Table Of ContentPrimo Levi was bom in Turin in 1919 and trained as
a chemist. Arrested as a member of the anti-fascist
resistance during the war, he was deported to
Auschwitz. His experiences there are described in his
two classic autobiographical works, If This Is A Man and
The Truce. He also wrote a number of universally highly
acclaimed novels and essay collections, including If Not
Now, When?, Moments of Reprieve and The Wrench.
The Drowned and the Saved, Levi’s impassioned
attempt to understand the ‘rationale’ behind the con
centration camps, was completed shortly before his
tragic death in Turin in 1987.
Also by Primo Levi in Abacus:
THE PERIODIC TABLE
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
MOMENTS OF REPRIEVE
THE WRENCH
OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES
THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED
THE SIXTH DAY
THE MIRROR MAKER
PRIMO LEVI
If This is a Man
and
The Truce
Translated by Stuart Woolf
With an Introduction by Paul Bailey
and an Afterword by the author
ABACUS
An Abacus Book
This combined volume first published in Great Britain by
Penguin Books 1979
This edition published by Abacus 1987
Reprinted 1987 (twice), 1988, 1990 (twice), 1992, 1993 (twice), 1994,
1995 (twice), 1996, 1997, 1998 (twice), 1999, 2000, 2001 (twice), 2002,
2003, 2004, 2005
Introduction copyright © New Statesman 1971
Se questo è un uomo first published in Italy 1958
Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A. 1958
This translation first published by The Orion Press 1969
Copyright © The Orion Press 1960
La Tregun first published in Italy 1963
Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A. 1963
This translation first published by The Bodley Head 1965
Copyright © The Bodley Head 1965
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 349 10013 6
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Abacus
An imprint of
Time Warner Book Group UK
Brettenham House
Lancaster Place
London WC2E 7EN
www.twbg.co.uk
Contents
Introduction: Saving the Scaffolding
by Paul Bailey 7
IF THIS IS A MAN
Author’s Preface 15
1. The Journey 19
2. On the Bottom 28
3. Initiation 44
4. Ka-Be 48
5. Our Nights 62
6. The Work 71
7. A Good Day 77
8. This Side of Good and Evil 83
9. The Drowned and the Saved 93
10. Chemical Examination 107
11. The Canto of Ulysses 115
12. The Events of the Summer 122
13. October 1944 129
14. Kraus 137
15. Die drei Leute vom Labor 142
16. The Last One 151
17. The Story of Ten Days 157
THE TRUCE
Map Showing Author's Route Home 184
1. The Thaw 187
2. The Main Camp 194
3. The Greek 207
4. Katowice 230
5. Cesare 243
6. Victory Day 257
Contents
7. The Dreamers 268
8. Southwards 278
9. Northwards 290
10. The Little Hen 298
11. Old Roads 307
12. The Wood and the Path 316
13. Holidays 328
14. The Theatre 342
15. From Starye Dorogi to Iasi 352
16. From Iasi to the Line 363
17 The Awakening 376
Afterword: The Author’s Answers to
His Readers’ Questions 381
Introduction:
Saving the Scaffolding
PAUL BAILEY
In 1943 Primo Levi, a young chemist from Turin, helped to
form a partisan band which he and his comrades hoped would
eventually be affiliated with the Resistance movement ‘Justice
and Liberty*. At the end of the year he was captured by the
Fascist militia and sent to a detention camp at Fossoli. He
stayed there a few weeks. On 21 February 1944 it was an
nounced that all the Jews in the camp would be leaving the
following day for an unknown destination. They were told to
prepare themselves for a fortnight of travel. On the train the
next morning - 650 ‘pieces* crammed into twelve goods wagons
- they found out where they were going: Auschwitz. ‘A name
without significance for us at that time, but it at least implied
some place on this earth.*
On arrival the children, the old men and most of the women
were ‘swallowed up by the night*. Ninety-six men and twenty-
nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna
and Birkenau: the rest went to the gas chamber. Of the 125
people sent to the camps only three made the return journey
to Italy after the liberation. One of them was Primo Levi.
Some years later, when he had adjusted himself to normal
life once more, he sat down and wrote about the twenty months
he spent in hell. Two short books, If This is a Man and The
Truce, contain the recollections that came to him in that uneasy
tranquillity.
Two books, but they should be read as one. Although a crude
over-simplification, it is nevertheless essentially true that If This
is a Man is about the descent into, and The Truce about the
flight away from, hell. The statement is crude because the first
book, despite its appalling subject, is not dispiriting. Levi does
not flinch from setting down the unbelievable details of that
7
Introduction
cruelty born of the ‘mystique of barrenness’, but then neither
does he paint them in lurid colours to press his point home.
The facts are surely enough. Paradoxically, what finally
emerges from the book is a sense of Man’s worth, of dignity
fought for and maintained against all the odds :
Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks
words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment,
with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we
had readied the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this;
no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it con*
ceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken
away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will
not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will
even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to
find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that
behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. ‘
Häftling* 174517 - *We have been baptized, we will carry the
tattoo on our left arm until we die’ - found the strength in him
self to retain something of Primo Levi. But, at the beginning
of his internment especially, it wasn’t easy; he was shocked into
finding it by the example of others:
... after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness com
pletely disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom
when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude
torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no
soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without
preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash?
Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more?
Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter
time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth ...
We will all die, we are all about to die ... Steinlauf interrupts me.
He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth
jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees
and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the opera
tion he administers me a complete lesson ... This was the sense, not
forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was
a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts;
that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want
* Prisoner.
8
Introduction
to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we
must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding,
the form of civilization ... We must walk erect, without dragging
our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive,
not to begin to die.
Levi does not say how Steinlauf died - presumably he disap*
peared in one of the many ‘selections*. Nor did he take all of
the older man*s advice literally: many months of freedom
passed before he lost the habit of walking with his eyes fixed to
the ground, as if searching for bread or something to sell ot
exchange for it
If This is a Man and its sequel are books about a man among
men : there are no saints and no heroes in the accepted sense.
Indeed, what Levi says of his friend Leonardo in The Truce
could with equal justice apply to himself:
Besides good fortune, he also possessed another virtue essential for
those places : an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage,
not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed
hour by hour, a virile patience, which sustained him miraculously
to the very edge of collapse.
And Levi did have good fortune, though the phrase is an
obscenity when one thinks of the horrors that he and Leonardo
and the other survivors were forced to combat. But he was not
‘selected* and by some miracle he was ill with scarlet fever when
the Germans fled from Auschwitz in January 1945, taking all
the healthy prisoners with them. The healthy, who numbered
almost 20,000, vanished on the march. A few of the sick sur*
vived, surrounded by corpses and tormented by the groans of
dying men. *The living are more demanding; the dead can
wait. We began to work as on every day.* The work by this
time was the work of healing, of finding and sharing food with
the helpless, not the humiliating drudgery imposed upon them
by the SS (a sign at the entrance to the camp read Arbeit Macht
Frei, work gives freedom). It is on this note of hope that If This
is a Man ends : with the Häftlinge, tired and hungry, creeping
out of the shadows and slowly becoming men again.
Still, the book is not all blackness, though the tone of the
9
Introduction
narrative is elegiac and those millions of accusing ghosts haunt
its every sentence. Levi does not omit from his story the.faint
glimmers of light that came cm rare occasions to shine briefly
out of the evil murk. There is the story of Lorenzo, for in
stance:
In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker
brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every
day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patdies; he
wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply.
For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he
was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a
reward ... His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was out
side this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to
forget that I myself was a man.
But The Truce is almost all light It tells of Levi’s journey
home to his native Turin, and the quiet hesitant note of hope
and renewal that aids the first book is transformed into some
thing like a trumpet blast in its pages. The reader’s eyes open
with Levi’s as he becomes aware of the abundant life about him.
Like the great novels he devoured as a youth (’printed paper is
a vice of mine’), it is a celebration of other men’s uniqueness.
In Auschwitz he had learned a new morality, one that had
made him more tolerant of the failings of others, and he
draws a clear line in The Truce between the good thieves and
the bad, the genuinely strong man and the vicious bully. There
are unforgettable portraits of the people he met or who shared
his journey with him : Cesare, from the Roman slums, making
fish fatter with the aid of a syringe and selling them to gullible
Russian peasants; the resourceful Greek, Mordo Nahum; Mr
Unverdorben, the composer of a fantasy opera, The Queen of
Navarre, praised by a fantasy Toscanini and never performed
because of four consecutive bars which were identical with
four in I Pagliacci', the ministering angel, Dr Gottlieb; the
stately Moor of Verona, warding off friendship with obsceni
ties. But the self-styled Colonel Rovi is perhaps the most in
credible character of them all - an official interpreter at
Katowice camp who cannot speak a word of German or Rus
sian, dressed in a uniform composed of Soviet boots, a Polish
10
