Se questo un uomo - La tregua by Primo Levi

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Original Title: Se questo un uomo - La tregua

ISBN: 8806116053
ISBN13: 9788806116057
Autor: Primo Levi
Rating: 3.3 of 5 stars (2481) counts
Original Format: Paperback, 362 pages
Download Format: PDF, FB2, DJVU, iBook.
Published: November 30th 1989 / by Einaudi / (first published July 26th 1979)
Language: Italian
Genre(s):
Nonfiction- 240 users
History- 221 users
Biography- 98 users
World War II >Holocaust- 94 users
Classics- 76 users
War- 67 users
Autobiography >Memoir- 56 users

Description:

Testimonianza sconvolgente sull'inferno dei Lager, libro della dignita e dell'abiezione dell'uomo di
fronte allo sterminio di massa, "Se questo un uomo" un capolavoro letterario di una misura, di
una compostezza gi classiche. Levi, ne "La tregua", ha voluto raccontare anche il lungo viaggio
di ritorno attraverso l'Europa dai campi di sterminio: una narrazione che contempera il senso di
una libert ritrovata con i segni lasciati dagli orrori sofferti.

'With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful,
unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to
think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was
profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the
most contemptible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but
also, in The Periodic Table and The Wrench, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him.
He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known'
- Philip Roth.

About Author:

Primo Michele Levi (Italian: [primo lvi]; 31 July 1919 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist and
writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and
poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947), his account of the year he spent as
a prisoner in the Auschwitz extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work,
The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great
Britain named the best science book ever written.
The Jews were rounded up for deportation to eastern concentration and death camps. On 21
February 1944, the inmates of the camp were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to
Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex (Levi's
record number was 174,517). He spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the
Red Army on 18 January 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of twenty
who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant at the camp was three
months.
Shortly before the camp was liberated by the Red Army, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was
placed in the camp's sanatorium. On 18 January 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as
the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march to a site further
from the front.
Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After
spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, as a result of the
Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces, he embarked on an arduous journey home in the
company of former pre-1946 Italian prisoners of war from the Royal Italian Army in Russia. His
long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus,
Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. In later writing, he noted the millions of
displaced people on the roads and trains throughout Europe in that period.
In the Academy Award-winning 2003 film by Denys Arcand, Les Invasions Barbares (The
Barbarian Invasions), the main character expresses outrage at the apparent apathy of the Roman
Catholic Church during World War II toward the Holocaust: "Pius XII sitting on his ass in his gilded
Vatican, while Primo Levi was taken to Auschwitz... It's despicable! Hideous!". In another scene
the same character wishes that he had written The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
and Levi's The Periodic Table. Later in the film, a French edition of If This Is A Man (Si c'est un
homme) is prominently shown on the same character's bookshelf.
' book The Portable Atheist, a collection of extracts of atheist texts, is dedicated to the memory of
Levi, "who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the 'selection'
process in Auschwitz". The dedication quotes Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, asserting, "I
too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this
day."
The Primo Levi Center was named after the author.
In the Warehouse 13 episode "No Pain, No Gain," Primo Levi's scarf is featured as an artifact. The
wearer gains "deep insight and intellect. Side effects may include prolific bouts of writing and
intense thought provocation".
has Primo Levi's concentration camp number, 174517, from Auschwitz tattooed on his left
forearm.
More:

Other Editions:
- If This Is a Man / The Truce (Paperback)

- If This Is a Man & The Truce (Hardcover)

- Survival in Auschwitz; And, the Reawakening: Two Memoirs (Hardcover)

- If This Is A Man/The Truce (Abacus 40th Anniversary)

- If This Is A Man / The Truce

Books By Author:

- Survival in Auschwitz
 - The Periodic Table

- The Drowned and the Saved

- If Not Now, When?

- The Reawakening

Books In The Series:

 - Survival in Auschwitz

- The Reawakening

- The Drowned and the Saved

- Moments of Reprieve

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- La ragazza di Bube
- The Cap: The Price Of A Life

- La vita agra

- The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

- Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca

- Il partigiano Johnny

- Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

- La concessione del telefono

- History
- La cognizione del dolore

- Cuttlefish Bones

- Un anno sull'altipiano

- The Moon and the Bonfire

 - The Destruction of the European Jews

- L'Agnese va a morire

- The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy,
September 1939-March 1942

- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory

Rewiews:

Nov 24, 2009

Paul Bryant
Rated it: it was amazing
Shelves: holocaust-literature
However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear
witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be
perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because
we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of
you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed they
will say they are th
However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear
witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be
perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because
we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of
you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed they
will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny
everything, and not you.
This is such a stunning statement. Levi puts it into the mouth of a contemptuous SS officer
speaking to a Jewish kapo some time in 1943. Reading it in the 1980s I was thinking well, at least
Primo Levi and all the other great writers and historians have made sure that this greatest of
horror stories has been documented and believed. Reading the same speech 20 years later, I'm
not so sure. Now we have many people telling us well, you know, the Holocaust was just one
amongst many - they happen all the time. Which is not so, and misunderstands, even from well-
meaning motives. And tragically the Holocaust is inextricably bound into the DNA of the creation of
the state of Israel, so that Israel is accused of using the Holocaust to prop up its own ultra-
defensiveness and expansionism. (Remember the "Eleventh Commandment" : "Thou shalt not
grant Hitler any posthumous victories.")And so this infests the whole pro-Palestinian rhetoric which
has a vile tendency to shade over towards Holocaust denial (our current but by no means only
example being Ahmedinejad).
Just another grand example of the hideous knots us human beings love to tie whilst living on a
beautiful little planet on the edge of a galaxy, itself one of millions of others, spinning in the
glistering vastness of this universe.
45 likes
15 comments

Whitaker
notgettingenough wrote: "I wonder if there is anybody hostile to the idea of climate change who
would realise, if put in front of Irving, that they ar
notgettingenough wrote: "I wonder if there is anybody hostile to the idea of climate change who
would realise, if put in front of Irving, that they are behaving in exactly the same way? And I
wonder if that would have any impact on them?"
Yeah, man! I say put them in a room full of methane and then strike a match. BWWAA HAAA
HAAA HAAA HAAA!

Nov 26, 2009 06:34AM

Whitaker
Stephen wrote: "This certainly got under peoples skin! Isn't that the purpose of literary discussion?
To stimulate? To bring further issues to the for
Stephen wrote: "This certainly got under peoples skin! Isn't that the purpose of literary discussion?
To stimulate? To bring further issues to the fore? "
Um, hee, guilty as charged. In my exculpatory defence though I will say that I've recently finished
Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, and it made me angry.

Nov 26, 2009 06:37AM