What always amazes me about the Holocaust is the sheer improbability of the story of each of its survivors. This is the horror. For every shining genius of the stature of Primo Levi, there are thousands of other amazing people, gassed and murdered in the showers filled with Zyklon-B.

It would be easy to bluntly horrify the reader in a book about life in a death camp, but Levi is not content to appeal to the emotions. He has an intellectual fascination with details, and the psychology of genocide. By a dispassionate and careful treatment of the very difficult material, he manages to write a compelling book about a terrible subject. And the emotional effect does not suffer from this approach--because Levi does not manipulate them, the reader's feelings are deeper and more lasting.

In one chapter, Levi describes how many of the prisoners, after fourteen hours of manual labor, would assemble in one corner of the camp in a market. They would trade rations and stolen goods. Levi describes how the market followed classical economic laws. Whenever I remember this I am freshly amazed at the resilience of life, and the ability of people to live and think and work in the most adverse conditions. It is remarkable that I finished a book about the Holocaust with a better opinion of mankind than I started with; I think the fact that the book affected me this way is the best recommendation

An earlier reviewer writes, "We see property in its most base form. A spoon, a bowl, a few trinkets cleverly used, that is all a person can hold at a time." In fact, we see the absence of property. Hobbes wrote that "liberty in the state of nature is the liberty to be knocked over the head for a handfull of acorns." The Lager at Auschwitz was a state of nature. As Levi describes it, anything you possessed would be stolen by anyone the instant you took your eyes off it. Complete individuality was the only road to survival. Trust was fatal. No one could endure, however strong or lucky, unless they were ready to sacrifice any other prisoner at any time for any scrap of food, clothing, or respite from the crushing labor.

In the chapter "The Drowned and the Saved," Levi portrays four successful survivors, who each, in different ways, looked out only for himself. Each was, of necessity, completely heartless. Levi, a gentle humanist, despises the type, and he could not forgive the Germans for reducing humanity to that level.

Since Levi survived to tell about it, he himself must have done and been what he despised. Perhaps that contributed to his eventual suicide.

It challenges you to look beyong the surface. Beyond the attrocities that occurred and take a look at where it all came from. It is scary to conclude that Germany before Nazi control is similar to the way America is now. A top notch industrial nation filled with Nationalism.

While this book has recieved countless reviews from critics, it is a short easy read that will not fill you with senseless information. If you read it slowly and really think about what it says you will take away so much more.

If you don't have the time, or effort to do that, just reading the tale of this man's transition into something that was no longer a man, more a living mass.

Levi writes another book "The Drowned and the Saved" which tells of his return home after the concentration camp and is a good companion to the book

Levi was somewhat fortunate, and did not enter the death camps until late in the war. His length of internment was part of what helped him survive. Yet oddly, it was only a mere fraction of the whole system needed to survive under such conditions.

Ironically, Levi did eventually commit suicide, after becoming world renown as a writer. While this is uncommon for Holocaust survivors, it is most predominant amongst writers, artists and poets. But before leaving, Levi left us some of the finest examples of how to convey an unbelievable situation in a believable manner. His work and his choice of verbiage is uncommonly artistic. And the book gives the reader a very real and present understanding of just how the conditions really were. As unbelievable as one can imagine, is in fact, how they were.

For all of we adults who will never again step into a classroom to be fed information the government/state thinks is important for us to know, we are spared a lot of propaganda, but we are also given the opportunity to forget some of the founding currents of our day and to avoid difficult-to-face issues. The holocaust as a horrorful example of genocide is one of them that can fade away, only to be brought back up occasionally, usually in the form of oscar-winning movies.

This book deserves an award similar to such a major prize because it is truly accessible to we who have no CLUE of what even a state of war feels like, much less a collective transformation into the macabre and cruel. And as those who remember that era grow fewer, their written words such as this book grow more important to help us never forget.

I had a chance to go to Dachau and visit a concentration camp similar to the one described in the book. Dachau, in fact, was a camp where protocol would be established and then implemented across all the other camps. During my visit I took a long tour with a historian who documented as completely as possible in our short-ish time what it was like to live in a concentration camp. It is beyond words. The details are unlike anything that I was told in high school, and yet they are critical, just critical to understand the nature of these camps. This book is full of these details, about the shoes, the sickness, the roll calls, the food regimen, the complex labryinth of rules that are valued over life, the overlords of prisioners over prisoners, and adds to it a layer of human calculation that is true survival instinct.

In part of the book, Levi recounts a dream he had, where no one who had been outside the camps would listen to his horrors. As he said it was a common dream for many, it feels to me that it is at least in part because what he has to say is so hard to listen to. But listening to it for me is so critical so as to understand the fragile base upon which our society is based, to mourn the past and current racial divisions that persist the world over, to put our own lives and problems into perspective and perhaps even maybe to take stock of our own lives and how we live them as regards the tolerance and acceptance we extend to others.

If you up to reading a book on the experience of living in a concentration camp, you would do well to choose this one.

Primo Levi's memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, is a moving account of one young man's struggle for survival in the notorious Polish concentration camp. Levi employs a unique narrative structure, emphasizing the power of words both thematically and stylistically. Levi is only twenty-five when he enters the camp, and his storytelling does much to reveal the devastating impact that concentration camps had on the psyche and on the spirit. Levi confronts the harsh reality of what life in Auschwitz means, and how different it is from any form of civilization. In clear contrast to the camp's dehumanizing effects on its victims, Levi uses language to stir the hearts of his readers. In a kind of dictionary of suffering, he gives the reader the terms of his old existence: Buna, where young men labor in a factory that will never produce synthetic rubber; Ka-Be, the infirmary where Levi is granted a few weeks' rest to recover from a foot injury, and Selekcja, the Polish word for "selection," that seals the fate of those marked for the crematorium. Many readers wishing to learn more about the Holocaust or concentration camps will find Levi's work powerful and enriching. Perhaps more importantly, these readers will continue to ask Levi's questions in today's society.

In my opinion, Levi's preservation of his memories in this work are an invaluable chance for those he left behind him to move on, live, evolve and progress. Certainly and hopefully, Levi rid himself of his nightmares to a degree as he compiled this work, but in so doing, I believe he also reveals the extent to which our compatriots fought (in all senses of the word), and the price they paid, in order to achieve the democracy which we in Europe often take for granted today.

Also, you may want to read Night by Elie Wiesel for another account of life in a death camp.

Levi presents the truth with this book about life in Auschwitz. The book is rather disturbing (but not gory) and very informative, as well as interesting. It is one of the best descriptions of camp life that I have ever read, definitely worth the read!

This book is a pretty easy read, although there is a bit of German throughout (just a sentence here and there), but almost all of it is translated.