As the 20th century seemed determined to teach us, the only universal response to others’ suffering is weariness. The more we hear about a tragedy, the faster we blunt our senses. Certainly, humanity is capable of great outpourings of sympathy – but our attention tends to last as long as the novelty. Flags fly at half-mast (rightfully) for London, but when a bomb kills 40 people in Baghdad these days, it hardly gets a newspaper inch.

Sympathy and outrage run hot on emotional circuits, the quickest to burn out. So when Antony Sher arrived in town with his adaptation of Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir, there seemed to be an almost audible sigh of jaded exhaustion. Levi himself saw this happening in his lifetime: The old have heard the stories too many times and the young don’t want to hear them at all. So much dreadful, nearly pornographic mileage has been eked out of the camps, so many easy assaults on our tear ducts, that a kind of resistance begins to spring up against it. What is there left to exhume?

Plenty. Mr. Sher has adapted Stuart Woolf’s English translation of “If This Is a Man,” so it is hard to know if Levi’s cadences and eloquence have been perfectly captured. But the freighted accuracy does remain. In the book Levi recounts his days in the camp, where his survival was a simple product of luck, completely beyond his control. By laying out the mechanisms of life – a pair of shoes that fit, an extra four hundred calories a day smuggled in by a sympathetic civilian – he focuses on minutiae rather than swamping us with pain.

When Primo Levi was shipped from Italy to Auschwitz, he was a Jew, a partisan fighter, and a chemist. It is the last that characterizes his account. Like any good scientist he noted the details, refrained from judgment as long as possible, and scrupulously recorded his own human failings.

As Levi says, right at the outset, he arrived in Auschwitz at a “lucky” moment. Because of labor shortages and the exigencies of a wartime economy, the Germans were slightly prolonging their prisoner’s lives. Rather than operating solely as an extermination camp (though the gas chambers were still up and running), Auschwitz in 1945 was also a labor camp: Able-bodied workers had a chance to survive.

Ironically, after enduring terrible cold, starvation, and beatings, it was weakness that saved him. When – at the very end of the war – scarlet fever landed him in the infirmary tent, Levi was left behind in the mass evacuation. What started as a forced flight from the Russians turned into a death march; the sick and halt who stayed behind were the ones to survive.

Levi maps a survivor’s shame, not a country’s. What’s astonishing is that his harshest criticisms are not for the monsters who tortured him but for himself. Survival in the camp meant a stripping away of civilization’s veneers, discarding the sentimental behaviors of the outside world. He admires those that steal cleverly, and when he finally gets a life-saving post in the chemistry lab, he too begins to pilfer and bargain for his life.

Levi marks the ultimate success of the Nazi guards at the moment when the entire camp watches a heroic prisoner hang. Conditioned and passive, they stand by mutely as he dies. In a landscape of horror, this moment of silence seems to haunt Levi more than any other. No wonder he then spent the rest of his life speaking out.

Considering the horrors he narrates, the degradation and loss and humiliation, he still doesn’t deign to jerk a tear. His dryness seems much harder to shake afterwards than a hanky-soaking catharsis. Tears would be a release, and Levi has no intention of letting us go.

Mr. Sher’s careful, nearly bloodless recitation of Levi’s autobiography steers as clear of bathos as an Auschwitz tale can manage. Gravely respectful of Levi’s dignity, and almost visibly keeping his performance under tight rein, Mr. Sher backs completely away from making the memoir into “drama.” There are light cues and sound cues and a single prop chair, but “Primo” is really a reading rather than a play.

Mr. Sher has found one of the few ways that a public, cynical from daily tragedies, can still bear to remember the ones that went before. He appeals to his audience members by asking them to consider the past rather than wallow in it – to face it without the usual self-indulgence of tears. Since the Holocaust, other genocides have gone unhindered and almost unremarked upon. The tricky resource of “human sympathy” failed the Rwandans and the Congolese, and “Primo” recognizes it as an undependable substance. Perhaps our minds will do better work this century than our hearts did in the last.

Until August 7 (239 W. 45th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).