If this is a man when I read the title, not knowing that it was still the translation of Primo Levi, I found it interesting and even thought I would refer to the new masculinities. When I knew I belonged to Primo Levi, I didn't really want to skip the Auschwitz accounts. But when I read to him that if I hadn't had the time of Auschwitz, I would surely never have written, I remembered Le Murmure des fantômes, who wrote Boris Cyrulnik with the Jewish writer, and I hurried to read it in the hope of finding the narrative of another resilient. So I decided to spend a few days with the Doctor Chemist, who lived, survived and dared to tell hunger, cold and death in extremis. The

chemist confesses that he wrote this story just out of Auschwich, and it cannot be otherwise, since the objectivity and accuracy of the story not only resonate in the accuracy of a chemical, but also in the closeness, very vivid and stored. “None of us: they have taken away the clothes, the shoes, even the hairs; if we spoke, they would not listen to us, and if they listened to us, they would not understand us. They have also taken our name off.” In addition to the destruction of man, Levi has filled the story of painful, cruel and moving stories. “All our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all special and all conceived by a tragic and strange coincidence. We tell each other at night.” After all, every story of the shipwrecked and the saved is a horribly savage and desperate solitude, educated in the struggle for survival. The

roads to the death of the oldest, the weakest and the Muslims are constant in the text, “because the bell always sounds at dawn and then is a target, but at noon” means to lock itself in the barracks and choose the weakest, the oldest, the most insignificant and the chosen ones to start a journey to the gas without a return. Then the saved got their lives until the bells rang.

The characters on these pages are not men. Their humanity has been buried. There are no women, they have disappeared in the crematoria with children, the elderly and the sick. “But Lorenzo was a man, his humanity was pure and unpolluted, he was outside this world of denial. Lorenzo must not forget that I was a

man.” Levi confesses, in the language of testimony, that this book has no passion. “Not the victim’s concern, not the avenger’s outrage, because the word is more credible and more effective.” You are the judges.