Why we should care: Primo Levi’s poem, from Survival in Auschwitz

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find on 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, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 11.