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Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi (1947)

A masterpiece by the poet of the unspeakable

by
Ruth Franklin
September 17, 2013

Its title translated literally from the Italian means “If This Is a Man,” and that is the central question of Levi’s lucid memoir, possibly the single most essential work of Holocaust literature. A chemist by training who spent 11 months in Auschwitz, Levi recognized that the camp’s perverse rules and systems constituted “a gigantic biological and social experiment” designed to strip the prisoners of their humanity. But in the midst of the Inferno, he recalls a passage from Dante: “For brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence.” His work is as authentically life-affirming as a book about the Holocaust could possibly be.

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, which has just appeared in paperback.

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, which has just appeared in paperback.