Viewer's review: If This Is A Man / The Truce

If This Is A Man / The Truce
Primo Levi   
ISBN: 978-0-349-10013-5

Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor and his experiences are described in this 2 part autobiographical work. In If This Is A Man Levi relates the story of his 11 months imprisonment in Auschwitz at the age of 24 and The Truce is the long journey home to Italy after the camp is liberated. Primo Levi recounts his time in the concentration camp as someone trying to make sense of what is happening around him, and of human nature.

Levi’s first hand account of the horrors of every day existence in Auschwitz makes for uncomfortable reading, however Levi writes in such a way that his story of hell and survival is not depressing and his prose is gentle. In the preface Levi states that the origin for the book came from “a need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it therefore providing an interior liberation for himself and other survivors. He signs off “It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented”, which may seem strange at first but on further reading you almost want to believe that this is a work of fiction and not autobiographical.

Stripped of all possessions, clothes, shoes, shaved and branded with a prisoner number the only way to obtain bread and soup in the camp is to show your number. Degraded and de-humanised, a prisoner’s prize possessions become his bowl and spoon. The Nazis beat and worked the prisoners remorselessly and treated them as slaves until they were ready to be disposed of in the gas chambers and crematoria. Prisoner’s hair was used for cloth, gold teeth were extracted and prisoner’s ashes were used for pathways. Degraded and nothing left of the man. A remarkable story beautifully written.

Before embarking on this book I re-capped on my prior exposure to the Holocaust. My first exposure was the much honoured movie Schindler’s list which told the story of a Czech/Nazi who, realising the horrors of the war, set up a factory not just to profiteer from the war, but he saved 1,100 Polish Jews from certain death and at great risk to himself. Then I read the Anne Frank Diaries which told the story through the eyes of a German Jewish teenager in hiding with her family and a few other Jews in Holland. They hid for 2 years in the back rooms above her father’s factory in Amsterdam before being exposed and sent to the camps. Anne succumbed to Typhus in the camp a few days before it was liberated. The Anne Frank Museum was a real eye-opener. Then more recently I read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – by John Boyne – a novel which tells the story of the Holocaust and the Final solution through the innocent eyes of a nine-year-old boy Bruno, the story has a twist at the end which makes for an unexpected conclusion.

Marion Thomas, Hampshire

Marion has also recently enjoyed reading The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.