What always amazes me about the Holocaust is the sheer improbability of the story of each of its survivors. This is the horror. For every shining genius of the stature of Primo Levi, there are thousands of other amazing people, gassed and murdered in the showers filled with Zyklon-B.


A Clinical Look at Auschwitz   March 13, 2006
 38 out of 47 found this review helpful

There are reasons why it is difficult to review a book like this. First, it is a translation so it is hard to tell whether problems with prose belong to the author or the translator. Second, it is a Holocaust memoir which means criticizing it feels like criticizing the author's experiences. And yet, if we are going to do justice to any piece of writing, a reader has to be willing to be honest about his reactions to it. My reaction is simple: I think this is a good piece of writing but not a great one.

Despite it's brevity, I found this a very difficult book to get through. I wanted very much to be moved by Levi's experiences but it wasn't until the final section, "The Story of Ten Days," that I really felt emotion--that I connected to the author's fight for survival. Most of the time I felt detached because the writing felt very clinical to me. Unlike Elie Weisel's Night, for example, a memoir I've read many times, which grabs me from the first page and doesn't let go.

This is not to discount the horror of Auschwitz's nor Levi's obvious suffering. I guess it's just that, strange as it may sound, I want to be drawn into the author's horror and share his plight. I rarely had that feeling here. However, there is no doubt that this book offers a unique insight into the Auschwitz experience and cannot be discounted. Anyone interested in trying to understand the insanity that was the Holocaust needs to read it.


dispassionate but moving account of the durability of life   June 10, 1997
 19 out of 20 found this review helpful

It would be easy to bluntly horrify the reader in a book about life in a death camp, but Levi is not content to appeal to the emotions. He has an intellectual fascination with details, and the psychology of genocide. By a dispassionate and careful treatment of the very difficult material, he manages to write a compelling book about a terrible subject. And the emotional effect does not suffer from this approach--because Levi does not manipulate them, the reader's feelings are deeper and more lasting.

In one chapter, Levi describes how many of the prisoners, after fourteen hours of manual labor, would assemble in one corner of the camp in a market. They would trade rations and stolen goods. Levi describes how the market followed classical economic laws. Whenever I remember this I am freshly amazed at the resilience of life, and the ability of people to live and think and work in the most adverse conditions. It is remarkable that I finished a book about the Holocaust with a better opinion of mankind than I started with; I think the fact that the book affected me this way is the best recommendation


Details we take for granted   July 18, 2005
 18 out of 23 found this review helpful

What makes Primo Levi's account of life in Monowitz so amazing is the immediacy of it all: he speaks in the present tense, as if all this is happening again, now. For Levi, it's not in the past, was never in the past.

That, and the little things that we take for granted. Here, the water is not drinkable. And the fit of one's clogs can be a matter of life or death. One must not talk.

One finds oneself in the blue and icy snow of dawn, barefoot and naked, with all one's clothing in hand and one hundred yards to go to the next hut, where one may finally get dressed.

Another thing Levi understands: it can always be worse, and that for most everyone, it does get worse. When readers finish this book, they understand an iota of what Levi suffered, what all the vanquished innocents suffered.

--Alyssa A. Lappen


The State of Nature   February 26, 2000
 16 out of 18 found this review helpful

The worst atrocity Levi describes at Auschwitz is not the gassings, which he did not witness, or the periodic selections of the weak for gassing, or the beatings, or the hangings, or the routine brutality, or the starvation, or the destructive labor that was designed to work the prisoners to death. It is the moral degradation of the prisoners by their desparate need to survive in those conditions.

An earlier reviewer writes, "We see property in its most base form. A spoon, a bowl, a few trinkets cleverly used, that is all a person can hold at a time." In fact, we see the absence of property. Hobbes wrote that "liberty in the state of nature is the liberty to be knocked over the head for a handfull of acorns." The Lager at Auschwitz was a state of nature. As Levi describes it, anything you possessed would be stolen by anyone the instant you took your eyes off it. Complete individuality was the only road to survival. Trust was fatal. No one could endure, however strong or lucky, unless they were ready to sacrifice any other prisoner at any time for any scrap of food, clothing, or respite from the crushing labor.

In the chapter "The Drowned and the Saved," Levi portrays four successful survivors, who each, in different ways, looked out only for himself. Each was, of necessity, completely heartless. Levi, a gentle humanist, despises the type, and he could not forgive the Germans for reducing humanity to that level.

Since Levi survived to tell about it, he himself must have done and been what he despised. Perhaps that contributed to his eventual suicide.