Primo Levi’s account of the year (1944/45) he was at Auschwitz was published in Britain in 1947 as If This is a Man. I can say no more – I haven’t read it but it is on order.
It is the first account of what it was like to be in a concentration camp. I have read possibly the most recent biography (2023) on the subject: Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad by Daniel Finkelstein. He describes the ordeals endured by his parents, grandparents and their families in Russia and Germany in the war.
His father’s family were rich industrialists in Lviv. His paternal grandfather was an intellectual who had fought in the first war and settled with his wife in a fashionable suburb of Berlin. Both families were Jews and the second war took them on different but horrific journeys. The Wieners, his mother’s family, fled to Amsterdam in 1934 and lived there precariously as refugees until Holland was invaded and they were taken to concentration camps. His father’s family, Finkelsteins, were arrested by Stalin’s army when Russia invaded Poland and sent to a gulag in Kazakhstan.
The people who made those journeys did not return and it is remarkable that his parents and three of his grandparents did survive. It’s a horrifying story that literally gave me nightmares but it is an important story that cannot be told often enough. There is little to choose between the cruelty and inhumanity shown by the Germans and the Russians but, as Finkelstein observes, the German perpetrators faced justice at Nuremberg and are still being sought today. The Russians have never been brought to book.
Jews fleeing Germany were not welcomed in Holland and France or Britain and America for that matter. Today Hungary is trying to expel refugees from Ukraine and immigrants coming to Europe and the United Staes are not welcome. We must learn from what Hitler and Stalin did and be on our guard.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a wonderful book – not only an account of the fate of European Jews from the Nazis and Stalin, but also story telling at its best and so well written.
If This Is A Man is an extraordinary and searing book. Everybody should read it; one of those books that should be compulsory at school. Not too young students though
You say that the Jews were not welcomed here. Nowadays, via films and books such as Schindler’s List, we are encouraged to approve of people who helped them escape. This contrasts with disapproval of the modern equivalents such as the boat people. There is a lot of hypocrisy about refugees.
Recent blogs have referred to Pianos, Russian cruelty, Jews, Ukraine, refugees exile to Siberia and Kazakhstan and some very grim European and Asian history. A quite astonishing book called The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts covers the lot in a wholly readable fashion around a pretty unique theme. Just thought I’d mention it
“If this is a man” is an extraordinarily powerful and uplifting book. Levi wrote a separate account of how he travelled from Auschwitz back to Italy called “The Truce” which is worth reading. I recommend the film “the Garden of the Finzi- Continis ” which is about a semi-fictional Jewish family in Turin ( which is where Levi was from) in Fascist Italy.