The Truce

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.

Auschwitz was a complex of concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. Located in occupied Poland near the town of Oswiecim, it consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Auschwitz I served as the administrative center; Birkenau functioned primarily as an extermination camp where mass killings were carried out in gas chambers; and Monowitz was a labor camp. Established in 1940, Auschwitz became a symbol of the Holocaust, where over 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered.

At the beginning of The Truce, Primo Levi is one of many prisoners who have been abandoned by the retreating Germans and left to die in Monowitz. The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27th, 1945, but The Truce describes the ways in which the traumatizing effects of Auschwitz remain in the minds of the survivors long after liberation.