SynopsisPlot
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH
Story
About this book
This volume collects two linked works by the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi. If This Is a Man, first published in 1947, is his account of the eleven months he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz during 1944 and 1945. Levi was a young chemist from Turin, deported as part of the Nazi persecution of Italian Jews. His writing records daily conditions in the camp with a measured, analytical attention to detail, documenting the systematic destruction of human dignity alongside small acts of connection between prisoners.
The Truce, published in 1963, picks up where the first book ends. It follows the long and disorienting months Levi spent crossing Eastern Europe after liberation, passing through Soviet transit camps and displaced-person networks before finally reaching home. Where the first book is tightly focused on survival inside Auschwitz, the second opens outward into a chaotic landscape of uprooted people, improvised economies, and uncertain borders.
Levi wrote in plain, precise Italian prose, approaching his subject as both witness and observer. His background as a working chemist shaped his habit of looking closely at materials, processes, and human behavior under pressure. The two books together cover the full arc from imprisonment through the slow, uneven process of return.
