Creator Bio
Primo Levi
1919–1987
A chemist and a writer of memoirs, short stories, poems, essays, and novels, Primo Levi was an Italian-born Holocaust survivor and one of the foremost Italian writers of the aftermath of World War II. He studied chemistry at the University of Turin, graduating in 1941. Subsequently he wrote for the resistance magazine Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom) and joined a group of Italian partisans. In 1943, he was captured and deported to Auschwitz. He was liberated in 1945 by the Soviets. Levi won the first annual Premio Campiello Literary Award in 1963 and the Premio Viareggio in 1982. He died in Turin.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz)
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering…
Primary Source
Shema
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust…
Primary Source
The Periodic Table
There was a mysterious jar on one of the shelves. It contained about twenty gray, hard, colorless, tasteless little rods and did not have a label. This was very strange, because it was a German…