Finished: If This Is A Man (Levi). Horrific, but matter-of-fact account of the Italian Jewish author's year spent at the Auschwitz III prison camp at Monowitz, which housed several thousand prisoners. Of the over six hundred Italian Jewish prisoners who were carted to the prison camp, only about a hundred of the healthiest men were chosen to be kept alive to work at the Buna factory at Monowitz. All the women, children, elderly and the rest of the men were put to immediate death. After eleven months of horror, when the Germans finally retreated due to the approaching Russians, only about twenty of the Italians were still alive. The author, Primo Levi, sick with scarlet fever, was left behind in the infirmary along with the other prisoners too sick to walk. The rest of the prisoners were taken by the Germans as they retreated...taken on the 12 mile death march, where most of them died. The horrors that the prisoners had to go through, from the sub-freezing conditions, to the starving conditions, to the constant fear of being sent to Birkenau (Auschwitz II, the extermination camp) on "selection" days, to the insufferable work conditions, to the basic stripping of humanity of each man, made me read the book with tears in my eyes and a catch in my stomach. I've never understood how the hatred of Hitler and his regime for other human beings could have occurred in a civilized world. Never. It's hard to believe my parents were alive and teenagers when all this was going on. Primo Levi described the feelings in a way I can't put into words as he wrote about being called into the office of one of the German doctors to be interviewed to possibly work in the chemistry lab at the prison camp. Levi is a Haftling (prisoner) known only by the number tattooed on his arm:

    Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair and nose as all Germans ought to have them, and sits formidably behind a complicated writing table. I, Haftling 174517, stand in his office, which is a real office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched.
    When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.
    From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.
    Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.
    One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: 'This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.'

I will always be stunned by the atrocities of the persecution of innocent people by Hitler and his ilk, and by the horrific death camps that became the final physical resting place for so many people. If This Is A Man ends with the Russians coming into the near barren prison camp and Primo Levi knowing that he has at least survived to be free. Whether he will survive his illness and make it back home is addressed in his next book, The Truce. Obviously he makes it home and lives to write the books. But...it was a journey of nine months before he got home. I don't think I've got it in me to read that one yet, but I will eventually.