Auschwitz Report

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.“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 VoiceA 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.