- You who live safe
- In your warm houses,
- You who find, returning in the evening,
- Hot food and friendly faces:
- Consider if this is a man
- Who works in the mud,
- Who does not know peace,
- Who fights for a scrap of bread,
- Who dies because of a yes or a no.
- Consider if this is a woman
- Without hair and without name,
- With no more strength to remember,
- Her eyes empty and her womb cold
- Like a frog in winter.
- Meditate that this came about:
- I commend these words to you.
- Carve them in your hearts
- At home, in the street,
- Going to bed, rising;
- Repeat them to your children.
- Or may your house fall apart,
- May illness impede you,
- May your children turn their faces from you.
Primo Levi, 1947
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