If this is a Man, The Truce

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. If This Is A Man describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. The Truce covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe.

Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame. By telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writing - work love, power, the nature of things, what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated, apprehensive.