Primo Levi

Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it with a chemist's precision and no rhetoric. Born in Turin in 1919 into an assimilated Jewish family, he took a degree in chemistry in 1941 with a diploma noting that he was of the Jewish race, under the racial laws Mussolini had introduced in 1938. He joined a small and inexperienced partisan group in the Alps in 1943 and was captured that December. He declared himself a Jew rather than a partisan, expecting it to be safer, and was sent to Fossoli and then in February 1944 to Auschwitz III-Monowitz, the labour camp attached to the Buna synthetic rubber works. He survived eleven months. He attributed it to luck, to a smattering of German, to an Italian civilian bricklayer named Lorenzo who brought him extra soup for months, and to being assigned to the chemical laboratory in the final winter. He was in the infirmary with scarlet fever when the camp was evacuated in January 1945, which is why he was still alive when the Soviets arrived; most of those marched out died. If This Is a Man was published in 1947 by a small press after Einaudi rejected it, and sold poorly until it was reissued in 1958. The Truce describes his nine-month journey home through Eastern Europe. He worked as an industrial chemist at a paint factory near Turin until 1977. The Periodic Table, published in 1975, tells his life in twenty-one chapters named after elements. His last book, The Drowned and the Saved, argues that the true witnesses are those who died. He fell from the landing of his building in April 1987.

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