- Person
- Primo Levi
- Lived
- 1919–1987
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Italian
The story
Primo Levi, a young Jewish chemist from Turin, was arrested as a partisan in December 1943 and held at the Fossoli camp near Modena. On 21 February 1944 he was deported with about 650 Italian Jews to Monowitz, part of the Auschwitz complex, where he became prisoner 174517. He survived eleven months there before the Red Army liberated the camp on 27 January 1945. Of the 650 people on his transport, only about twenty left the camps alive.
He reached Turin in October 1945 and began writing within months. Working at a paint factory outside the city, he jotted memories on train tickets and scraps of paper, and each night he typed up his recollections. The first pages he wrote, in February 1946, became the final chapter, the story of the last ten days before liberation. Lucia Morpurgo, who became his wife, helped him shape the manuscript, which he finished in December 1946.
Einaudi, the leading Turin publisher, turned it down, and so did an American publisher. A small Turin press, De Silva, run by the anti-Fascist Franco Antonicelli, published Se questo è un uomo on 11 October 1947. Antonicelli took the title from a poem by Levi that opens the book. The first printing sold only about 1,500 copies, despite a warm review from Italo Calvino. Levi did not give up, and in 1958 Einaudi published a revised and expanded edition and promoted it. Stuart Woolf's English translation followed in 1959, and German and French editions in 1961.
The book's power lies in its tone. Levi explained that he believed his words would be more credible and useful the more objective and less impassioned they sounded, like a witness preparing the ground for the judge, and he modelled his clear prose on the weekly reports of factory life. He described the camp's rules, its trade and its daily struggle, and asked how far a prisoner could remain human.
If This Is a Man has since been adapted for radio and for the stage, including Antony Sher's one-man play Primo at London's National Theatre in 2004, and it is read and taught around the world as one of the essential witness accounts of the Holocaust.
Why it matters
If This Is a Man is read and taught around the world as a primary witness account of the Holocaust, helping generations understand what happened and why it must not happen again.
About Primo Levi
Turin chemist and Auschwitz survivor whose If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table and The Drowned and the Saved are among the most important writings on the Holocaust.
More about Primo Levi
- Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved named the 'grey zone'In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Primo Levi reflected on Auschwitz forty years later and introduced the idea of the 'grey zone', now central to Holocaust ethics.
- Primo Levi made sure Germans could read his testimonyPrimo Levi closely supervised the German translation of If This Is a Man, published in 1961, which he considered perhaps the most important translation of all.
Sources
- Primo Levi Wikipedia
- Biography Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi
- If This Is a Man Wikipedia
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