Primo Levi at the Einaudi Foundation: 80 years after Auschwitz (1945-2025)

Primo Levi, a survivor from that camp, published If This is a Man in 1947. The publishing house Einaudi accepted it in 1958 in the series ‘Saggi’ and since then it has been continuously reprinted and translated worldwide. A shattering testimony to the hell of the Lagers, a book of man's dignity and abjection in the face of mass extermination, If This is a Man is a literary masterpiece of an already classic measure and composure. 

Levi later wrote The Truce, a diary of the journey to freedom after his internment in the Nazi Lager. This book, more than a simple biographical re-enactment, is the eventful and poignant adventure among the ruins of liberated Europe - from Auschwitz through Russia, Romania, Hungary, Austria to Turin - which unfolds in a tortuous itinerary, punctuated by encounters with people from unknown civilisations, and victims of the war itself. The epic of a rediscovered humanity after the extreme limit of horror and misery.

The library of the Einaudi Foundation holds almost all editions of the two novels, various other writings by Levi on his experience in the lager, and a number of works by scholars who have dealt with Levi and his work.

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