Reading List

Books Like If This Is a Man

5 Books to Read Next

A reading list by Lisanne Swart

If This Is a Man is not a book that tries to move you. It does not ask for your tears. Primo Levi was a chemist, and he wrote the way a chemist thinks — precisely, carefully, without decoration — about ten months in Auschwitz. That restraint is what makes it devastating. The book does not tell you how to feel. It describes what happened and trusts you to respond. The question it leaves you with is not what the Nazis did. It is what human beings are capable of doing to each other — and what they are capable of preserving inside themselves — when a system is designed to destroy both. These five books ask the same question, each from a different angle and in a different register. None of them flinch.

By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Memoir · History · Updated June 2026

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01
Memoir

Night

Elie Wiesel · 1960

Wiesel was fifteen when he arrived at Auschwitz with his family. Night tells what followed: his father’s death, the destruction of everything he believed, and whether God could survive what he saw. It takes about two hours to read and stays for years. Levi and Wiesel were in the same camp system and wrote about it completely differently. Levi observes. Wiesel breaks. Both are necessary.

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02

Memoir · Psychology

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl · 1946

Frankl was a psychiatrist before he was a prisoner, and survived four camps, including Auschwitz. The first half describes how people behaved and who survived; the second introduces his idea that our deepest drive is meaning. Levi asks what this tells us about human beings; Frankl asks how, knowing it, we choose to live. The more hopeful of the two, but the hope is hard-won.

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03
Memoir

The Drowned and the Saved

Primo Levi · 1986

Levi’s last book, published the year before his death. Where If This Is a Man is testimony, this is the reckoning: forty years on, he looks at how the memory of Auschwitz has been distorted and simplified, and at the “grey zone” between perpetrator and victim. That idea alone is worth the whole book. Read it second; it will change how you read the first.

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04
Short Stories

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Tadeusz Borowski · 1959

Borowski was a non-Jewish Polish prisoner at Auschwitz. His stories are told by a narrator called Tadek who takes part in the camp’s machinery in order to survive. There is no moral distance, and the narrator isn’t innocent. Where Levi keeps his humanity by observing, Tadek gives his up to live, writing from inside the grey zone Levi later named. Not easy, and one of the most honest books about Auschwitz.

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05
Graphic Novel · Memoir

Maus

Art Spiegelman · 1991

Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, and draws it as a comic: Jews as mice, Nazis as cats. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, and it’s also about fathers and sons and what gets lost between generations. Levi used the tools of science to bear witness; Spiegelman uses cartoons, with the same seriousness.

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Not sure where to start?

If you want to stay closest to Levi’s own voice
→ Read The Drowned and the Saved next. It is Levi thinking about everything he wrote in If This Is a Man forty years later. It is the book he had to write.

If you want a completely different register — shorter, more immediate, impossible to put down
→ Read Night. Two hours. You will not forget it.

If you want to understand what makes Levi’s restraint so radical
→ Read Borowski. He shows you what testimony looks like without it — and why the distance Levi maintained was not detachment but an act of profound moral will.

Frequently asked questions about books like If This Is a Man

What is If This Is a Man about?

If This Is a Man is Primo Levi’s memoir of his ten months as a prisoner at Auschwitz-Buna, the chemical sub-camp of the Auschwitz complex, where he was deported in 1944 as a twenty-five-year-old Italian Jewish chemist. It was first published in Italian in 1947 as Se questo è un uomo. Levi writes with a scientist’s precision and without self-pity about the daily mechanics of the camp — the hierarchy among prisoners, the strategies of survival, the slow destruction of identity, and the small acts of humanity that persisted anyway. It is one of the foundational texts of Holocaust literature, and one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

What makes Primo Levi’s writing style different from other Holocaust memoirs?

Most Holocaust memoirs are written in a register of grief, rage, or moral urgency. Levi writes like a scientist — observational, precise, almost dispassionate. He studies Auschwitz the way he would study a chemical reaction: what are the components, what are the conditions, what does this tell us about how these things work? That restraint is not coldness. It is a formal choice about where the horror lives. Levi understood that description was more powerful than lamentation — that the facts, presented clearly, were enough. The result is a book that is both more readable and more disturbing than most accounts of the same material.

Should I read If This Is a Man or Night first?

They are very different books and there is no wrong order. If This Is a Man is longer, more analytical, and gives you more context for what the camp system actually was and how it functioned. Night is shorter, more immediate, and more emotionally unguarded. Many readers find Night more accessible as a first encounter with Holocaust memoir — it is simpler in structure and more direct in its emotional impact. But Levi’s book is richer and, in the long run, more rewarding. If you can, read both.

What is the grey zone in Primo Levi’s writing?

The grey zone is a concept Levi develops in The Drowned and the Saved — his final book and in many ways the most important companion to If This Is a Man. It refers to the moral space between perpetrator and victim that the camp system deliberately created: prisoners who were given power over other prisoners, Sonderkommandos who processed the dead in exchange for a few more weeks of life, kapos who enforced order through violence. Levi argues that this zone — where survival and complicity become inseparable — is the most morally complex and important territory to understand. It is also the territory that comfortable moral frameworks most want to avoid.

What should I read after If This Is a Man?

Read The Drowned and the Saved — Levi’s last book, written forty years after If This Is a Man, in which he examines how memory of the camps has been simplified, misused, and misunderstood. It is the book that completes If This Is a Man. After that, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl offers a very different kind of response to the same experience — less concerned with testimony than with what comes after, and what meaning can be found in survival. Both books are on my shelf and both have stayed with me.

More from the shelf

Reading listHolocaust Survivor BooksTestimony from those who came back.Books likeBooks Like Man’s Search for MeaningFinding meaning in the worst places.Reading listBooks About ResilienceStaying yourself when everything says otherwise.Reading listBest Memoirs and BiographiesReal lives, told well.

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“If this is a man, who with toil and offence lives as an animal Deny him not your action, consider if this is a man.”

— Primo Levi

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