Primo Levi

Born Primo Michele Levi on July 31, 1919, in Turin, Italy, into an educated, secular Jewish family of Piedmontese origins, Levi grew up in the same apartment building where he would spend most of his life. He studied chemistry at the University of Turin, graduating with honors in 1941 despite the racial laws enacted by Mussolini's fascist government, which stamped his diploma with the words "of the Jewish race." In September 1943, after Italy's armistice with the Allies and the subsequent German occupation, Levi joined a partisan band in the mountains of the Val d'Aosta. He was captured in December and, upon declaring himself Jewish, was sent to the transit camp at Fossoli and then deported to Auschwitz in February 1944. Of the 650 Italian Jews on his transport, only twenty survived. Levi endured eleven months in the Buna-Monowitz labor camp, saved partly by his usefulness as a chemist. If This Is a Man (1947), his account of that year, was rejected by major publishers before appearing in a small edition of 2,500 copies; it would later be recognized as one of the essential works of Holocaust testimony. The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of autobiographical stories each named for a chemical element, was called the best science book ever written by the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The Drowned and the Saved (1986), his final meditation on the moral ambiguities of survival, appeared just a year before his death. On April 11, 1987, Levi fell from the third-floor landing of his Turin apartment building. His death was ruled a suicide, though some who knew him have disputed this.

In Auschwitz, assigned to fetch the day's soup with a young prisoner named Jean, Levi used the walk to teach him Italian through Dante, straining to reconstruct the canto of Ulysses from a memory he could not fully trust. Reciting poetry over the soup pot, he felt entirely himself again.