Auschwitz Report

by Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti, Robert S. C. Gordon (Editor)

Overview

Among the first written accounts of the concentration camps—a major literary and historical discovery.

While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public.

Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report details the authors’ harrowing deportation to Auschwitz, and how those who disembarked from the train were selected for work or extermination. As well as being a searing narrative of everyday life in the camp, and the organization and working of the gas chambers, it constitutes Levi’s first lucid attempts to come to terms with the raw horror of events that would drive him to create some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature and testimony. Auschwitz Report is a major literary and historical discovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781688045
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	03/03/2015
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	669,202
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919–1987) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War IIand deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include The Drowned and the Saved, If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table. He died in 1987.

Leonardo de Benedetti (1898–1983) was an Italian Jew and physician who was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until its liberation in January 1945.

Editorial Reviews

One of the most important and gifted writers of our time.”
—Italo Calvino

“The book is important not just because it is the first published work by Levi; it contains the seeds of his great Survival in Auschwitz.”
—New Yorker

“One of the first written by eyewitnesses, it has an important place in Holocaust historiography.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An important corrective to the accepted view of Auschwitz.”
—Guardian

“More than anything else I’ve read or seen, Levi’s books helped me not only to grasp the reality of genocide but to figure out what it means for people like me who grew up sheltered from the storm.”
—Meredith Tax, Village Voice

From the Publisher

It embarrasses me to say so, but it's not Levi's best work. It has neither the breath nor the breadth of Survival in Auschwitz or The Reawakening. But it was his first. And that is its strength and importance…In sober, precise language, without resorting to reverie or philosophical meditation, they describe the atmosphere in the railcar, the chaotic arrival, the selections, the separation of families…the transfer to Auschwitz III, a satellite of the death camp compound also known as Buna-Monowitz…the showers, the searches, the daily rations, the hunger, fear, disease…and then, the liberation by the Red Army…All without a superfluous word. In its very dryness, the book delivers a quasi-scientific report.
—The Washington Post

Elie Wiesel

First published in Italy in 1946, this newly rediscovered early work by the celebrated late author of such Holocaust memoirs as Survival in Auschwitz-an eyewitness account of conditions at Buna-Monowitz, a satellite camp of Auschwitz-appears in English for the first time. The short report was written for the Russian authorities who had liberated the camp and were gathering information on German war crimes. While the report is not exactly a curiosity-one of the first written by eyewitnesses, it has an important place in Holocaust historiography-it contains little new information. Some of what it does contain-for instance, the authors thought the Sonderkommandos were criminal inmates rather than Jews-we now know to be inaccurate. Despite this, the publication of the document gives readers, and especially Holocaust scholars, new insights into Levi's work. An excellent introduction by editor Gordon gives an astute overview of the stylistic and historical relationship between this work and Levi's later autobiographical writings. Levi's training as a chemist and his friend and fellow survivor De Benedetti's training as a physician bring to the piece a dispassionate tone that has, in a sense, prefigured the best writing about the Holocaust. This is an important addition to Holocaust literature, but probably of limited interest to the general reader. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In 1944, Primo Levi was one of several hundred Italian Jews transported to Aushwitz. After the liberation of the concentration camp by the Soviet army, Levi and De Benedetti, a fellow survivor, were asked by their liberators to write a report about the camp. Levi was trained as a scientist; De Benedetti, a physician. Their report appeared slightly edited in an Italian medical journal in 1946 but has been mostly lost to history, not even mentioned in Ian Thomson's magisterial biography Primo Levi: A Life. The authors relate with great economy the basic depredations of concentration camp life that are now so well known yet all the same stunning each time we read them. No, there is nothing new here Levi later expanded on his observations many times over, while De Benedetti apparently never wrote again but returned happily to practicing medicine. But the report's sting and historical significance there is an introduction by Robert S.C. Gordon (Italian, Caius Coll., Cambridge) mean that it belongs in most academic and public libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

One of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

Italo Calvino