If This Is A Man / The Truce

Two works of autobiography. If This is a Man tells of Levi's experiences as a victim of the Holocaust, from his arrest by the Fascists in 1943 to the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians. The Truce is the story of his eight-month journey back to Italy after he was liberated.

'With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, 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 contempible. 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

The death of Primo Levi robs Italy of one of its finest writers ... One of the few survivors of the Holocaust to speak of his experiences with a gentle voice'
- Guardian