If This Is A Man / The Truce

From a major contender for the Nobel Prize, this volume of Survival in Auschwitz, the Reawakening and Moments of Reprieve, contain some of the most unforgettable chronicles of our times, tells of Primo Levi's ten months in the hell of a Nazi death camp and the confused, frightening months after liberation. Without self-pity, but with passion, intensity and even humor, Levi recounts being thrust in 1944, at the age of 25, from ordinary life into a world of systematic cruelty, where survival depended on unspoken, illogical rules, where pain and death were a daily presence. Equally fascinating are all his portraits of the unusual companions, prisoners and guards, who fought to survive--and to hold on to the memory of what it felt like to be human.