Survival in Auschwitz

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” was arrested by the Italian Fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Levi was spared the gas chambers because his technical training was deemed useful for work in the I. G. Farben laboratories of Hitler’s Third Reich. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous survival. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains—forty years after its composition—a lasting testament to the indestructible human spirit.