Customer Reviews

If This Is a Man and The Truce (Penguin Modern Classics)

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If I had to nominate one book from the 20th century to give to a person from another century it would be this one. The two books in this single volume complement eachother perfectly. They are so different and yet I cannot say which is the better book. I have tried for several weeks to write a few paragraphs to sell this book to any would-be reader, but nothing I can say can convey the extraordinary personality of the writer. Reading If This Is A Man was a humbling experience in a way that no other book or movie I have encountered in my life has been.

People sometimes suggest that the Holocaust is old news, part of a long ago past. The day after I finished Levi's book I heard five English soccer fans singing songs about Belsen, imitating the sound of gas escaping and yelling "turn on the shower" - and laughing. I've debated with educated Americans who believe the Holocaust was exaggerated and that most of the deaths were caused by disease. One in seven French voters support a man who is in Holocaust denial. Perhaps these people would not be changed by this book, but I hope that a hundred years from now millions of people will still be reading Primo Levi and learning from this sad, brave, modest man.

If you are a man, no matter if you're jew or german or whatever else, you cannot read this book emotionless. This is something so strong words are not enough to describe it. Nobody must forget, nobody must repeat what's so honestly described in this pages. Primo Levi committed suicide 40 years later, never able to chase those days off his days and nights. We owe him and everybody who suffered that atrocity at least the promise to keep on reading his testimony,generation after generation, no matter our race, religion or gender.

'If this is a man / The Truce' is an amazing testimony to the millions of Jews who suffered & died during the Holocaust & to any other human being who has ever suffered at the hands of another man on account of race, colour, religion or any other prejudice.

Primo Levi recounts the months he spent in Auschwitz & although you get an impression of the concentration camps, the suffering endured is hard to contemplate. He suggests there should be different words in the camp to describe hunger, cold & tired. From the comfort of our armchairs, maybe it is us who do not truly understand these words. He captures the full scale of horrors that was the Holocaust. The story of little Hurbinek (named so by other survivors), whom he came across in the camp after liberation shows the pitiless evil in man that was Nazism.

"Hurbinek, who was three years old & perhaps had been born in Aushwitz & had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men. From which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm - even his - bore the tattoo of Aushwitz; Hurbinek died int he first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him; he bears witness through these words of mine."

Read this book & remember it. This is what men are capable of.

Reading this book filled me with sorrow and horror. I was prepared for the horror but did not expect the crawling sadness of this impassive tale of improbable survival, of days and months of fear, hunger and torment that I devoured in astonishement but digested with a lot more difficulty. That there were millions of human beings that went through such systematic torture and annihilation and that this whole torment was inflicted by man. That others (all of us) should quickly declare it an aberration and fail to relate to it. Primo Levi talks of a nightmare common among concentration camp prisoners: they are telling their story to people from home, people outside the camps and no one is listening. Reading Levi's tale of survival and lengthy repatriation, we come to understand the need for telling this extraordinaty experience. It is said that those survivors who chose not to talk were those who could not reconcile the shame and misery of the camp experience with their condition as human beings. They tried in vain to suppress a memory they could not assimilate. Others, like Levi, maitained the belief in his humanity as well as in that of every other man. Fot this, he claims, the extermination camp experience touches us all. 'If This Is a Man' made me realize once and for all that it is extemely important that we know, that we relate to what happened. For every victim of insane hatred and violence and for humanity's sake.

This book cannot fail to provoke overwhelming compassion from the reader.Primo,s account of being a victim of some of the worst evils ever inflicted on man will grab you from the first page and not let you put it down.The author speaks in factual detail of the wickedness inflicted upon himself and the thousands like him during his incarceration in Auschwitz.Another perspective is also written about, The demise of the human spirit and personality when faced with such gross evils. This book should be read by everyone, everywhere and never forgotten.

The very fact that Levi writes without animosity, without any overt appeal to emotions, without an hysterical hatred, is what makes this book(s) so wrenching. He does not try to do what cannot be done - describe Auschwitz painstakingly. He acknowledges in If This Is A Man that the word "cold" cannot describe the cold they felt, the word "hunger" does not begin to portray the hunger that became a living thing, "tiredness", "fear", "grief" - nobody who was not at Auschwitz can ever truly say "I understand, I feel". And I respect Levi for not trying. Just laying the bitter facts down, interwoven with sometimes heartrending, sometimes funny, and always charming characterizations of people, events, incidences, has been a far more powerful, moving and thought-provoking exercise - that is guaranteed to make every reader feel at least one pang of guilt-cum-gratitude for never having known an experience like that, at least one moment where he or she deeply and in the most acute way mourns Auschwitz.

I have just finished reading Levi's book, If This Is a Man. It was picked as one of the best books of the 20th centurey by the Folio Society of Great Britain, and having read it, I know why. It is a dispassionate but not emotionless, account of one man's experience in one of the Auschwitz satellite camps, from capture in Italy to the coming of the Russians. The book is frightening but never seeks to more than describe the actual events. Could this happen again? Of course. Should it happen? Never. The book has to be a must-read for anyone concerned with the world in which we live, and the world in which we and our childen COULD live.

I've never really invested any thought in the holocaust before reading this book. Levi's testimony has changed all that. His sober view of the concentration camps and the war have made this book one of the selected few which have truly changed the way I think. It has been an honor and a pleasure reading it. I can offer no guarantee others will feel the same way I did, only my humble and sincere recommendation of this book.

7/26/1999 I am an italian 18 year-old boy who really loved this book.I don't suggest anyone to read this book if he doesn't want to cry,if he doesn't want to really understand what has been the Olocaust for certain people: but if you wonna know the most of the truth about this genocide of the Second World War read it, and you will understand why, even more than 50 years later, is not possible to stop of speaking about it.

I think this book gives a very fair look at the life in Auswitz for the prisoners. If you have read this book you never need to read another book about the Holocaust. Also try The Periodic Table.