Started on Primo Levi's Holocaust book If This is a Man the other day. About 70 pages in.
Pretty much what you would expect from a first person account of the death camps. It's hard to understand how people did these things.
So far the most insightful thing from the book is Levi's statement that it isn't the body that dies first, but the personality. The thing that makes you you.
It's a hard read in the sense that you know it isn't fiction, so there is this darkness that is put in front of you that you have to somehow reconcile with the idea of humanity and civilization that we have in our heads.
Even though it isn't a 'fun' book to read, I think it's a important book because we all - all of us - need to remember what happened. Not because some brutish Germans committed crimes against humanity 80 years ago, but because it shows us something deeper about human beings in general; how a society that had some of the most intelligent and cultured people on earth could turn into this. We need to remember not just because it honors the Jews who were treated this way but because we need to always be watchful in our own societies to be sure we don't allow it to happen again.
Levi has already said more than once that one of the motivations to survive was simply to make sure someone could tell others what had happened. That it would be known and not forgotten.
Always be mindful, fellow Americans, that our own society has its dark past as well. As a society, we also enslaved and abused and murdered a race of people. The idea that people of a past time were just not as smart as we are is a fallacy. We have more knowledge now, yes, but we aren't any smarter or better in our natures than were our forebears. We are just as susceptible to the forces of group psychology and manipulation as they were.