Auschwitz, ciudad tranquila

Auschwitz has been the alpha and omega of Primo Levi's work. The alpha, in 1947, with If this is a man; the omega, forty years later, with his last book, The Drowned and the Saved. But, between these two cornerstones of the literature on the Shoah, Levi has never stopped telling about the Lager and inquiring, through his narrations, about the terrifying nature of that place. This book offers us ten stories framed by two poems: twelve unexpected and passionate reflections on the greatest collective tragedy of the 20th century. Under the aegis of a paradoxical title but conceived by the same author, "the quiet city" of the concentration camp here becomes the object of the most disparate views and interpretations: the fantastic, for example, in the triptych of dystopian stories made up of Angelic Butterfly, Versamina and Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge; or, of course, the autobiographical one, with texts such as Cerio or Vanadio, in which Levi speaks of the reunion, twenty years later, with one of his jailers. Thirty-five years after the death of Primo Levi, perhaps the most lucid witness to the barbarism of the Nazi concentration camps, this anthology reiterates the importance of keeping the memory of horror alive, and opens, thanks to the delicate balance between fiction and memory, a new space for reflection.