(; see Nazi concentration camps) were comparable. The death rate in Stalin's gulags was 30% at worst, he wrote, while in the extermination camps he estimated it to be 90–98%. His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews was a horror unique in history because the goal was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior. He noted that it was highly organized and mechanized; it entailed the degradation of Jews to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths. Distinct purpose of extermination camps The purpose of the Nazi camps was not the same as that of Stalin's gulags, Levi wrote in an appendix to If This Is a Man, though it is a "lugubrious comparison between two models of hell." The goal of the was the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe. No one was excluded. No one could renounce Judaism; the Nazis treated Jews as a racial group rather than as a religious one. Levi, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, had not been religiously observant before World War II, but the Italian racial laws and the Nazi camps impressed on him his identity as a Jew. Of the many children deported to the camps, almost all were murdered. Levi wrote in clear, dispassionate style about his experiences in Auschwitz, with an embrace of whatever humanity he found, showing no lasting hatred of the Germans, although he made it clear that he did not forgive any of the culprits. Works Adaptations Five of Levi's poems (Shema, 25 Febbraio 1944, Il canto del corvo, Cantare and Congedo) have been set to music by Simon Sargon in the song cycle Shema: 5 Poems of Primo Levi in 1987. In 2021 the work was performed by Megan Marie Hart during the opening event of the festival year commemorating the first documented mention of Jewish communities in the territory of present-day Germany. The 1997 film (The Truce), starring John Turturro, was adapted from his 1963 memoir of the same title and recounts Levi's long journey home with other displaced people after his liberation from Auschwitz. If This Is a Man was adapted by Antony Sher into a one-man stage production Primo in 2004. A version of this production was broadcast on BBC Four in the UK on 20 September 2007. In popular culture Till My