the last book I ever read (If This is a Man by Primo Levi, excerpt four)

from If This is a Man by Primo Levi:

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

Since that day, I have thought about Doctor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself about his inner workings as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization Department and his Indo-Germanic conscience. Above all, when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not out of a spirit of revenge but merely out of my curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two being who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.