Last night, I finished Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. I have read and heard and seen much about the Holocaust. But as I read Levi’s book about his year in Auschwitz, I realized this was the first time that I had read a first-hand account of the death camps at length. Levi’s book is, by turns, haunting and mesmerizing. It shows how, when everything is taken away from a man, the smallest thing, like a piece of string, a spoon, or a hunk of bread, takes on enormous significance. More importantly, it illustrates how a very ordinary man, who once lived an ordinary life, can survive, alone, with cruelty and death all around:

Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly enough to wipe out the past and the future when one is forced to. A fortnight after my arrival I already had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown to free men, which makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. I have already learnt not to let myself be robbed, and in fact if I find a spoon lying around, a piece of string, a button which I can acquire without danger of punishment, I pocket them and consider them mine by full right. On the back of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain. I shiver in the wind; already my own body is not mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my face is thick in the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly recognize each other.

We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday evening in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped it at once, because it was too sad to count our numbers and find fewer each time, and to see each other ever more deformed and more squalid. And it was so tiring to walk those few steps and then, meeting each other, to remember and to think. It was better not to think.