Primo Levi’s experience in If This Is a Man included the change of his body through adversity while he remembered and recorded the names and stories of those he encountered on his downward journey into Auschwitz. In the post-war decades, he witnessed his life and mind in context of the camps and in his place of the middle to late Italian and global twentieth century. Phenomenological and Buddhist thought reveals one approach readers may take in developing a practice of witness in reading traumatic literature. French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writing in the mid-twentieth century, found witness to be perception and attention that is inherent to the body through observation and participation expressed through the senses and the rational and intuitive intelligences. Buddhism focuses on shared human suffering and addresses how humans respond to individual and other’s pain. Writers of traumatic literature and their readers are ethically linked in the process of witness. There are limitations as well as opportunities in a practice of witness for writers and readers.