If This Is a Man

"If This Is a Man" is a harrowing Holocaust memoir written by the Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi. He completed the manuscript shortly after returning to his hometown of Turin following the end of World War II.

Primo Levi details his eleven months of survival in the Auschwitz III-Monowitz concentration camp, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. The memoir specifically focuses on his experiences working as a chemist in the Buna-Werke rubber factory under brutal SS guards.

When Levi first submitted the manuscript in 1947, publishers were largely uninterested, and it sold only a few thousand copies before going out of print. It wasn't until the late 1950s, when an Italian publisher rediscovered it, that it achieved international acclaim.

When the book was published in the United States and the UK in 1959, it was titled "Survival in Auschwitz." The subtitle explicitly notes the book as "The Nazi Assault on Humanity."