Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity - Softcover

Primo Levi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0020343000 ISBN 13: 9780020343004

Publisher: Collier, 1961

Synopsis

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.

About this title

Review

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

About the Author

Primo Michele Levi (July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include Survival in Auschwitz (1947), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975) which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.

Edition details

• Publisher: Collier
• Publication date: 1961
• ISBN 10: 0020343000
• ISBN 13: 9780020343004
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 157