The narrator, Primo Levi, begins his memoir of his imprisonment in Auschwitz with his capture by the Fascist Militia on December 13, 1943, when he is 24 years old. He is working with friends in the Italian Alps on anti-Fascist resistance, and they are betrayed to the Fascist militia. He is taken to a detention camp in Fossoli, Italy, in late January 1944.

German SS (an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, the segment of the Nazi Party explicitly responsible for the murder of the Jews) arrive in Fossoli. On February 21 he learns that all Jews being held in Fossoli will be forced to leave the next day. The detainees are warned that for every person who attempts to escape 10 people will be shot.

Levi describes how “all took leave from life in the manner which most suited them” (6). Mothers prepare food and “a hundred other small things” (7) for their children, washing clothes and hanging up their clean laundry on the barbed wire. One group organizes a Jewish mourning ceremony, praying and weeping together all night. The next day “dawn came on us like a betrayer” (7), and they are forced into closed compartments on transport trains.