Book Review

I have spent the past 36 hours nursing a child with an upset stomach.  I had heard it was going around the school, along with head-lice and all of the usual communicable illnesses such as coughs and colds, but I was rather hoping that we would escape this time.  No such luck though, I’m afraid.  It has resulted in a very quiet, if tiring weekend.  Normally our Saturdays revolve around dropping off/picking up from clubs, rehearsals and dance classes.  Instead, I have managed to finish the book we are discussing at book club on Tuesday, Primo Levi’s harrowing, “If This Is A Man”.

The book is a straightforward, undramatical account of the writer’s interment in Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland.  Levi, who died in 1987, was a Jewish Italian Chemist (and writer).  He was born in Turin in 1919.  On 13th December 1933 he was captured by the fascist militia, interrogated and held in a detention camp at Fossoli, near Modena.  On 21 February 1944, the inmates of the camp were rounded up for deportation and transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.  Levi was duly tattooed with his record number and became Haftling (prisoner) 174517. Levi spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the Russian Red Army on January 18, 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months.  The inmates not only lost their liberty, they were stripped of their individuality, emotions and dignity – forced to live in a camp where everything was ‘free’ but the most basic essentials had to be paid with beatings and from portions of their meagre daily rations.

Fortunately, Levi knew some German from reading German publications on chemistry.  He used bread to pay a more experienced Italian prisoner for German lessons and orientation in Auschwitz and later on, he received a smuggled soup ration each day from Lorenzo Perrone, a sympathetic Italian civilian bricklayer, working as forced labourer outside the camp in Buna. He quickly oriented himself to life in the camp without attracting the attention of the privileged inmates.  His professional qualifications may have saved his life as he was able to secure a position as an assistant in IG Farben’s Buna Werke laboratory in November 1944, thereby avoiding both selection for extermination and another winter doing hard labour in freezing outdoor temperatures.

Shortly before the camp was liberated, Levi fell ill with scarlet fever and was placed in the camp's sanatorium, Ka Be. On January 18, 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long march that led to the death of the vast majority of the remaining prisoners. Levi's illness spared him this fate.  The weak grip with which the prisoners held on to life is highlighted by the speed with which they died once the camp was deserted and they were no longer supplied with a ration of bread and soup each day.  All but the strongest were dead within ten days and many more died in the weeks following the liberation of the camp.

It has been, at best, a difficult read and at worse extremely upsetting but I am very glad to have experienced it.  I recommend the book to anyone who has limited knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust and firmly believe that it should be compulsory reading for today's spoiled, materialistic teenagers.