If This Is a Man

If This Is a Man, the book that inaugurates the trilogy that Primo Levi dedicated to the Nazi extermination camps, arose in its author's imagination during the days of horror in Auschwitz, when the main concern of the prisoners was that, if they survived, no one would believe the atrocity of the history they had lived. The concentration and extermination camps, more than being guarded by barbed wire and guards, were guarded by their own monstrosity, which made them inconceivable. It is the sobriety of Primo Levi's testimony, a victim who does not scream but who wrenches the scream from the reader's throat, that restores horror to its reality and makes it intelligible as a sinister warning sign. A moving book by a man with an indestructible faith in reason.