n'est pas finie.'

[O]nly at first glance does it seem paradoxical that people who rebel are those who suffer the least. Even outside the camps, struggles are rarely waged by Lumpenproletariat. People in rags do not revolt.

This isn't a handbook of how to combat what its pages contain in the future. Nor is it a model or an ultimate say on one of the many mass annihilation that have occurred since the time human beings evolved enough to segregate themselves and define the other as a worthy target of extermination. Primo Levi himself says he survived by chance, and so these writings, much as all writings are in the days of academic stagnation and capitalistic popularity contests (it took If This Is a Man eleven years and a republication to become what it is recognized as today), are beholden to chance, if perhaps in higher than average measure when the journey of the author is taken into account. The fact that he chose to target specific mythologies in his afterword (examples being the rise of the angry masses and the lack of courage of Jewish people) arose from even more chance, wherein audiences asked questions about certain topics and Levi responded to a certain few of those questions. Put together, you don't get the finale of the trilogy The Drowned and the Saved, or Levi watching the German translation and publication like a hawk, or his final years before he passed. What you get is a text written before decades of simplification into a trope wiped away the fact that the United States waging war against the Nazis was birthed out of chance, not a sizable difference in ideologies. Simply put, the clues are all there. All that is needed is the murder.

They were "charismatic leaders"; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the soundness of the things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practiced. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannahs and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.

The knocked off half star is for the characterization of various evils and uncanny survival mechanisms as 'madness'. You can get mad at me for it right after you look up "the elimination of the incurably ill", "T-4", Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Muenster, and euthanasia of disabled people up until the present day. In any case, it is not impossible to be both Jewish and disabled. Writings that reject such that occurred during the body of the memoirs, sunk into the present as they are, would have been understandable. Re-occurrences as a final conclusion in the afterword, written long after the diverse background of those condemned to the crematories had been revealed, are dangerously obtuse. As such, I recommend this book to those who are willing to learn from history, but do not equate it to swallowing any particularly history whole.

All the same I would not want my abstaining from explicit judgment to be confused with an indiscriminate pardon. No, I have not forgiven any of the culprits, nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them, unless he has shown (with deeds, not words, and not too long afterward) that he has become conscious of the crimes and errors of Italian and foreign Fascism and is determined to condemn them, uproot them, from his conscience and from that of others. Only in this case am I, a non-Christian, prepared to follow the Jewish and Christian precept of forgiving my enemy, because an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

...more

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May 21, 2012 Claire rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classic, nonfiction

An extraordinary witness to events and sharing of observations of humankind without judgement or condemnation. An important narrative that reminds us to continue and perhaps forever pay close attention to whom we support, for it is not true that we learn from the mistakes of others, we must be wary of in whom we place our trust and bestow leadership.

My complete review here at Word by Word. ...more

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Jan 21, 2018 Colin rated it it was amazing

[Only read the first of the two books in this double-up]
Primo Levi's path through the camp system, and his perspective on it, seem set apart from most other accounts (Elie Wiesel for example) owing to his knowledge, which made him more valuable (in purely economic terms) to the system that used up labour as a prelude to destroying the labourers. It's interesting to compare and contrast, noticing how each survivor's account tells us a little more about the central crime of the twentieth century. ...more

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May 20, 2014 Ugh rated it it was amazing

I read this for a number of reasons: because I thought The Periodic Table was superb, because I wanted to read about Levi's experiences in writing of that quality, because I wanted to see whether I could apply any of the wisdom Levi gleaned from his experiences to my own existence, because I wanted to see whether Levi did something similar, and because I wanted to read Levi's thoughts about the wider context of his and other people's treatment.

Some of those reasons were based on the ill-thought- I read this for a number of reasons: because I thought The Periodic Table was superb, because I wanted to read about Levi's experiences in writing of that quality, because I wanted to see whether I could apply any of the wisdom Levi gleaned from his experiences to my own existence, because I wanted to see whether Levi did something similar, and because I wanted to read Levi's thoughts about the wider context of his and other people's treatment.

Some of those reasons were based on the ill-thought-out expectation that liberation from the camps and return home would have been swift and restorative, and that The Truce would have been written in velvet-cushioned comfort, satiety and isolation. Based on idiocy, basically.

So wide-ranging musing is largely absent, but If This Is a Man and The Truce are both unshowily excellent throughout, and at times unshowily shatteringly awful and at others unshowily joyously redemptive in recounting acts of enormous horror and small-scale humanity, respectively. I turned down the corners of a lot of pages, but here are a couple of illustrations (which are exceptions to what I said at the start of this paragraph):

"Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable."

"When it rains we would like to cry. It is November, it has been raining for ten days now [...] If I could walk ten steps to the left I would be under shelter [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] well, even in that case, you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining." ...more

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Aug 11, 2017 Mimei rated it it was amazing

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Behind the barely-closed eyelids, dreams break out violently, the usual dreams. To be at home, in a wonderfully hot bath. To be at home, seated at a table. To be at home, and tell the story of this hopeless work of ours, of this never-ending hunger, of this slave's way of sleeping.

Excellent audiobook. This is a book that is impossible to rate or review, a deeply personal account written in almost-scientific prose. I have written and deleted so many thoughts already that I think I will have to l ...more

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Jan 29, 2018 Tom LA rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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, beca ...more

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Play Book Tag: If This is a Man / The Truce \| Primo Levi \| 5 stars	12	26	Aug 10, 2018 08:56AM
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About Primo Levi

Primo Levi

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Primo Michele Levi (Italian: [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]) was a chemist and writer, the author of books, novels, short stories, essays, and poems. His unique 1975 work, The Periodic Table, linked to qualities of the elements, was named by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as the best science book ever written.

Levi spent eleven months imprisoned at Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz c ...more

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Auschwitz Trilogy (3 books)

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Quotes from If This Is a Man ...

“I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.” — 227 likes

“A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.” — 59 likes

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