Survival in Auschwitz

Survival in Auschwitz is Primo Levi's remarkable memoir describing his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated in January 1945. This is one of the great classics of Holocaust survivor literature.

Survival in Auschwitz is a mostly straightforward narrative, beginning with Primo Levi's deportation from Turin, Italy, to the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland in 1943. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in the camp. Even Levi's most graphic descriptions of the horrors he witnessed and endured there are marked by a restraint and wit that not only gives readers access to his experience, but confronts them with it in stark ethical and emotional terms: "[A]t dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him something to eat today?" --Michael Joseph Gross