Moments of Reprieve
A Memoir of Auschwitz
“He is our Dante . . . writing a modern masterpiece about his journey into Hell . . . [that is] unique in the literature of the Holocaust.” —USA Today
A Penguin Classic
Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century: a man who survived one of the ugliest times in history, yet who was able to describe his own Auschwitz experience with an unaffected tenderness.
Levi was a master storyteller but he did not write fairytales. These stories are an elegy to the human figures who stood out against the tragic background of Auschwitz, “the ones in whom I had recognized the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue.” Each…