If This Is A Man/The Truce

By Primo Levi, Stuart Woolf (translator),

Book cover of If This Is A Man/The Truce

Book description

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutestā€¦

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Why read it?

5 authors picked If This Is A Man/The Truce as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I was forever changed by the sheer poetic authenticity and ferocity of how Primo Levi captured his nearly one year of suffering unbearable atrocities at the Auschwitz Nazi prison camp with such humanity, causing me to gasp for air page after page; I literally had to stop and catch my breath.

As we are in a time of truth denial, as we drift further away from the holocaust, Levi wrenched me back to the horror and reminded me, and all who read his book, to ā€œNever Forget.ā€ I was both entertained and astonished by Leviā€™s exquisite yet unpretentious prose, captivatingā€¦

From Christopher's list on survival, WWII history, and the Holocaust.

One of the many questions I asked about the Holocaust is: how a normative person could survive in Auschwitz? Levi provides some ideas.
Levi survived because of a few reasons. Unlike many people who gave up, he wanted to survive. He learned the keys to survival in an impossible place. He quickly learned basic German so he could understand the commands and many rules. He was smart and innovative. He was willing to take calculated risks. He understood that in the Auschwitz planet, he could not maintain ALL the norms he had as a free person. Some compromises with hisā€¦

This book has been described as one of the centuryā€™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 writerā€™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. 

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Book cover of Sufferance

Sufferance by Charles Palliser,

This is a novel about choices. How would you have chosen to act during the Second World War if your country had been invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy determined to isolate and murder a whole community?

Thatā€™s the situation facing an ordinary family man with two children, aā€¦

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. ItĀ“s a low-key book but vibrant book about being a human surrounded by inhumanity.   

From Elisabeth's list on memory and oblivion.

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