Many people have written about the Holocaust. But not many Holocaust survivors have written about their personal experiences of this horrific period. Although we have read dozens of historical books and articles about this genocide written by well respected historians, there aren’t enough memoirs of the Holocaust written by people who experienced everything first hand. Books that are considered primary sources are very few and this is why those biographies and autobiographies of victims and survivors of the Holocaust are priceless.
Primo Levi’s memoir If This Is A Man is one of those books describing the horrible acts that the author endured during the Holocaust. In his autobiography, Levi describes his time in Auschwitz after being captured by the Nazis during World War II until the concentration camp’s liberation almost two years later. The events are described in chronological order in the way the Italian – Jew author experienced it all. …show more content…
It focuses on what he and the other prisoners had to endure those two years in the concentration camp; the living conditions, the hunger, the smell from the gas chambers, the fear they felt whenever new groups of people were taken away to die, the dehumanization they experienced when they lost their families, friends and when they were ripped from their names and clothes. Levi describes his everyday life while he was a prisoner he describes his deeper thoughts and feelings that were similar to all other prisoners. Although the book is about his life at the camp and how he experienced it all, it is at the same time about every single other person who had to go through what he had to go