Book Review: Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Primo Levi’s ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ is the story of a Jew chemist who gets packed off to a concentration camp by the Nazis during World War Two. Levi describes the inner workings of the camp in great detail, explaining how he and a few others like him survived the machinations of a state intent on exterminating Jews - almost like cockroaches.

The book is gruesome in its detailing of the many tortures of the camps and yet concurrently, incredibly poetic as Levi litters his day to day stories - of survival or descriptions of the evolution of the Jew intent on surviving - with prose that is so incredibly beautiful and poetic that it reminded me of Arundhati Roy.

Levi’s version of the concentration camp tortures is not as famous as Anne Frank’s (primarily because Frank died and Levi survived the camp) but it is still essential reading to understand what mankind can stoop to. Several times in the book, while pausing to absorb the poetic beauty of Levi’s words, I would wonder why the Nazis did what they did (and why the Al Qaeda today does what it does).

The book should be and probably already is a textbook in schools. Everyone needs to understand what grave tragedies mankind is capable of inflicting and how while a man’s body might get broken, his soul can survive torture and write a book that leaves an indelible mark in someone’s head decades later.