A book everyone should read in their life

I have taken 4 weeks to read it as its very traumatic to keep going.
Not one for holday pleasure ona sun soaked beach.


On 21 February 1944, Primo Levi, an Italian Jew from Turin, was one of hundreds of new admissions who arrived, aboard a train of cattle trucks, at Auschwitz Concentration Camp in southern Poland.

?Auschwitz : a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it implied some place on this earth?

The number printed above was indelibly tattooed on his wrist.

He became a Haftling. A prisoner of Auschwitz.

Unlike very many of his companions, he was still alive on 27 January 1945 when Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, the last of the German captors having fled some days earlier.

He was 25 years old.

This book is his account of the eleven months he spent in hell.

Although he wrote it quite shortly after the war, it wasn?t published in English and German until 1959.

Enjoyment is not on the agenda with this book.

It is a chore to read this book.

But, as indicated by Philip Roth?s review of the book, it is a necessary chore.

The horrors of Auschwitz are well known now.

But this book still has the power to shock, appall, disgust, frighten, enrage, horrify, terrify, inspire despair and, perhaps, ultimately inspire hope.

We know that the Nazi captors were cruel, and we know that many of the prisoners proceeded to the gas chambers, so that details of casual violence and industrial murder perhaps do not shock as much as they should. Indeed, the more actually shocking details are perhaps to be found amongst the mundanities of life ? Levi is relentless in the minutiae of toilet arrangements. For example, in a later account, he describes being aboard the transport train from Italy to Poland, locked in the cattle truck with men, women and children pressed together without pity, travelling for days in chilling cold, suffering parching thirst and gnawing hunger ? but much worse than all of that -

a much worse affliction than thirst and cold ? for them, evacuating in public was painful or even impossible: a trauma for which civilization does not prepare us, a deep wound inflicted on human dignity, an aggression which is obscene and ominous, but also the sign of deliberate and gratuitous viciousness

The disgusting indignity continues right to the bitter end ? when the Germans decided to evacuate Auschwitz in the face of the advancing Russians, they still could not bear to let the prisoners go ? they forced up to 60,000 prisoners to march through the snow to another camp. The majority of them died. Paradoxically, Levi survived because he was too ill to march ? he was suffering scarlet fever, and he was one of about 7500 ailing prisoners left behind to the mercies of the Russians. In the days between the Germans fleeing and the Russians arriving, all ?system? broke down entirely

An indescribable filth had invaded every part of the camp. All the latrines were overflowing, as naturally nobody cared any more for their upkeep, and those suffering from dysentery had fouled every corner of the sick-bay, filling all the buckets, all the bowls formerly used for the rations, all the pots. One could not move an inch without watching one?s step????although suffering from the cold, which remained acute, we thought with horror of what would happen if it thawed : the diseases would spread irreparably, the stench would be suffocating, and even more, with the snow melted we would remain definitively without water

It is more or less impossible to imagine what it was like to live/exist in a concentration camp. This book gets you as close as it?s possible to go.

Read it and weep