How is war presented in the poem?

Primo Levi, the poet, was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, and this poem describes his experiences of being treated as if he were less than human during the Second World War. While it does not mention war directly—it is not a poem about soldiers or physical fighting—it confronts the reader with the reality of being dehumanized by war and the belief of others that you are less than they are.
The key question the poet poses to the reader is: "consider if this is a man," and, later, "consider if this is a woman." The man in the poem is an avatar for all those who were condemned by the Nazis; the man "works in the mud," "fights for a scrap of bread," knows no peace and can be killed because of "a yes or a no" from those in charge. War, or rather, prejudice and hatred, have reduced this man to a being without agency, who is forced to fight among his own people for food and who has no peace left to him, although he is not a soldier. The effect of the war on this man has been to dehumanize him so greatly that the poet must ask whether the reader truly sees him as a man at all.
In the same way, the woman has had her feminine features taken from her, her hair and her name; with her "womb cold," she is compared to an animal, a "frog in winter," rather than a human being. The poet hopes that the reader will "meditate that this came about" and recognize that, whatever has been done to these people, they are still human, and their experience must be remembered through the generations so that it does not repeat itself.