It's difficult to say anything about these two books, the first shorter than the second, which were published together being the story of the author's experience in one of the workcamps attached to Auschwitz and the subsequent liberation and tale of how he eventually got back to his home in Italy. Despite the grim subject matter, they contain passages of lyricism, philosophy and the endurance of the human spirit against a regime of the utmost brutality which aimed not only to murder millions, but to pulverise their individuality in the process. The second volume also makes it clear how difficult it was to return home in a situation of total chaos just before the Cold War started, when there was a constant struggle just to find food. The author was more fortunate in most in having living family to go home to when so many had lost theirs (and I know from other books and from TV documentaries, returned to find their homes stolen by people who would not give them up, and even to those who would murder them for being Jews). However, he had no guarantee that he would ever reach them.

In the afterword it was sad to hear that he apparently had committed suicide many years later, but I've read online that this is controversial - an article from the Boston Review (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/diego-gambetta-primo-levi-last-moments/) makes it clear that he could just as easily have had a dizzy spell following a recent operation which resulted in him falling over the low balcony on the staircase in his apartment building. A sad ending in any case for a man who had overcome so much and left a lasting legacy in the shape of this amazing memoir, for which I can only give 5 stars. ( )

This book was brutal, brutal.... But one of the most thought and emotion provoking books I’ve read, a masterpiece.

Remember Hurbinek... ( )

Would give it six, seven or eight stars it poss. The translation is superb, I just wish I could read the original Italian. I cried. I laughed. Had to put it down from time to time to let the material sink in and get absorbed. Should be on Eng Lit reading lists, even though a translation. ( )

Wstawać.

Why did the last page of Truce shatter me? Years after Levi died, many decades after he survived Auschwitz, I read it and still felt the enormous haunt of what the Nazis did. After what seemed like an entire book that rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented something inherently wicked in human nature -- hundreds of pages celebrating the triumph over Auschwitz, the escape, community and chutzpah and character over the gray decimation of persons -- Levi writes in the last pages of a "truce". A truce -- it is unclear really what it is a truce of -- seemingly between the survivors of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of it, or perhaps the memory of their actions. Quite the reversal.

Everything we do as humans is tarnished by the Nazis; we live in a dream that is corrupt in its core, that is drained from its color when you look at it close enough. Esther Perel says that the "erotic is the antidote to death", and perhaps Levi says here that eroticism has been ruined, wasted, invalidated. That there is no redemption. ( )

In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I have read what is probably the most famous memoir from a survivor. If This is a Man is, however, rather different from other such memoirs I have read, as its theme is not so much the detail of his lived experiences, or particular atrocities (though these are of course covered), but what Auschwitz and the Holocaust represented - in the author's words, "the demolition of man": "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."; 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." Notwithstanding these bleak quotes, I did not find this memoir bleak, as throughout his year at Auschwitz, Levi survives by never losing an ultimate belief in human dignity and hope, though, paradoxically, "our wisdom lay in ‘not trying to understand’, not imagining the future, not tormenting ourselves as to how and when it would all be over; not asking others or ourselves any questions." The book ends with the Nazi abandonment of Auschwitz and the notorious death march (which Levi avoided only by virtue of being ill with scarlet fever at the time) culminating, after a ten day period of further struggling with the forces of cold, hunger and disease, with the Red Army liberating the camp on 27 January 1945.

My edition was paired with its sequel the somewhat longer The Truce, which details the author's lengthy enforced peregrinations across eastern and central Europe to eventually get home well into the autumn of 1945. This is less immediately memorable as a read, but does contain descriptions of the many colourful characters of different nationalities with whom he makes his itinerant life. Finally, the book ends with the author providing lengthy answers to some of the most common questions he was asked in the post-war period by audiences to whom he spoke about his books and his experiences, to ensure the events of the Holocaust remained alive in the minds of succeeding generations as: "Strong though the words of If This is a Man are, they are still weak before the will to deny or forget." ( )