A Turin childhood
Primo Michele Levi was born on July 31, 1919, in Turin, in the apartment at Corso Re Umberto 75 where he would live almost his entire life. His family were Piedmontese Jews whose ancestors had come to northern Italy from Spain and Provence centuries before; he later wrote affectionately about their customs and their dialect in the opening chapter of The Periodic Table. His father, Cesare, was an engineer who worked for the Hungarian firm Ganz and travelled often; he was a voracious reader who, his son recalled, had jackets made with pockets deep enough to hold books. His mother, Ester “Rina” Luzzati, was cultured and well read. A sister, Anna Maria, was born in 1921, and the two stayed close all their lives.
Primo was a thin, delicate, shy boy who was often ill but did brilliantly at school. At his gymnasium he was the youngest, the smallest and the only Jew in his class, and a couple of classmates bullied him for it. He studied Hebrew and Jewish tradition at Turin’s Talmud Torah school and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1932, but the family was not religious, and Primo would later describe himself as a non-believer. At the Liceo D’Azeglio, a school famous for its anti-Fascist teachers, his Italian teacher for a time was the future novelist Cesare Pavese. Reading a popular book on the nature of things by the physicist William Henry Bragg, he decided to become a chemist.
Chemistry under the racial laws
In October 1937 he enrolled at the University of Turin to study chemistry. The following year Mussolini’s government enacted its anti-Jewish racial laws, which stripped Italian Jews of public jobs and barred new Jewish students from universities. Those already enrolled were allowed to finish, so Levi could complete his degree, but finding a supervisor for his thesis was difficult. He graduated in 1941 with top marks; his diploma carried the words “of Jewish race.” He later said the racial laws had a paradoxical effect on him and his friends: by revealing Fascism’s stupidity and cruelty, they pushed them toward opposition.
In these years he fell in love with the mountains, climbing with his friend Sandro Delmastro, whom he memorialised in the chapter “Iron” of The Periodic Table. Unable to find legal employment, he worked under a false name at an asbestos mine near Turin, trying to extract nickel from waste rock, and from 1942 in Milan for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Wander, on a doomed project to make a diabetes drug from plants. His father died of cancer in March 1942. In Milan, Levi and his friends grew politically active and joined the clandestine Partito d’Azione, the Action Party.
Partisan, prisoner, deportee
After Italy’s armistice with the Allies was announced on September 8, 1943, German forces occupied northern Italy and restored Mussolini as the head of a puppet state. Levi joined a small, untrained partisan band in the Aosta Valley linked to the Giustizia e Libertà movement. He later called it the most muddled episode of his life, a story of well-meaning but inexperienced young people. On December 13, 1943, Fascist militia arrested him. Believing he would be shot as a partisan, he admitted he was Jewish, and was sent to the internment camp at Fossoli, near Modena.
In February 1944 the Germans took over Fossoli. On February 21 Levi and some 650 Italian Jews were loaded onto cattle trucks bound for Auschwitz. The journey took several days. On arrival most of the deportees were sent straight to the gas chambers; Levi was selected for labour and sent to Monowitz, the camp that supplied workers to IG Farben’s vast Buna synthetic-rubber plant. He was tattooed with the number 174517.
Eleven months in Auschwitz
Levi survived for eleven months in a place where most new prisoners died within weeks or months. He credited a combination of luck and a few concrete advantages. He knew some German from chemistry textbooks and paid a fellow prisoner with bread for lessons, because not understanding orders could be fatal. An Italian civilian bricklayer working at Auschwitz, Lorenzo Perrone, secretly brought him extra soup every day for months, asking nothing in return; Levi credited him with saving his life and with reminding him that a just world still existed outside the camp. In November 1944, his training as a chemist got him a place in the Buna laboratory, indoors and out of the freezing cold.
In January 1945, as the Red Army approached, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was left in the camp infirmary. On January 18 the SS evacuated the camp, driving almost all the prisoners who could walk on a death march on which most of them perished. Levi, abandoned with the sick, survived the next ten days of chaos until Soviet troops arrived on January 27, 1945. Of the 650 people on his transport, he was one of only about twenty who returned home.
If This Is a Man
The journey home took months. Levi was sent through a Soviet transit camp and on a long, circuitous railway odyssey through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany before reaching Turin on October 19, 1945, a journey he would recount in The Truce (1963). He was so thin and swollen that people barely recognised him. In January 1946 he took a job at a DuPont-owned paint factory outside Turin and began writing down what he had seen, on train tickets and scraps of paper, and then, night after night, at the typewriter. He met Lucia Morpurgo, who helped him edit the manuscript; they married in 1947.
Major publishers, including Einaudi, turned the book down. A small press run by the anti-Fascist Franco Antonicelli published Se questo è un uomo, If This Is a Man, in October 1947 in a run of 2,000 copies. Its tone was unlike anything else: calm, exact and unsparing, more interested in understanding than in accusing, written, as he put it, in the measured language of a witness. It sold modestly and was largely forgotten until Einaudi reissued a revised edition in 1958. Translations followed, into English in 1959, and then into German, a translation Levi supervised closely and cared about most, because he wanted Germans to understand what had been done in their name. In the United States it was later published as Survival in Auschwitz.
Chemist by day, writer by night
For nearly thirty years Levi kept his day job. From 1948 he worked at the SIVA paint and varnish company near Turin, becoming its technical director, solving industrial problems and travelling on business, including to Germany, where he made a point of wearing short sleeves so that the Germans he met could see his camp number. His daughter, Lisa, was born in 1948 and his son, Renzo, in 1957; both carried a form of the name Lorenzo in honour of Perrone, who died in 1952 after sinking into alcoholism.
The Truce won the first Campiello Prize in 1963. Under a pen name, Damiano Malabaila, he published witty and unsettling science-fiction stories. He retired from SIVA in the mid-1970s to write full-time. The Periodic Table (1975) is a memoir in twenty-one chapters, each named after a chemical element, linking chemistry with friendship, resistance and the camps; in 2006 the Royal Institution in London named it the best science book ever written. The Wrench (1978), stories about a rigger who builds cranes and bridges around the world and takes pride in his work, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s leading literary award.
A Jew made by Auschwitz
Levi often said that the racial laws and the camps had made him a Jew. Before the war, Jewishness had been for him a family background with little religious content. Afterwards he said Auschwitz had imposed a sense of difference on him and then called him to claim a heritage he had not possessed; he set about studying Jewish history and culture, including the world of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews he had first met, as an outsider, in the camp. His only conventional novel, If Not Now, When? (1982; English translation 1985), follows a band of Jewish partisans fighting their way from Russia toward Palestine, and won both the Viareggio and the Campiello prizes.
His relationship with Israel was complex. He praised it in 1967 as a land of witnesses and survivors, but he grew uneasy at its militarism, visited only once, in 1968, and in 1982 signed an open letter condemning the Lebanon war. He said he was not a Zionist and described himself as essentially Italian. He never stopped insisting on the uniqueness of the Nazi genocide, rejecting attempts to equate the extermination camps with other systems of oppression.
The Drowned and the Saved
In his last major book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Levi returned to the camps forty years on to ask harder questions. He examined the “grey zone” of prisoners who had been forced or tempted into collaborating with their tormentors, the unreliability of memory, the shame survivors felt, and the failure of so many ordinary Germans to know what they did not want to know. It is a book of moral analysis rather than accusation, and it ends with a warning that what happened could happen again, anywhere.
Levi died on April 11, 1987, after falling from the third-floor landing of his apartment building into the stairwell. The coroner ruled the death a suicide, and several biographers have agreed; Levi had suffered from depression and was caring for his elderly, ailing mother. Others who knew him, including his friend the Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini and the sociologist Diego Gambetta, argued that it may have been an accident, noting that he left no note and had plans for the future. The question has never been settled.
Legacy
Primo Levi disliked being called a “Holocaust writer” but he is now read around the world as one of its essential witnesses and one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century. Philip Roth praised him for rendering the camps comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. If This Is a Man is taught in schools across Europe, and Penguin’s three-volume Complete Works, edited by Ann Goldstein, made his entire output available in English in 2015.
His name is attached to a Paris centre for victims of torture, to the International Primo Levi Studies Center in Turin, and to a prize awarded by the German and Italian chemical societies for chemists who defend human rights. What gives his work its lasting power is the chemist’s discipline he brought to the worst experience of the century: patient observation, precise language, and a refusal either to hate blindly or to forget.
Sources & further reading
Primo Levi, Wikipedia · Biography, Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi · Primo Levi, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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