IF THIS IS A MAN/THE TRUCE: Survival In Auschwitz

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. If This Is A Man describes his deportation to Poland and the 20 months he spent working in Auschwitz. The Truce covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. He never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame, but by telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language, he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writings, work, love, power, the nature of things and what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated and apprehensive. This is clearly one of the most focussed Holocaust testimonies, written before the genre existed and with no bitterness or self-pity. This slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out to systematically remember the German hell on earth which he recounts in lucid, unpretentious prose. A must-read with the situation today in Israel and the Gaza Strip. 457pp, paperback.