Auschwitz Report | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs; Translations

Auschwitz Report

By Primo Levi, and Leonardo De Benedetti
Edited by Robert S. C. Gordon (NHC Fellow, 2005–06)

Concentration Camps; The Holocaust

London: Verso, 2006

From the publisher’s description:

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.

Subjects
Literature / History / Concentration Camps / The Holocaust /

Gordon, Robert S. C. (NHC Fellow, 2005–06), ed. Auschwitz Report, by Primo Levi, and Leonardo De Benedetti. Edited by Robert S. C. Gordon. London: Verso, 2006.