Without doubt the holocaust is the darkest chapter of German history and it is inseparably linked to the horrors of World War II. Millions of Jews from all over Europe lost their lives not just in concentration camps, industrial plants and ghettos, but huge numbers of them were killed right away by members of the Waffen-SS and sometimes the Wehrmacht ploughing through the lands of the traditional Jewish shtetl on their way eastward. When Nazi troupes crossed the Soviet borders on 22 June 1941, the fighting on the Eastern front began. Little noted at the time and hardly remembered today, both in the lines of Stalin’s Red Army and of the partisan bands that had formed on German-occupied territory fought Jews. The novel If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi tells the fictitious story of a dispersed Jewish artilleryman of the Red Army who joins the partisans because he has nothing left to lose except his life.