Primo Levi
Primo Levi (1919-1987) - pronounced PREE-mo LAY-vee, IPA: /'priːmo 'levi/ - was an Italian writer, best known for Se questo è¨ un uomo (If This Is A Man, 1947), an account of his experiences as a prisoner in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Primo Levi was born to Jewish middle-class parents in the city of Turin in northwest Italy. He went to school in Turin and studied chemistry at Turin University, graduating in 1941. By this time the anti-semitic racial legislation introduced by Mussolini in 1938 made it difficult for Jews to find employment, but by adopting a false identity Levi succeeded in working as an industrial chemist until September 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies and the Germans established Mussolini as the head of a puppet regime - the Repubblica di Salò - in northern Italy. Levi joined a group of partisans from the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e libertà (Justice and Liberty), but was soon arrested and eventually, in February 1944, deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. After some months Levi, as a chemist, was selected to work indoors in the laboratory of a synthetic rubber factory adjacent to the camp (he boasted that this group of victims of Nazi slave labour policy didn't produce a single kilogram of usable synthetic rubber), Partly because he was able as a privileged skilled worker to mitigate the terrible conditions of life in Auschwitz, he managed to survive until the arrival of the Russian army in January 1945. Levi's journey back to Italy took nine months as he was forced to travel by a roundabout route through Poland, Russia, Rumania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. On his return he resumed his former profession, and from 1948 he worked as an industrial chemist in a paint factory in Turin, retiring in 1977 in order to devote all his time to writing. Levi had been subject to periods of depression throughout his adult life, and his death in 1987, when he fell from the third-floor landing of the building in which he lived, is generally believed to have been a suicide, though some have argued that it was an accident.
The eleven months Levi spent in Auschwitz are the subject of his most famous book Se questo è un uomo (If This Is A Man, 1947), which gives a lucid and compassionate account of life in the camp. Levi's nine-month journey from Auschwitz back to Italy is recounted in another of his books La tregua (The Truce, 1963). Apart from these, his two best-known books, Levi published a collection of poems, L'osteria di Brema (The Bremen Beer Hall, 1975), several collections of essays or short stories (such as La chiave a stella (The Wrench, 1978)), and other books which are largely autobiographical in character (such as Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975)). In one of his last books, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1985) he returns to the period of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and tries to explain why some of the prisoners survived and others died. ]
