July 31: Primo Levi

Primo Levi was born in Turin on this date in 1919. He trained and worked as a chemist before joining an Italian partisan group in 1943. When the group was arrested, Levi expected to be shot, but saved his life by confessing to being Jewish - which landed him in an internment camp and then, by February, 1944, in Auschwitz. He spent eleven months there. In 1947, his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man, was published, launching years of literary output that included a novel and books of short stories, poems, and essays, including The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, and If Not Now When? Levi was a major literary figure in Italy and his works were translated into many languages, but he was not published in Israel until after his death, possibly as a suicide, in 1987.

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.” -Primo Levi