Italian-Jew writer and chemist, who gained first fame with his autobiographical story SE QUESTO UN UOMO (If This is a Man, 1947) of survival in Nazi concentration camps. Levi devoted the last fourty years of his life to attempts to deal with thefact that he survived Auschwitz. Levi published also poetry, science fiction, essays, and short stories. Levi was born in Turin. Just before the Fascist racial law of 1938 forbade Jews access to academic status, Levi started hischemistry studies at the University of Turin and graduated in 1941. Levi wrote also for the resistance magazine Giustizia eLibert. When he tried to contact a partisan group he was captured in December 1943, and interned in a transit camp inFssoli. Two months later he was deported to the camp ofMoniwitz-Auschwitz. From the transport of 650 people, fifteen menand nine woman survived. Liberated by the Soviets in January 1945 Levi returned in Turin, after an eight-month odyssey. Levitook up his work as a chemist, living in a stately old building that his family had occupied for three generations. In 1961 Levibecame the general manager of a factory producing paints. He retired in 1977 to become a full-time writer. His prison recollections Levi wrote in the form of memoir, Se questo un uomo. It was reprinted in an enlarged edition tenyears later. The book sold over half a million copies in Italy, was translated into eight languages and adapted for the theater andradio. It documented how the camp deprived each individual of his and her identity and dignity, and brought about annihilationof the internees. Levi's alert moral consciousness blocked any hate for the oppressors, in spite of the brutality to which he wassubjected. LA TREGUA (1963) was its sequel, and portrayed the wanderings that Levi and his companions followed atRussian directive through a devasted eastern Europe. Among Levi's other works is IL SISTEMA PERIODICO (The Periodic Table, 1975). The work uses the Russia...
