It tells the experiences of the author deported in the Nazi Lager of Buna-Monowitz, near Auschwitz. The principal stops of such circumstance go from the arrest happened in the night of December 13 th 1943, up to the moment of the liberation from the Lager the morning of the 27th January of 1945. The experiences are introduced by the writer following the thread of his story that assumes, little by little, a different course: that of the account, in which the events are exposed us in their chronological succession; that more open and extended one, that proceeds for associations of memories, in which the author introduces the camps life through a series of pictures that includes characters and situations; and finally the diary plan, adopted in the last pages, that reproduces better the falling of the events and that adapt itself better to the emotion that the story assumes, entitling his testimony.
The testimony that Levi entrusts us through the pages of his book is anything but a long meditation on the work of annihilation of the human personality (either in physical sense, and, above all, in moral sense), that constitutes the first aim of the death camps.
After having narrated us in concise terms as he was captured by the fascists and brought in the concentration camp, and after having described us through highly dramatic pages as the interned Hebrews in the camp welcomed the announcement of the deportation, Levi faces the description of the trip that will conduct him from the small station of Carpi, in Italy, to Auschwitz in the Upper Slesia.
Reached their destination, the mechanism of the annhiliation starts immediately: it is the first episode of a long series of analogous events, whose only purpose is that to reach, by degrees, the total elimination of the deported. Those people that are able to be used as manpower up to the complete exploitation of every human resource, are conducted to the fields of job; all the others, old, unable, children, are directed to the gas chamber. Naked, and not only in metaphoric sense, of every human dignity, dressed again with striped jackets, weared with clogs, tattooed on the left arm with the number that from then onwards will replace their name and therefore it will also serve to delete their personal identity under the anonymity of a figure, they are transformed from men to imprisoned. During the day all the internees are transferred in a rubber factory, where they make an exhausting job. Well sonn the weakests succumb to the work, to the deprivations, to the illnesses, to the cold. But the most tragic aspect of the life in the Lager is not constituted by the daily struggle for the survival, that is to say by the ability to withstand the maltreatments, the work, the lack of food, the illnesses.
Inside the Lager the same structures that govern any type of society are reproduced, where the privilege, the injustice, the abuse of power, the personal ability, the astuteness, the intrigue have an fundamental role giving rise to a hierarchy of oppressors and of oppressed, of exploiters and of exploited, of ables and of incompetents.
Inside this situation some figures start to live, fiercely or compassionately outlined by the author according to the cases, that represent the human models belonging to the two aforesaid categories.
It hasn’t gone by a lot of time from his arrival in the camp when Levi is assigned to the chemical Kommando, that exonerated him from the exhausting works sustained up to that moment.
Levi will remain admitted to the chemical Kommando, but many months will pass, marked by new sufferings as well as by another " selection " before the author becomes a member of the laboratory and can start to cherish the hope, if not to survive, at least to overcome another hard winter.
In the meantime the allied bombardments on the Upper Slesia have begun, the factory is struck too. Forced to work between the dust and the rubbles, constantly exposed to the dangers of the aerial raids as well as made object of their oppressors and jailers with a doubled ferocity, because of the tragedy that impends on Germany, they suffer the whole weight of a situation that becomes more and more unbearable day by day.
The author, in an entirely unexpected manner and when he had given up hoping, is destined to the laboratory where he will spend the last months of imprisonment, in a heated environment and in contact with materials and tools that remember him his studies and his profession.
In this period the first layout of Se questo è un uomo takes place and it is just in the meditation allowed him by the laboratory that he will warn for the first time the necessity to survive, to be able "to testify, as well as the possibility to give a sense to the suffered pains and a justification to his own experience, letting take part the others to it, through a book of memories.."
The Russian front is coming nearer, the Germans acquire awareness of the imminent catastrophe, they get ready to let evacuate the stermination camp and to destroy the facilities, so that the trace of the Lagers doesn't remain. It is January 1945. These last dramatic events are narrated under the form of diary. The author, that in the meantime is sheltered in the huts used as hospital, assists to the departure of his companions. they will die during an endless march through Germany, while the sick, left to their own, will remain in the devastated Lager, without cares, neither water, neither food, to a temperature of twenty degrees under zero, decimated by the typhus, from the diphtheria, from the dysentery.
Levi is among a few people that succeed in surviving and the conclusive pages of the book give us the hallucinating chronicle of what happened in those terrible ten days and precisely from the 19th January to the 27th January 1945. When at dawn on January 27 the Russians arrive, the show that is offered to their eyes is the terrifying one of the dead bodies that are piled up on the snow and of the few survivors that are wandering about the ruins of the camp as ghosts.