Having movingly chronicled his own experiences during the Holocaust in such books as Survival in Auschwitz and If This Is a Man, Primo Levi penned these analytical essays on Hitler's Final Solution and its legacy. Written in 1987, a year before Levi's death, the pieces here offer perceptive insights on the nature of authoritarian regimes, the unreliability of memory, how language is used in the camps, and how violence harms those that inflict it, while offering a remembrance of fellow Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry and dispelling the notion that everyday Germans were unaware of the genocide perpetrated in their midst.

"Primo Levi wrote about this most terrible event with a purity of spirit for which we can only feel grateful."—NYTBR