If This Is a Man / Primo Levi 205 pp.

If This Is a Man is the first item in this massive, 3-volume, 3,000 page new Complete Works.  Because it was originally published as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fair to get credit for it as one item translated from Italian.  Levi wrote this shortly after his return from Auschwitz to Turin.

At this point I've read quite a few personal narratives of the Holocaust, and I now wonder how many of those writers weren't directly or unconsciously influenced by Levi.  It seems to me almost an alpha narrative, to which all the others are a sort of response.  Although Levi's experience was not particularly representative -  'only' one year in Auschwitz as an Italian Jew who was 'fortunate' to wind up assigned  to an indoor chemistry lab - it is so beautifully, intelligently, written, so free of melodrama, so carefully observed, that he seems to have laid the groundwork for the entire discussion of events that took place during the period.  He is especially astute regarding what it took to survive, and how, or whether, it was possible to remain a man throughout.

Stuart Woolf's  translation is fluid and unobtrusive.

Hanns and Rudolf: the True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz / Thomas Harding 348 pp.

Hanns Alexander escaped Berlin in the early 30s to England, served in WWII, and afterward served Britain's War Crimes Group as an investigator.  In this role, he tracked and captured Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz' Kommandant, who oversaw the murder of some 3 million people, most of them Jews.  Hoess is not to be confused with Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer.

Harding is Hanns' great-nephew, and he has put together a highly satisfying piece of storytelling.  In alternating chapters, he tells the story of the two men's lives from infancy forward. The book jacket states that he is a former documentary filmmaker, and the skills of that trade are obvious here:  the book is informative and well-researched, but Harding keeps his focus on the reader's experience, and moves the story at an expert pace.  Hoess' capture and trial are suspenseful, and the details of Hanns' emigration interesting, but it is Harding's style in writing Hoess' story that shines.  He has a calm,  almost modest tone as he describes the life of a seemingly ordinary German boy once destined for the Church, who later became a loving husband, father, and mass-murderer.

Dancing with the Enemy / Paul Glaser 299 pp.

Glaser is Dutch and only as an adult learned that his family was Jewish.  He became particularly interested in the story of his Aunt Rosie, a widow living in Sweden and an Auschwitz survivor.  He tells her story, mostly by reconstructing it through her extensive correspondence, and some conversations at the end of her life. 

There's no doubt that Rosie is fabulous book material.  She was a dancer and teacher of some renown in European cities in the 1930s, and a bit of a rebellious good-time girl as well.  She was betrayed to the Germans by her ex-husband and another ex-lover and sent first to Westerbork near Amsterdam, and later to Auschwitz.  She survived by the force of her personality, good looks, and, I suspect, an instinct for which tasks it was safest to be assigned to.  She had more than one lover among the guards, and became an entertainer for their soirees.  Yet it's clear she also had great personal integrity.  After the war she testified against her betrayers and left the Netherlands forever, feeling that her countrymen and women did not live up to their later reputation as heroic resisters of German power, citing the high rate of Jewish deportations from Holland with respect to other European countries, most notably Denmark.  A fascinating story told in mediocre style.