This book, published months after Italian writer Primo Levi's suicide in 1987, is a small but powerful look at Auschwitz, the hell where Levi was imprisoned during World War II. The book was his third on the subject, following Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963). Removed from the experience by time and age, Levi chose to serve more as an observer of the camp than the passionate young man of his previous work. He writes of "useless violence" inflicted by the guards on prisoners and then concludes the book with a discussion of the Germans who have written to him about their complicity in the event. In all, he tries to make sense of something that--as he knew--made no sense at all.


From Library Journal
Renowned Italian author Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, finished this contemplation of the Holocaust before his death in 1987. Observing a general loss of understanding about Nazi Germany as time passes and eyewitnesses die, he asks, "How much of the concentration camp world is dead? . . . What can each of us do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified?" Levi's answer is a thoughtful analysis of the process that was the camps, and his chilling conclusions about the conditions that created them are uncomfortably relevant to current events. Highly recommended. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Irving Howe
Primo Levi wrote about this most terrible event with a purity of spirit for which we can only feel grateful.


Book Description
Levi wrote of the moral collapse that occurred in Auschwitz and the fallibility of human memory that allows such atrocities to recur. Levi's last book published before his death in 1987.


Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)


From the Inside Flap
Levi wrote of the moral collapse that occurred in Auschwitz and the fallibility of human memory that allows such atrocities to recur. Levi's last book published before his death in 1987.

FROM THE PUBLISHER