If This Is a Man The Truce by Primo Levi .It is a long, “ludicrous journey”, as Philip Toynbee described it in the Observer when the book first came out in English in 1965: “a poem in honour of human wit and endurance”. If This Is a Man The book tells of Levi’s final days in the camp in southern Poland before his eventual return home to Turin, via numerous extended detours and meanderings through Soviet Russia, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. It’s a long climb into the light and – remarkably – it’s frequently beautiful. <img src= hasn’t “drowned”, as he terms it, but nor does he show us much about salvation. If This Is a Man finishes with Levi in a kind of perilous limbo. His sense of self has been undermined by mental and bodily weakness and the moral compromises needed for survival. But he has been hollowed out by hunger, toil and unremitting horror. Levi holds on to this humanity until the camp is liberated. As Levi explains an afterword, he remained “determined to recognise always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things.” But it also required stubborn resistance. Throughout If This Is a Man, Levi reiterates that survival was mainly a matter of random events, coincidences and fortune.

If This Is a Man • The Truce by Primo Levi