Book of a lifetime: If This is a Man/The Truce by Primo Levi

From The Independent archive: Frances Fyfield on ‘If This is a Man/The Truce’ by Primo Levi

Primo Levi’s story is a reliving of horror but at the end it is life-affirming (Alamy)

I can’t remember how old I was when I read Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, and The Truce (two interlinked books in one volume), but it wasn’t my youth and impressionability which gave it such power. It was the sheer, unmitigated truth of it; the sense of what a book could achieve in terms of expanding one’s own knowledge and understanding at a single sitting. Because you do read this in a single sitting: it is a terrible exposure of man’s capacity for harm and annihilation on an unprecedented scale, a narrative of appalling suspense, and re-reading it now, the impact is just as great as it ever was.

Primo Levi, then a young Italian chemist from Turin, was incarcerated in Auschwitz in 1944 and was one of the three out of the 125 people consigned with him to survive not only a year of the killing regime at the concentration camp, but also the long, insanely complicated, starvation-filled route home across Europe, described in The Truce. Twenty months of dehumanising hell and murder, without, even now, a logical explanation.