If This is a Man

First published in 1947, this memoir recounts Primo Levi's deportation from Italy and his year in the Auschwitz-Monowitz labour camp. He describes the transports, the stripping of names and clothes, the hunger, the work details, the hierarchy of prisoners and kapos, and the small bargains that decide who lasts another day. Trained as a chemist, he is eventually assigned to a laboratory, which alters his chances without lifting the camp's rules. Fellow prisoners, the German overseers, and the winter of 1944-45 occupy the later chapters. The book is a testimony of the camp as a first-person record of what was done and how people behaved inside it.

Bound in dark blue cloth blocked on covers and spine with an image in silver and grey. Pale blue endpapers. Dark blue slipcase.