There’s a moment early on in If This Is a Man, Primo Levi’s first-hand account of the horrors of Auschwitz, when the author, newly arrived at the death camp and desperately thirsty, reaches for a “fine icicle” to suck on, only to have it brutally smashed out of his hand by a prison guard. “Why?” asks Levi, plaintively. “Hier ist kein warum,” replies the guard (“Here there is no why”).
There are not too many whys either in Daniel Finkelstein’s powerful and beautifully written new book, which tells the story of how his Jewish parents lived through the Holocaust, as European civilisation was ripped apart by nazism and communism in the 1930s and 40s.
