Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like If This Is a Man
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
Night
Wiesel was fifteen when he arrived at Auschwitz with his family. Night is the account of what followed — the death of his father, the systematic destruction of everything he had believed, and the question of whether God could survive what he witnessed. It is a very short book. It takes about two hours to read. It will not leave you for years.
Levi and Wiesel were in Auschwitz at the same time, in the same camp system, and they wrote about it completely differently. Levi observes. Wiesel breaks. Where Levi maintains the scientist’s distance — studying his captors and fellow prisoners with almost clinical attention — Wiesel writes from inside the wound. Reading them together is not a lesson in the Holocaust. It is a lesson in how two people can survive the same thing and emerge with entirely different relationships to language, God, and silence. Both are necessary.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Frankl was a psychiatrist before he was a prisoner. He survived four camps, including Auschwitz, and wrote this book in nine days after liberation. The first half describes what he observed in the camps — how people behaved, who survived, what kept them alive. The second half introduces logotherapy: the argument that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power but meaning. It is one of the best-selling books ever published.
Levi asks: what does this tell us about what human beings are? Frankl asks: given that we know this, how do we choose to live? Both questions come from the same place — from men who were there, who thought carefully about what they saw, and who refused to answer with silence or despair. Frankl’s book is the more hopeful of the two, but the hope is hard-won and specific. It does not offer comfort for free. It offers something more useful: a framework for finding meaning even in circumstances designed to make meaning impossible.
The Drowned and the Saved
Levi’s last book, published the year before his death. Where If This Is a Man is testimony — what happened, described as clearly as possible — The Drowned and the Saved is analysis. Forty years on, Levi examines the memory of Auschwitz: how it has been distorted, simplified, misunderstood. He writes about the grey zone — the moral space between perpetrator and victim where most human beings actually live. It is one of the most important books ever written about how we think about atrocity.
If If This Is a Man is the account, The Drowned and the Saved is the reckoning. Levi had spent four decades living with what he had seen, watching it be turned into myth, simplified into lesson, absorbed into culture. He is not comfortable with any of it. The concept of the grey zone alone — the idea that the most important moral territory is the one we most want to avoid looking at — is worth the whole book. Read this second. It will change how you read the first one.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Borowski was a non-Jewish Polish prisoner at Auschwitz, and he survived by working as a Sonderkommando — one of the prisoners who processed the arriving transports. These stories are told in first person by a narrator named Tadek, who participates in atrocity in order to survive it. There is no moral distance. The narrator is not innocent. The stories are among the most disturbing things written in any language about what human beings can become when a system makes survival and complicity the same thing.
Levi observes the camps from inside them with extraordinary moral clarity. Borowski writes from a position of moral contamination — from inside the grey zone that Levi would later theorise. Where Levi maintains his humanity by observing, Borowski’s narrator loses his in order to live. The two books are in permanent conversation with each other. Levi even mentions Borowski directly in The Drowned and the Saved. This is not an easy book. It is one of the most honest books about Auschwitz ever written.
Maus
Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, and draws the story as a comic — Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs. The result is one of the most formally inventive works of Holocaust literature ever made, and the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. It is also a book about memory, about fathers and sons, about what gets passed down and what gets lost between generations.
Levi was a chemist who used the tools of science — precision, observation, classification — to bear witness to something that resisted all rational framework. Spiegelman uses the tools of cartoons for the same purpose, and with the same radical seriousness. Both are asking: what form can contain this? Both are answering: not the obvious one. Maus is also, like If This Is a Man, a book about what the act of testimony costs — and what it means to be the one who survived to tell it.
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.
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From the bookshelf
“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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