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Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi
One of the essential books of the twentieth century. Primo Levi, a young Italian Jewish chemist, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and survived; this is his account of that year, written immediately after the war. What makes it extraordinary is not sensation but restraint: Levi observes the machinery of dehumanization with a scientist's precision and a moralist's steadiness, refusing both self-pity and vengeance in order to understand what was done to human beings, and what remained of them. Clear, exact, and unforgettable, it is at once a personal testimony, a work of literature, and a permanent ethical document. It belongs in any serious library, and it asks to be read slowly.
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The author
Primo Levi (1919–1987) was a chemist from Turin, arrested as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance and, as a Jew, deported to the Auschwitz complex (Monowitz) in 1944. His training as a scientist shapes the book's cool, exact attention; his humanity shapes everything else. He went on to a distinguished life as a writer and returned to this material across his career, most searchingly in The Drowned and the Saved.
The book
Written just after the war and first published in Italian in 1947 as Se questo è un uomo ("If This Is a Man") by a small press, it was nearly overlooked until Einaudi reissued it in 1958. Stuart Woolf's English translation, made in close consultation with Levi, appeared in 1959; in the United States it has long carried the title Survival in Auschwitz, though Levi's own title, If This Is a Man, is truer to the book's central question.
How it has aged
As a permanent classic — a foundational text of Holocaust testimony and of twentieth-century literature, valued precisely for its refusal of melodrama. Readers and scholars have sometimes regretted the American retitling, which frames as a survival story a book that is really an inquiry into what it means to remain, or to cease to be, a human being.
For more context
Levi's own The Truce and The Drowned and the Saved; and the wider literature of witness.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Primo Levi
- Publisher
- Touchstone (Simon & Schuster)
- Place of publication
- New York
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine