Primo Levi in two films

On the morning of October 19 1945, nine months after his rescue from Auschwitz, Primo Levi reached his home in northern Italy. Of the 650 Jews who had been deported with him, Levi was just one of 24 returning. The first to see him at 75 Corso Re Umberto, the address where he had lived in Turin, was the concierge. She had known Levi since his teens but did not recognise the bearded stranger, and brusquely asked him what business he had. There was a silence before she began shouting up the stairwell to Primo's mother: "Madame Levi! Madame Levi!"Many years later, the chaos of Levi's homeward journey across eastern Europe became the subject of his book The Truce. It sold 40,000 copies on publication in Italy in 1963 and put Levi among the front rank of Italian writers. He was one of the first in the west to describe the postwar Soviet Union from the inside. More than any other Italian book at that time, The Truce helped to heal cold war antagonisms and free the Italian public from the dark years following fascism. It was no sooner in the shops than the smiling Pope John XXIII published his famous encyclical Pacem in Terris ("Peace on Earth"), which opened up a dialogue between the Catholic and Marxist worlds. Europe was changing, and The Truce caught the new mood.

With its mock-heroic misadventure, Levi's chronicle has long tempted Italian film directors. Mario Monicelli had wanted to make a grand epic movie of The Truce that would retain something of the book's lightness of touch. A draft treatment was ready by early 1964, but the project was dropped owing to financial difficulties. For 250,000 lire (£1,300 today - a risible sum), Franca Films in Rome bought an option on the book. Alberto Sordi, then Italy's favourite screen comedian, was to star in the film. A script based on the earlier Monicelli treatment was offered, but nothing came of it. Next came Franceso Rosi, who, with his sharp, inquisitorial eye, seemed ideally suited to adapt Levi's chronicle. His film version appeared in 1997, but was disappointingly overblown and operatic, with John Turturro in the unlikely role of Levi.

Davide Ferrario, the latest Italian director to take an interest in The Truce, has chosen to trace the course of Levi's journey in the form of a documentary. Moving from Poland across Ukraine to Austria, Primo Levi's Journey captures something of the exuberant railway vagabondage of The Truce, as well as the boundless immensity of Russia, with its steppe and tundra. The bureaucratic delays and difficulties experienced by the Italian film crew, moreover, mirror the scenes of disorder and confusion à la russe described so vividly by Levi.

Fourteen years ago, in the summer of 1992, I retraced the same journey while researching my biography of Levi. Like Ferrario, I began at the small Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), where a railway line still ran directly to the former death camp. When I went on to Cracow, a field kitchen had been set up by Polish nuns in what used to be Adolf Hitlerplatz; it was a scene straight out of The Truce. On his arrival in Cracow in 1945, Levi had been greeted by the adrenaline-boosting booms and bangs of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. (The music, written in memory of Russia's victory over Napoleon, was issued from loudspeakers rigged up by the Red Army in the train station.)

Made 60 years after Levi's epic railroad odyssey, Ferrario's film has elements of the road movie, as it trundles out of Cracow and on to nearby Katowice. The Red Army had set up a transfer camp in Katowice for displaced persons awaiting repatriation in 1945. Under Hitler, Katowice had served as a Reich office for processing confiscated Jewish property. And during the four months Levi spent in the Polish city as a free man under Russian care, he must have felt in some measure vindicated for what he had endured. (Katowice was the most important city in Levi's life, he claimed, after his birthplace of Turin.) The transfer camp was situated in the dowdy suburb of Bogucice, where everything was (and still is) covered in coal dust. Only one of the 12 barrack huts was standing when I visited, yet I could sense the past. On March 25 1945 - Palm Sunday - a displaced Italian family in the camp had invited Levi to a meal of tagliatelle and roast chicken. After the famine and brutality of Auschwitz, the occasion must have been extraordinary to him.

Nevertheless, the frustration of enforced containment bit keenly. The Red Army promised departure from Katowice one day, only to postpone it the next. On June 30, not for the first time, they began shouting "Repatriatsiya!" But this time they meant it. With 800 jubilant Italians, Levi bounded a troop train headed for Odessa. However, instead of proceeding in the direction of Italy, the convoy rambled interminably northward into the heart of the steppe. Filled with nostalgia for his homeland, Levi reflected a good deal on the continuous official lunacy of the Soviets. The shambolic humanity of his Russian keepers could not have been more different from the harsh Prussian discipline of Auschwitz. As a chronicle of rebirth, The Truce is an often joyous work that gives the impression, said Levi, of a "world in Technicolor"; the monochrome of If This Is a Man, his earlier account of Auschwitz, has none of the sequel's radiance.

Yet the book's title (in Italian, La Tregua) is, I think, intentionally ambivalent. It suggests that Levi's joyous repatriation was to be a brief parenthesis, a queasy "truce", before further cruelty. The eastern European countries he travelled through at the war's end have been transformed utterly in the post-communist era. And not always for the better. As Ferrario interviews pensioners and war widows abandoned by the Moscow government, the motto of Russia's dispossessed, "Things were better before", is increasingly heard. Much of the documentary unfolds in Ukraine and the flatlands around Chernobyl's wrecked nuclear core. The Russians here haggle for scrag-ends of meat and bear the tell-tale mark of cerium pallor. Soviet Russia was no democracy - Levi could already see that in 1945 - yet, without Stalingrad, the Nazis might have won the war and all Europe could have been a vast German colony. Levi had reason to be grateful to the Red Army, anyway, as they had liberated Auschwitz.

In spite of its favourable portrait of mother Russia, however, The Truce has not been translated into Russian. One Moscow critic, reviewing the Italian edition in 1964, complained that Levi had done nothing but describe the "same old, unchanging Russia of Dostoevsky". The Russians in the book appear to suffer from "Oblomovitis" (after the chronically lazy anti-hero of Goncharov's novel, Oblomov). And Levi chronicles them with exasperated affection along with condescension. In much the same way, Primo Levi's Journey offers a hackneyed image of modern eastern Europe as land of hay ricks, plum brandy and klezmer music.

The film continues westwards to Romania, where the first Romanian shop signs glimpsed in 1945 must have looked tantalisingly like Italian to the homebound Levi. By mid-October, having been rerouted, deviated and delayed, Levi's train was clanking rapidly into the devastated city of Munich. His prison-camp number - 174517 - burned on his arm as he caught sight of shame-faced Germans. Once the convoy had passed the Brenner pass, his journey's end was near. At 26, Levi was in reasonable physical health, yet he was filled with anxieties. Everything that had gone before - the Russian chaos, the train derailments - was an irrelevancy now that Levi was poised to re-enter civilian life. The film concludes with an exterior shot of 75 Corso Re Umberto where, on the morning of April 11 1987, Primo Levi took his life.

La Tregua (1997)

Primo (2005)