Author: Primo Levi
Title: The Truce (or: The Reawakening; original Italian title: La tregua)
Year of publication: 1963
Page count: 217
Rating: ★★★★
This is the sequel to Levi’s account of his time spent imprisoned at Auschwitz, If This is a Man, picking up where he left off, in early 1945. When they vacated Auschwitz, trying to out-march the approaching Red Army, the Germans left the sick and the dying behind; among them, Levi, who suffered from scarlet fever, too weak to walk. Once liberated, his ten-month-long odyssey across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union begins, with this book charting the remarkable roundabout journey, his time spent at several displaced persons camps, and the people he met along the way. He finally made it back to Turin, unrecognizable to his family, as one of three survivors of the 650 Italian Jews who’d been deported to Auschwitz twenty months before.
Upon liberation, the war was still raging to the West of them, but they were free, and so he begins the trip with a sense of adventure, more so than trepidation. If the writing of his first memoir was a necessary exorcism—he was already writing it, in his head and on pieces of paper he would immediately destroy, while still at Auschwitz—The Truce wasn’t written until the early 60’s, and makes for a rather different reading experience. The fragmented, directionless account captures a sense of limbo—they are free, yet far from home, often traveling in the entirely wrong direction for weeks and months on end, crossing a wounded Europe, suspended in time, not yet realizing that their memories of home will no longer match reality… a brief period of inner truce before facing the rebuilding of a life after the trauma of the Holocaust.
Levi is still the scientist and observer, and while this is a fascinating eye-witness account of the chaos in the months around the end of the war, the narrative is less detached than in the previous book, more vivid—some stories are even humorous. Trauma casts a long shadow, and there is still hardship, but astonishingly little sadness: It’s a lively chronicle that affirms the value of community, and what permeates these pages is nostalgia, irony, and affection for all the outlandish, memorable travelers who shared parts of his journey. Even though the story begins and ends with a recurring nightmare, the pages in between read like they were written with a smile for the joy of this new and unhoped-for freedom.
(Notes: Read in the original Italian)
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