This book is the well written memoir of Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian chemist. It documents his life in a Nazi work camp during World War II. The story is filled with minute details of life of in the camp, from eating (starving) and working to the latrines and the clinic.

It is written in a very plain writing style. It is more like a documentary work than an overly flowery description. The camp is bleak and so is the prose. Levi was a chemist before the war, and he approaches the writing from a very anyalitical perspective. He lets reader read his mind while he was in the camp, which is both frightening and interesting. This writing style is very moving and effective when the content is the barbarity of war, the pain of hunger and inevitability of certain death.

The story starts with Levi living in the woods outside of his native Turin, with partisans and other oppressed outlaws. He was sent to Auschwitz in Poland by train, in 1944 by the Germans who captured him. He considers himself to be very lucky to have been sent so late, increasing his very slim chances of survival. He did survive, to tell the story however.

While in the camp, he considered his chances of survival to be zero. He felt her would be "sent to the gas" like everyone else. His youth, intelligence, strength, moxie, education, interpersonal skills and luck allowed him to survive. The old, weak, children and most women were all killed immediately after disembarking from the trains at Auschwitz. Levi was about 24 when he was sent, so he was neither too old nor too young, and could serve as a worker. The rations in the camp were insufficient to maintain strength, so Levi had to think about how to beg, trade and steal food from the non-Jewish (non-Jews were fed better) inmates he came into contact with in the camp, and the civilian workers at his assignment sites. It was only because he was a chemist that he was able to work in the laboratory, instead of as a ditch digger, brick layer or other laborer.

Ultimately, Levi developed Scarlet Fever, and was too sick for the forced march that the Germans organized in the face of the advancing Russian army. He was left behind as the Germans retreated, and in the ten days between the German departure and the Russian advance, he witnessed the corpses mount in the abandoned camp, as food became very scarce and the electricity, heat, and water were nearly non-existent (Levi made water from snow he heated in a make-shift stove).

Levi later learned that all those on the forced march were killed, his best friend among them.

This re-telling of life in the concentration camps is a story that had to be told. It shows humanity at its worst. What man in desperate life threatening circumstances will do toward other men. It shows the barbarity of the German captors and the helplessness of the concentration camp prisoners. I am glad this book was written, and I hope no one has to endure anything like that ever again.

Recommended: Yes