Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) appeared in print in 1947 two years after Levi's liberation and return from the concentration camp at Auschwitz. This book was originally published in Italy by De Silva, a small, relatively unknown publisher, following a rejection by Einaudi, a prestigios publishing house in Turin. Although it received favorable reviews, it went virtually unnoticed by the public. Of the original 2500 copies, close to 600 that had gone unsold and had been stored in Florence were eventually lost in the 1966 flood in that city. In 1956, encouraged by the interest shown (especially by the younger generation) in an exhibition held in Turin on the Italian deportation experience, Levi decided to resubmit his manuscript to Einaudi. This time it was accepted, and the firm published the book in 1958. It has been in print ever since; has appeared in various editions; and has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, and Dutch. Einaudi's edition is today considered to be the official version. Besides some slight variations of a syntactical nature, it includes the additional chapter "Iniziazione," ("Initiation") which was absent from the De Silva version.
On the surface, Survival in Auschwitz reads as a document in which Levi recounts the experiences and events in which he was a forced participant while incarcerated in the concentration camp of Buna-Monowitz following a short stay in the camp at Carpi-Fossoli in Italy. Levi's role, his self-imposed responsibility in writing this book, is to remind humankind of the Holocaust so that it will never happen again. The book is also his attempt to liberate himself from the psychological burden imposed by having survived this great offense against humanity, which was a constant stimulus to his creativity in fulfilling his compelling need to tell his experiences and make other vicarious participants in them. To designate the book a memoir or diary, as has often been done, is neither totally accurate nor fair. At the core of the book defined by Stuart H. Hughes as one "of the rare classics in the genre," and behind its memorialistic facade, is an eloquently expressed ethical and civil message. Levi claims, however, that in the book style takes second place to his urgent need to tell, and he begs forgiveness for the structural imperfections of the text and the "fragemntary character" of the chapters, which, he admits, were not necessarily written in the order in which they appear.
The theme of the work may be found in its short preface, where Levi states, somewhat self-effacingly, that the book adds little if anything to the already well known details of the atrocities carried out in, as he calls them, extermination camps. Nor is it his intention to point an accusing finger at the perpetrators of the Holocaust, even though he makes it clear that he cannot forgive. His purpose in writing is to attempt to synthesize for himself, while at the same time communicating to others, a representation of events that will allow for a sober study of both the destructive and the heroic aspects of the human spirit in the Holocaust. Through this chronicle of observations, at both the physical and the philosophical levels, Levi reveals not only the harsh realities of the daily struggle for survival but the clash between good and evil. The characters are sometimes laudable and sometimes ignoble, but, from a moral point of view, they confirm that the same event can elicit a diverse spectrum of human actions and reactions.
Focusing on what he calls xenophobic obsession in which "every stranger is an enemy," an obsession that he considers a "latent infection" in the depths of the human spirit even though it is rationally baseless, Levi views the Lager or prison camp, system as one without reason and thus a threat to humanity. Its conceptualization and implementation provide specific examples of how individuals or groups have attempted to allay their paranoid convictions that all foreigners are enemies. The emergence of the Lager becomes a drastic, counteractive measure that Levi believes should be understood as an ominous sign or, to use his own words, a "sinister alarm signal." It is the Lager experience and all its long-lasting effects that compel him to write, to revisit them over and over, so that the "rest" of us will comprehend the system's unfathomable irrationality. This irrationality is so extreme that, in his preface to this work, fearing the reader's possible disbelief, Levi assures us that the facts are not invented. Moreover, he finds it necessary to apologize, in light of the violence of the subject matter, for his own "immediate and violent impulse" to tell and tell again. But like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (an image to which he will often return), who is restored to the company of the living, Levi will never tire of telling his story, as his many interviews will confirm. It is only through a constant interface with his recollections that he sees any hope of surviving his survival. In fact, he opens his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, by quoting these famous lines from the Coleridge poem: "Since then, at an uncertain hour, / That agony returns: / And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns."