Authors Like Primo Levi

Jean Améry

Austrian · b. 1912 · Essayist

Born Hans Mayer in Vienna, Améry joined the resistance in Belgium, was captured in July 1943 and tortured by the Gestapo at Fort Breendonk, then sent to Auschwitz, where he was held at Monowitz — the same camp as Levi — and later to Bergen-Belsen. At the Mind's Limits (Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 1966) is five essays on torture, exile and what Auschwitz did to the intellectual. He died in 1978.

Imre Kertész

Hungarian · b. 1929 · Novelist · Nobel 2002

Kertész was deported from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944, at fourteen, and liberated at Buchenwald in 1945. Fatelessness, a novel narrated by a boy who goes through the same camps, took him about a decade to get published and was largely ignored in communist Hungary when it appeared in 1975. In 2002 he became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tadeusz Borowski

Polish · b. 1922 · Short-story writer

Borowski, a young Warsaw poet, was arrested in February 1943 and sent to Auschwitz that April as a non-Jewish political prisoner, working among other places on the ramp at Birkenau; he was moved to Dachau late in 1944 and liberated in May 1945. His camp stories, published in Polish as Pożegnanie z Marią and in English as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, are told by a prisoner who has learned to survive inside the system. He died in 1951, at 28.

Charlotte Delbo

French · b. 1913 · Memoirist and playwright

Delbo, assistant to the actor Louis Jouvet, was arrested in Paris with her husband, the resistance member Georges Dudach, in March 1942; he was shot that May. In January 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz with 229 other Frenchwomen, of whom 49 came back; she was later moved to Ravensbrück. Her trilogy Auschwitz and After — None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge and The Measure of Our Days — was written soon after the war and published in 1965, 1970 and 1971.

Ruth Klüger

Austrian-American · b. 1931 · Memoirist

Klüger was deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt with her mother in 1942 and then to Auschwitz, where both were selected for a work detail; they escaped during a forced march near the end of the war and emigrated to the United States in 1947. She became a professor of German literature at UC Irvine and Princeton. Her memoir weiter leben appeared in German in 1992 and in her own English version, Still Alive, in 2001.

Every book by Ruth Klüger →

Elie Wiesel

Romanian-born American · b. 1928 · Memoirist

Wiesel was born in Sighet, then in Romania, and deported with his family in 1944 to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. Night, his account of that year, was published in French in 1958 and became the most widely read Holocaust memoir in English. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Every book by Elie Wiesel →

Viktor Frankl

Austrian · b. 1905 · Psychiatrist

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist deported in 1942 to Theresienstadt and later held at Auschwitz and in subcamps of Dachau. Man's Search for Meaning, first published in German in 1946, combines a short account of camp life with the outline of logotherapy, his theory that the search for meaning is the primary human drive.

Every book by Viktor Frankl →

Hannah Arendt

German-American · b. 1906 · Political theorist

Arendt left Germany in 1933 and reached the United States in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism analysed how Nazi and Soviet terror worked; Eichmann in Jerusalem, her report on the 1961 trial, introduced the phrase “the banality of evil” and caused a long controversy over her portrait of Eichmann and of the Jewish councils.

Every book by Hannah Arendt →

Natalia Ginzburg

Italian · b. 1916 · Novelist and essayist · Premio Strega 1963

Born Natalia Levi (no relation) in Palermo and raised in Turin, Ginzburg worked for the Turin publisher Einaudi through the 1940s; her husband, the anti-fascist Leone Ginzburg, died in prison in 1944. Family Lexicon, a portrait of her family through the phrases they repeated, won the Premio Strega in 1963. Einaudi's 1947 rejection of If This Is a Man is usually attributed to Cesare Pavese and Ginzburg.

Every book by Natalia Ginzburg →

Oliver Sacks

British · b. 1933 · Neurologist and writer

Sacks was a London-born neurologist who worked in New York and wrote case histories for general readers, among them Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood is his memoir of the London childhood in which he fell in love with chemistry and the periodic table.

Every book by Oliver Sacks →