Primo Levi was a young, educated and inept member of the Italian resistance when he was captured by the fascist militia in the winter of 1943. He was identified as a Jew and shipped to Auschwitz. This book is an account of his time in hell until the liberation, and (in its second part) how he managed to make his way home in the chaos of post-war Europe.


It has already attracted so many superlatives — ‘one of the century’s truly necessary books’, writes Paul Bailey — that the chief danger is that people will ignore it for that very reason, as they tend to do things which too many people say would be good for them. That would be a great pity, since it is not only a record of the ultimate expression of Nazism it is also a profound testament of and to all humanity. And it is beautifully written — as elegant, economical, and dispassionate as its subject-matter is horrific and emotionally overwhelming. The effect of this conjunction is uniquely poignant.


The immense camp where Levi and his fellow-prisoners suffered and mostly died never produced a pound of synthetic rubber, which was its ostensible purpose. Its real purpose was death. On one occasion, denied even an icicle to assuage thirst, he asked in his broken German, ‘Warum?’ The guard replied, ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here).


Everything about such a life was a deliberate denial of human dignity. Survival itself was largely a matter of chance, mitigated, for a few, only by falling on the right side of the ferocious law, ‘to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away’. Levi’s dignity is therefore all the more authentic and moving for having been so dearly bought. No mere luxury, it was what he survived for, and what he has given to us.


The years since Levi’s death have increasingly confirmed what he and his fellow ex-prisoners felt in post-liberation Vienna: ‘not compassion, but a larger anguish, which was mixed up with our own misery, with the heavy, threatening sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil which was present everywhere, nestling like gangrene in the guts of Europe and the world, the seed of future harm.’ No one should think that what has happened could not happen again; and for anyone who finds that an appalling prospect, this book is (as Levi puts it in his Afterword) ‘a support and a warning’. It is also, by the same token, a reminder that literature itself is not an ornament of civilization but integral to it.

‘Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions...’ p396

Primo Levi was a young, educated and inept member of the Italian resistance when he was captured by the fascist militia in the winter of 1943. He was identified as a Jew and shipped to Auschwitz. This book is an account of his time in hell until the liberation, and (in its second part) how he managed to make his way home in the chaos of post-war Europe.

It has already attracted so many superlatives — ’one of the century’s truly necessary books’, writes Paul Bailey — that the chief danger is that people will ignore it for that very reason, as they tend to do things which too many people say would be good for them. That would be a great pity, since it is not only a record of the ultimate expression of Nazism it is also a profound testament of and to all humanity. And it is beautifully written — as elegant, economical, and dispassionate as its subject-matter is horrific and emotionally overwhelming. The effect of this conjunction is uniquely poignant.

The immense camp where Levi and his fellow-prisoners suffered and mostly died never produced a pound of synthetic rubber, which was its ostensible purpose. Its real purpose was death. On one occasion, denied even an icicle to assuage thirst, he asked in his broken German, ’Warum?’ The guard replied, ’Hier ist kein warum’ (’there is no why here’).

Everything about such a life was a deliberate denial of human dignity. Survival itself was largely a matter of chance, mitigated, for a few, only by falling on the right side of the ferocious law, ’to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away’. Levi’s dignity is therefore all the more authentic and moving for having been so dearly bought. No mere luxury, it was what he survived for, and what he has given to us.

The years since Levi’s death have increasingly confirmed what he and his fellow ex-prisoners felt in post-liberation Vienna: ’not compassion, but a larger anguish, which was mixed up with our own misery, with the heavy, threatening sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil which was present everywhere, nestling like gangrene in the guts of Europe and the world, the seed of future harm.’ No one should think that what has happened could not happen again; and for anyone who finds that an appalling prospect, this book is (as Levi puts it in his Afterword) ’a support and a warning’. It is also, by the same token, a reminder that literature itself is not an ornament of civilisation but integral to it.

’Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions...’ p396