Da Treblinka, da Auschwitz. Vasilij Grossman e Primo Levi: a dialogue between witnesses
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2026
Auditorium of the Polo del '900 - Palazzo San Daniele
8:00 p.m.
Readings by Valter Malosti
Introduction and commentary by Domenico Scarpa
Free admission with mandatory reservation at the following link.
A powerful alternating reading between Vasily Grossman's Inferno di Treblinka and Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti's Rapporto su Auschwitz: respectively, the first reportage and the first scientific report on the extermination camps. The two texts, essential for rebuilding a free and open Europe, offer a complementary truth about the Nazi extermination machine.
For the Ricordare cycle.
Written in the autumn of 1944, Inferno di Treblinka – penned by journalist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent following the Red Army – was the very first description of an extermination camp: its history, its geography, the people who killed there, collaborated in the massacre or were killed, its regulations, departments and organisational charts, the systems for implementing the “final solution” and concealing the evidence, daily life and the final collapse of Treblinka.
Written in Katowice in the spring of 1945 at the request of the Red Army, signed jointly by chemist Primo Levi and surgeon Leonardo De Benedetti, the Auschwitz Report is the first scientific report analysing the structure of a labour and extermination camp. Published in the autumn of 1946 in the Turin magazine «Minerva Medica», the Report preceded by a year Se questo è un uomo, a book that readers around the world have recognised as a seminal work in 20th-century literature and history.
The frightening truths of Inferno di Treblinka and the Auschwitz Report correspond and reinforce each other, just as the paths that the lives of their respective authors traced in the history of the twentieth century do. Added to this is the energy released by their interest in people, their characters, their faces, their professions, their ways of speaking, acting and being: the power of writing multiplies the power of the truths that Grossman and Levi were able to record and communicate.
Da Treblinka, da Auschwitz consists of alternating excerpts from Grossman's reportage and the scientific report by Levi and De Benedetti. Two works on the extermination camps that are still considered essential reading by audiences around the world today.
With Domenico Scarpa and Valter Malosti.
The Piemonte Region Committee for the affirmation of the values of the Resistance and the principles of the Republican Constitution participates in Holocaust Remembrance Day initiatives by sharing and participating in events promoted by Polo del '900.