Levi, immediately having completed Se questo è un uomo, thought about his second book. And after all, it is logic that the author felt the necessity to bring off the work of evidence he undertoke for two clearly evident motives: in the first place because his story had not ended with the liberation from the Nazi Lager. Infact it had to pass almost a year before it was possible for him to return to Italy.
In the second place because after having worked uninterruptedly for some months to the layout of the first book and having entrusted it the impressions and the memories of his experience of imprisonment, that same "internal liberation " would not be completely realized if the story of the sufferings suffered in the Lager wasn’ t followed by that of the mishaps in which immediately he run into, and they assumed the character of an absurd and dramatic epilogue at the time same. La tregua begins exactly where Se questo è un uomo breaks up, that is to say with the Russians' arrival to the camp of Buna-Monowitz in the morning of the 27 Janurary 1945. The narration goes on with the account of the evenements that took place after the arrival of the Russians. The first supplies come, the first helps, Polish girls" pale of pity and of disgust" wander around the camp taking care of the survivors. The prisoners still in life, the sick, the dying persons are transferred to the Great Camp of Auschwitz where the author, hardly joint, gets sick and will have the opportunity to look around and to come in contact with a crowd of characters. All the characters withdrawn by Levi assume a symbolic value here, everyone emerge with his face from the ghostly crowd of the survivors. Recovered, the author leaves the camp joining to those people that are able to undertake the return jorney to the respective countries of origin.
But it begins that weary odyssey that would have conducted him through oriental Europe for an year..Anyway the author never allows him to involve by the narrated events, he never completely identifies with them, on the contrary he succeeds in introducing us them with that separation and with that lucidity, always supported by a moral judgment leading, that allow him to identify beyond the facts the secret mechanisms that govern them and to show little by little the most grotesque or absurd aspects. The attention of the author doesn’t stop on the external aspect of the characters but on their different posing towards the reality, on their psychic physiognomy at which he looks, more than with the moralist’s eye with that of the scientist, succeeding in that way to give us an unmistakable portrait of every character. On May 1945 the war comes to an end. At the end of the spring the news of the repatriation comes. The Italian legionaries take place on a goods train in departure for Odessa where a ship would have had to conduct them in Italy. But it didn't happen this way. The train never reached Odessa. From this moment onwards the narration assumes the sorrowful tone that will almost constantly preserve up to the last pages, even if elegiac passages, humorous notations and very suggestive descriptions especially for what it concerns the Russian landscape. The absurdity trip toward the North conducts the legionaries up to the remote place of Staryje Doroghi, that they reach afoot. They are lodged in a gigantic building situated in a wild place at the borders of a forest. Here, always waiting for the repatriation, they will stop for two months up to the 15 September 1945. In these pages we not only find intense descriptions of the landscape but also of the Russian people, farmers of the place and soldiers set to garrison of the field, whose weakness and whose worths - always in precarious equilibrium between an atavistic negligence of Oblomovism school and a primordial passion rich of blaze - they are outlined here with incisive humor and with that attention to the most secluded aspects of the human personality that we have had occasion to show many times. Finally the announcement of the departure arrives and, after a night of celebrations, all the Italians crowded in the camp are directed exultant to the station of the small village of Staryje Doroghi where a train waits for them.
The first disappointment derives by the taking of conscience that the train retraces the stages of the trip already accomplished. Reached Zmerinka, where the legionaries had already spent days of sorrowful wait, inexplicably it goes down toward the South, completing an endless route until almost the seaside of the Black Sea, to slowly going up through Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and to reach Vienna the 8 October, after a trip lasted more than twenty days. The joy of the repatriation has constantly darkened, apart that from the material hardships derived from the trip and from the view of an Europe in disruption everywhere, also from the continuous memories that accompany the legionaries. The last pages, that narrate how the passage of the Brennero has happened in the night between the 16 and the 17 October 1945 and the re-entry in the homeland after the long exile, are marked by a fierce sadness. The same that crosses the whole book but that here explodes in its more painful accents: because if "the truce" is going to an end, if the long odyssey of the repatriation has reached the end, the future, for the legionaries from Auschwitz, is rich of uncertainties.
In La tregua we will have to underline as the singleness of the work has to be recognized, especially in the fact that the author has been able to seize the nodal aspects of this experience offering us, once again, through the narration of his own mishaps and those of his companions, the story of an internal event, that is of the irreparable breakdowns engraved by the Lager in the mind of the survivors, the deep incurable wounds that accompany them in their lonely wandering on the street of the return.
That is because La tregua still assumes a shape of odyssey: it is just the book of the return, understood as internal trouble, struggle against the memories, rising to life, where the episodes, the characters, the encounters, the same stops of the travel show, in symbolic key, the crucial moments of that painful itinerary that is just the recovery of the self, of his own human integrity, stamped on and disheartened by the terrible hurts he had to suffer.