In 1943, Primo Levi, a 25-year-old chemist and “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz.
Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months. This is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, this memoir remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.
‘[What] gave it such power . . . was the sheer, unmitigated truth of it; the sense of what a book could achieve in terms of expanding one’s own knowledge and understanding at a single sitting . . . few writers have left such a legacy . . . A necessary book.’ Independent
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Is a sequel ever as good as its original? Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) is a celebrated book while its follow-up (The Truce) remains less well known. But...
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