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You live safe
In your warm houses,
You come home at night to find
Hot food and friendly faces.
Consider if this is a man
Who toils in the mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who can die because of a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without a name,
Without the strength to remember,
her eyes hollow, her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Reflect and remember that all this transpired,
I entrust these words to you…
Primo Levi, from If This is a Man
Must Know
Italian chemist and writer, born in Turin, Italy. author of the famous book If This is a Man (1947), among the most humane and impactful accounts of his incarceration in Auschwitz during the war. His training as a chemist led to a job at a chemical plant laboratory and saved his life. He returned to Italy on a tortuous journey. His works, which includes novels, short stories, essays and poetry, are about the human soul during the Holocaust, the victims and the perpetrators, and life after the war. His legacy forms an important part of Holocaust studies. Among his best-known books: The Truce (1963),The Periodic Table (1975), The Wrench (1978) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986).
