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Levi Primo Michele
(1919—1987)

Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975) which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.

Levi was born in Turin at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi’s mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare was arranged by Rina’s father. On their wedding day, Rina’s father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto where Primo Levi was to live for almost his entire life.

In 1921 Anna Maria, Levi's sister was born; he was to remain close to her all of his life. In 1925 he entered the Felice Rignon primary school in Turin. A thin and delicate child, he was shy and thought of himself as being ugly, but he excelled academically. His school record includes long periods of absence during which time he was tutored at home at first by Emilia Glauda and then by Marisa Zini, daughter of philosopher Zino Zini. Summers were spent with his mother in the Waldensian valleys south-west of Turin where Rina rented a farmhouse. His father remained in Turin partly because of his dislike of the rural life, but also because of his infidelities.

In September 1930 he entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium a year ahead of normal entrance requirements. In class he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest as well as being the only Jew. For these reasons, he was bullied. In August 1932, following two years at the Talmud Torah school in Turin, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. He avoided rifle drill by joining the ski division, and then spent every Saturday during the season on the slopes above Turin. As a young boy Levi was plagued by illness, particularly chest infections, but he was keen to participate in physical activity. In his teens Levi and a few of his friends would sneak into a disused sports stadium and conduct athletic competitions.

In July 1934 at the age of 14, he sat the exams for the Massimo d'Azeglio liceo classico, a Lyceum (sixth form) specialising in the classics and was admitted that autumn. The school was noted for its well-known anti-Fascist teachers, amongst them the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, and for a few months Cesare Pavese, also an anti-Fascist and later to become one of Italy's best-known novelists. Levi continued to be bullied during his time at the Lyceum although he was now in a class with six other Jews. Upon reading Concerning the Nature of Things by Sir William Bragg, Levi decided that he wanted to be a chemist. Levi matriculated from the school in 1937 despite being accused of ignoring a call-up to the Italian Royal Navy the week before his exams were due to begin. As a result of this incident, and possibly some antisemitic bias in the marking, Levi had to retake his Italian paper. At the end of the summer he passed his exams and in October he enrolled at the University of Turin, to study chemistry. The registered intake of eighty hopefuls spent three months taking lectures in preparation for their colloquio (oral examination) when the eighty would be reduced to twenty. The following February Levi graduated onto the full-time chemistry course.

In the liberal period as well as in the first decade of the Fascist regime, Jews held many public positions. In 1929 Mussolini signed an agreement with the Catholic Church, the Lateran Treaty, which established Catholicism as State religion, allowed the Church to influence many sectors of education and public life and relegated other religions to the status of "tolerated cults". A year later, based on the new restrictions imposed on Italian public life by the Lateran Treaty, the regime created a legislation that defined the relations between the State and the Italian Jewish Communities. In 1936 the conquest of Ethiopia and the expansion of what the regime regarded as the Italian "colonial empire" materialized for the first time in the post-unification political narrative the question of "race". Within the context set by these two events and the alliance with Hitler's Germany, the situation of the Jews of Italy changed radically.

In July 1938 a group of prominent Italian scientists and intellectuals published the so-called Manifesto of the Race, a mixture of racial and ideological antisemitic theories from ancient and modern sources which underlay the Italian anti-Jewish legislation of September 1938. Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, their positions in public offices and their assets. Jewish students who had begun their course of study were permitted to continue them, but new Jewish students were barred from entering university. It was therefore fortunate that Levi had matriculated a year early, as he would not otherwise have been permitted to take a degree.

In 1939 Levi began his love affair with hiking in the mountains. His friend Sandro Delmastro taught him how to hike and they spent many week-ends in the mountains above Turin. Physical exertion, the risk and the battle with the elements supplied him with an outlet for all the frustrations in his life. In June 1940 Italy declared war against Britain and France, and the first air raids on Turin began two days later. Levi’s studies continued during the bombardments, and an additional strain on the family was imposed when his father became bedridden with bowel cancer.

However, because of the new antisemitic laws and the increasing intensity of prevalent Fascism, Levi had difficulty finding a supervisor for his graduation thesis which was on the subject of Walden inversion, a study of the asymmetry of the carbon atom. Eventually taken on by Dr. Nicolò Dallaporta he graduated in the summer of 1941 with full marks and merit, having submitted additional theses on x-rays and electrostatic energy. His degree certificate bore the remark, "of Jewish race". The racial laws prevented Levi from finding a suitable permanent position after he had graduated.

In December 1941 Levi was approached and clandestinely offered a job at an asbestos mine at San Vittore. The project he was given was to extract nickel from the mine spoil, a challenge he accepted with pleasure. It was not lost on Levi that should he be successful he would be aiding the German war effort, which was suffering nickel shortages in the production of armaments. The job required Levi to work under a false name with false papers. In March 1942 while he was working at the mine Levi’s father died.

In June 1942, due to the deteriorating situation in Turin, Levi left the mine and went to work in Milan. He had been recruited through a fellow student at Turin University who was now working for the Swiss firm of A Wander Ltd on a project to extract an anti-diabetic from vegetable matter. He could take the job because the racial laws did not apply to Swiss companies. It soon became clear that the project had no chance of succeeding, but it was in no one's interest to say so.

In September 1943, after the new Italian government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies, the former leader Mussolini was rescued from imprisonment by the Germans and installed as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. Levi returned home to Turin to find his mother and sister having taken refuge in their holiday home La Saccarello in the hills outside Turin. They all then embarked to Saint-Vincent in the Aosta Valley where they could be hidden. Being pursued by the authorities they moved up the hillside to Amay in the Colle di Joux. Amay was on the route to Switzerland that was followed by Allied prisoners of war and refugees trying to escape the Germans.

The Italian resistance movement became increasingly active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and a number of comrades took to the foothills of the Alps and in October joined the liberal Giustizia e Libertà partisan movement. Completely untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were quickly arrested by the Fascist militia.

When told he would be shot as an Italian partisan, he confessed to being Jewish and was then sent to an internment camp for Jews at Fossoli near Modena. Primo Levi's writings held at Yad Vashem indicate that as long as Fossoli was under Italian, rather than Nazi German control, he was not harmed. "We were given, on a regular basis, a food ration destined for the soldiers", Levi's testimony stated, "and at the end of January 1944, we were taken to Fossoli on a passenger train. Our conditions in the camp were quite good. There was no talk of executions and the atmosphere was quite calm. We were allowed to keep the money we had brought with us and to receive money from the outside. We worked in the kitchen in turn and performed other services in the camp. We even prepared a dining room, a rather sparse one, I must admit."

When Fossoli fell into the hands of the Germans, the Jews were rounded up for deportation. On 21 February 1944, the inmates of the camp were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex (his record number was 174,517). Levi spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 18 January 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months.

Levi knew some German from reading German publications on chemistry; he quickly oriented himself to life in the camp without attracting the attention of the privileged inmates; he used bread to pay a more experienced Italian prisoner for German lessons and orientation in Auschwitz; and he received a smuggled soup ration each day from Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian civilian bricklayer, working as a forced labourer. His professional qualifications were also useful: in mid-November 1944 he was able to secure a position as an assistant in IG Farben's Buna Werke laboratory that was intended to produce synthetic rubber, thereby avoiding hard labour in freezing outdoor temperatures. Shortly before the camp was liberated by the Red Army, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was placed in the camp's sanatorium (camp hospital). On 18 January 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march that led to the death of the vast majority of the remaining prisoners. Levi's illness spared him this fate.

Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, as a result of the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces he embarked on an arduous journey home in the company of former pre-1946 Italian prisoners of war from the Royal Italian Army in Russia. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany.

Levi was almost unrecognisable on his return to Turin. Malnutrition edema had bloated his face. Sporting a scrawny beard and wearing an old Red Army uniform he arrived back at Corso Re Umberto. The next few months gave him an opportunity to recover physically, re-establish contact with surviving friends and family and to start looking for work. However, Levi was understandably suffering from psychological trauma. Having been unable to find work in Turin he started to look for work in Milan. On his train journeys he started to tell people he met stories about his time at Auschwitz. At a Jewish New Year party in 1946 he met Lucia Morpurgo who offered to teach him to dance. Levi fell in love with Lucia. At about this time he started writing poetry about his experiences in the Lager.

On 21 January 1946 he started work at DUCO, a Du Pont Company paint factory, outside Turin. As the train service out to the factory was so limited Levi stayed in the factory dormitory during the week, which gave him the opportunity to write undisturbed. It was here that he started to write down the first draft of If This Is a Man. Every day he would scribble down notes on train tickets and scraps of paper as memories came to him. At the end of February he had ten pages detailing the last ten days between the German evacuation and the arrival of the Red Army. For the next ten months the book took shape in his dormitory as he typed up his recollections each night.

On 22 December 1946, the manuscript was complete. Lucia, who now reciprocated Levi’s love, helped him to edit it, to make the narrative flow more naturally. In January 1947 Levi was taking the finished manuscript around to publishers, but the wounds he was describing were still too fresh and he had no literary experience to give him a reputation as an author.

Eventually Levi found a publisher, Franco Antonicelli, through a friend of his sister’s. Antonicelli was an amateur publisher, but as an active anti-Fascist he was supportive of the idea of the book. At the end of June 1947, Levi suddenly left DUCO and teamed up with an old friend Alberto Salmoni to run a chemical consultancy from the top floor of Salmoni’s parents’ house. Many of Levi’s experiences of this time found their way into his later writing. They made most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride for mirror makers, delivering the unstable chemical by bicycle across the city. The attempts to make lipsticks from reptile excreta and a coloured enamel to coat teeth were turned into short stories. Accidents in their laboratory filled the Salmoni house with unpleasant smells and corrosive gases.

In September 1947, Levi married Lucia and a month later, on 11 October, If This Is a Man was published with a print run of 2,000 copies. In April 1948, with Lucia pregnant with their first child, Levi decided that the life of an independent chemist was too precarious and agreed to go and work for Federico Accatti in the family paint business which traded under the name SIVA. In October 1948 Levi’s first child, his daughter Lisa, was born.

A major trauma for Levi during this period was the decline and death of Lorenzo Perrone. Lorenzo was an Italian, civilian worker in the Lager, who for six months in the camp, gave the remainder of his ration and a piece of bread to Levi without asking anything in return. Levi juxtaposes Lorenzo against everyone else in the camp, prisoners and guards alike, as someone who has managed to preserve his humanity. After the war Lorenzo could not cope with the memories of what he saw and descended into alcoholism. Levi made several trips to rescue his old friend from the streets, but in 1952 Lorenzo died.

In 1950, having demonstrated his ample chemical talents to Accatti, he was made Technical Director at SIVA. As SIVA’s principal chemist and trouble shooter Levi travelled abroad. He made several trips to Germany and carefully engineered his contacts with senior German businessmen and scientists. Wearing short sleeved shirts he made sure they saw his prison camp number tattooed on his arm, and he engaged them on the depravity of the Nazis and the lack of redemption sought by most Germans, many of whom had been involved in the exploitation of slave labour during the war.

He was also involved in organisations pledged to remembering the horror of the camps. In 1954 he visited Buchenwald to mark the ninth anniversary of the camps liberation from the Nazis. There were many such anniversaries over the years and Levi dutifully attended them to tell and retell his memories. In July 1957, his son Renzo was born, almost certainly named after his saviour Lorenzo Perrone.

Despite a positive review by Italo Calvino in L'Unità, only 1,500 copies of If This Is a Man were sold. Levi had to wait till 1958 before Einaudi published it, in a revised form.

In 1958 Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with Levi, translated If This Is a Man into English and it was published in the UK in 1959 by Orion Press. Also in 1959 Heinz Riedt, also under close supervision by Levi, translated it into German. As one of Levi’s primary reasons for writing the book was to get the German people to realise what had been done in their name, and to accept at least partial responsibility, this translation was perhaps the most significant.

Levi began writing The Truce early in 1961 and it was published in 1963, almost 16 years after his first book, and the same year it won the first annual Premio Campiello literary award. It is often published in one volume with If This Is a Man, as it covers his long return from Auschwitz. Levi's reputation was growing. He regularly contributed articles to La Stampa, the Turin newspaper. He wished to be known also as a writer about subjects other than his deportation.

Also in 1963 came his first major bout of depression. At the time he had two young children, a responsible job at a factory where accidents could and did have terrible consequences, he travelled, became a public figure, and yet the memory of what happened less than twenty years earlier still burned in his mind. Today we recognise the link between stress and depression, but then it was not the case. Also the drugs available to him, several of which he was prescribed over the years, had variable efficacy and side effects.

In 1964 he collaborated on a radio play based upon If This Is a Man with the state broadcaster RAI, and in 1966 with a theatre production.

He published two volumes of science fiction short stories under the pen name of Damiano Malabaila which explored ethical and philosophical questions as well as imagining the impact upon society of inventions which many would consider beneficial, but which, he saw, would have serious implications. Many of the stories from the two books Storie naturali (Natural Histories) published in 1966 and Vizio di forma (Structural Defect) published in 1971 were later released in English as The Sixth Day and other Tales.

In 1974 he arranged to go into semi-retirement from SIVA in order to have more time to write, as well as escaping the burden of responsibility for managing the paint plant.

In 1975 a collection of Levi’s poetry was published under the title L’osteria di Brema (The Bremen Beer Hall), published in English as Shema: Collected Poems.

He also wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve) was published in 1978 and Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) in 1975. Moments of Reprieve deals with characters he observed during imprisonment. The Periodic Table is a collection of short pieces, mostly episodes from his life but also two short stories that he wrote before his time in Auschwitz, all related in some way to one of the chemical elements. At London's Royal Institution on 19 October 2006 it was voted onto the shortlist for the best science book ever written.

Levi retired as a part-time consultant at the SIVA paint factory in 1977 to devote himself full-time to writing. Like all of his books, 1978's La chiave a stella (published in the US in 1986 as The Monkey Wrench and in the UK in 1987 as The Wrench) is difficult to categorize. In some reviews it is described as a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator, Faussone, resembling Levi himself. Others have called it a novel, as common characters appear in the stories. Based upon a FIAT-run town in Russia called Togliattigrad, it portrays the engineer as a hero on whom others depend. The underlying philosophy is that pride in one's work is necessary for fulfillment. The Piedmontese engineer Faussone travels the world as an expert in erecting cranes and bridges. This book aroused criticism from left-wing critics because he did not describe the working conditions on the assembly lines at FIAT. However, it brought Levi a wider audience in Italy and The Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979. Most of the stories involve the solution of industrial problems by the use of troubleshooting skills and clearly many stories come from the author's personal experience.

In 1984 his only novel, If Not Now, When? -- or his second novel, if we count "The Monkey Wrench" -- was published. It traces the fortunes of a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II as they seek to survive and continue their fight against the occupier. With the ultimate goal of reaching Palestine to take part in the construction of a Jewish national home, the partisan band reaches Poland and then German territory before the surviving members are officially received as displaced persons in territory held by the Western allies. Finally, they succeed in reaching Italy, on their way to Palestine. The novel won both the Premio Campiello and the Premio Viareggio. The book had its origin in Levi’s train journey home, narrated in The Truce. At one point in the journey a band of Zionists hitch their own wagon to the refugee train. Levi was impressed by their strength, resolve, organisation, and sense of purpose.

Levi became a major literary figure in Italy. The Truce became a standard text in Italian schools. His books were translated into many other languages. In 1985, he flew to America for a speaking tour of twenty days. The trip, on which he was accompanied by Lucia, was very draining for him. In the Soviet Union his early works were not acceptable to censors because they portrayed Soviet soldiers as slovenly and disorderly rather than heroic. In Israel, a country formed partly by Jewish refugees who escaped horrors more or less the same as Levi experienced, Levi's works were not translated until after his death.

In March 1985 he wrote the introduction to the re-publication of the autobiography of Rudolf Höß who was commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943. In it he writes "It's filled with evil . . . and reading it is agony".

Also in 1985 a volume of essays, previously published in La Stampa, was published under the title L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades). Levi used to write these stories and hoard them away, releasing them to La Stampa at the rate of almost one a week. The essays ranged from book reviews and ponderings about strange things in nature to fictional short stories.

In 1986 his book I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), was published. In it he tried to analyse why people behaved the way they did at Auschwitz, and why some survived whilst others perished. In his typical , those Jews who did the Germans' dirty work for them and kept the rest of the prisoners in line. What made a concert violinist behave as a callous taskmaster?

Also in 1986 another collection of short stories, previously published in La Stampa, was assembled and published as Racconti e saggi (some of which were published in the English volume The Mirror Maker).

At the time of his death, in April 1987, he was working on another selection of essays called The Double Bond which took the form of letters to "La Signorina". These essays are very personal in nature. Approximately five or six chapters of this manuscript exist. Carole Angier, in her biography of Levi, describes how she tracked some of these essays down, but that others were being kept away from public view by Levi’s close friends, to whom he distributed them, and they may have been destroyed.

In March 2007 Harper's Magazine published an English translation of Levi's story "Knall", about a fictitious weapon that is fatal at close range but harmless more than a meter away. It originally appeared in his 1971 book Vizio di forma, but was published in English for the first time by Harper's.

A Tranquil Star, a collection of seventeen stories translated into English by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli was published in April 2007.

What drove Levi to write If This Is a Man was a desire to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. He read many accounts of witnesses and survivors and attended meetings of survivors, becoming in the end a symbolic figure for anti-fascists in Italy.

Levi visited over 130 schools to talk about his experiences in Auschwitz. He was shocked by negationist attitudes that tried to rewrite the history of the camps as less horrific, what is now referred to as Holocaust denial. His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews was a horror unique in history because the aim was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior; it was highly organized and mechanized; it entailed the degradation of Jews even to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths.

With the publication in the late 1960s and 1970s of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world became aware that the Soviet regime used camps (gulags) to repress dissidents who might be imprisoned for as much as twenty years. There were similarities with the Lager; the hard physical work and poor rations. Levi rejected, however, the idea that The Gulag Archipelago and the system of the Nazi Lager were equivalent. The death rate in the gulags was estimated at 30% at worst, he wrote, while in the Lager he estimated it was 90–98%. The aim of the Lager was to eliminate the Jewish race. No one was excluded. No-one could renounce Judaism; the Nazis treated Jews as a racial group rather than a religious one. Many children were taken to the camps, and almost all died. The purpose of the Nazi camps was not the same as that of the Soviet gulags, Levi wrote in an appendix of If This Is a Man, though it is a "lugubrious comparison between two models of hell"

Levi himself, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, was not religiously observant. It was the Fascist race laws and the Nazi camps that made him feel Jewish. Levi writes in clear almost scientific >Auschwitz, showing no lasting hatred of the Germans. This has led some commentators to suggest that he had forgiven them, though Levi denied this.

Levi died on 11 April 1987, when he fell from the interior landing of his third-storey apartment in Turin to the ground floor below. Elie Wiesel said at the time that "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier".

The coroner interpreted Levi's death as suicide, and three of his biographers (Angier, Thomson and Anissimov) agree with this interpretation. In his later life Levi indicated he was suffering from depression: factors may have included responsibility for his elderly mother and mother-in-law, with whom he was living in the same apartment, and the traumatic effects of memory.

However, Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta has argued that the conventional assumption of Levi's death by "suicide" is not well justified by either factual or inferred evidence. Levi left no suicide note, and no other clear indication that he had thoughts of taking his own life. In Gambetta's view, documents and testimony indicate immediate and ongoing plans at the time of his death. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a close friend of Levi, commented that "If Levi wanted to kill himself he, a chemical engineer by profession, would have known better ways than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed." Also, Gambetta has pointed out that Levi had complained to his physician of dizziness in the days before his death, and concludes (from a visit to the apartment complex) that it is more plausible to assume Levi lost his balance and fell accidentally to his death.

Italy, 2012, Primo Levi

Italy, 2012.11.25, Torino, Primo Levi