If This Is a Man and The Truce

This book has been described as one of the century’s truly necessary books.

If you are interested in holocaust literature, then this is a starting point. It's biographical writing at its best. No stone is left unturned in the writer’s account of his time spent in a concentration camp. A story of survival, this book is humanly honest in the portrayal of the unthinkable.

Reading this book for the first time was an experience not to be repeated. It is an essential read for everyone. 

This I think is one of the most important first-hand accounts of prisoner life at Auschwitz. It is a quiet, yet determined narrative that makes you feel as though you were there with Levi; experiencing the horrors, finding friends with other inmates, and understanding the true horror that awaited so many in Poland during WWII. If you want to really understand what it was like for camp inmates, this is the book to read.

Another book I keep returning to is If This Is a Man. Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, has written a matter-of-fact masterpiece, poetic yet never sentimental, about his year as a slave in the Monowitz/Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. It´s a low-key book but vibrant book about being a human surrounded by inhumanity.