If This Is A Man/The Truce (50th Anniversary Edition): Surviving Auschwitz

‘There are other Holocaust testimonies, but Levi’s is the first, and the most focused. Written before the genre existed, it reads most straightforwardly like a record … It is a meticulously presented diary of hell.’ David Baddiel

‘Levi’s voice is especially affecting, so clear, firm and gentle, yet humane and apparently untouched by anger, bitterness or self-pity. If This Is a Man is miraculous, finding the human in every individual who traverses its pages, whether a Haftling (prisoner) or Muselmann ( the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection ), a kapo or a guard.’ Philippe Sands

‘With the moral stamina and intellectual pose 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

With new introduction from David Baddiel