Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s depiction of the Holocaust and trauma, and it also contains brief references to abuse and domestic violence.

In January 1945, Primo Levi is a Jewish Italian man who is a prisoner in the Auschwitz extermination camp. As the Red Army of Soviet Russia begins to rout the Nazis, the Germans hastily evacuate the concentration camps. They take any healthy prisoners with them but leave the sick, starving prisoners behind in the camps as they cannot be used for forced labor. Of the 800 who remain in the camp section known as the Lager of Buna Monowitz, 500 die before the Russian forces arrive.

On January 27th, the Russian soldiers are spotted around the camp. They approach on horseback, throwing “strangely embarrassed glances” (187) at the dying prisoners. They seem unable to grasp the horrors inflicted on the prisoners by the Nazis. During this time, Levi is sick. His sickness meant that he was left to die by the Germans. He lies in “a sickly state of semi-consciousness” (191) and suffers from bouts of painful nostalgia.