Primo Levi

Primo Levi, born in Turin in 1919, was an Italian chemist, writer, and one of the most important witnesses to the Holocaust. Arrested during the Second World War and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Levi survived and returned to Italy determined to record what he had experienced with clarity, restraint, and unwavering respect for truth.

His landmark memoir If This Is a Man, known in Italian as Se questo è un uomo, examined not only the brutality of the concentration camp but the struggle to preserve human dignity under conditions designed to destroy it. In The Truce, Levi recounted his long journey home after liberation and the difficult return from catastrophe to ordinary human life.

Levi never abandoned his scientific identity. In The Periodic Table, he brought chemistry, autobiography, history, humor, and reflection together in one of his most original works. Throughout his life, he wrote with precision against hatred, indifference, distortion, and forgetting, insisting that memory carries a responsibility to future generations.