Primo Levi
"To forget the pass is to condemn oneself, to relive it."
Primo Levi
Biography
His life
Primo Levi was born in Turin on January 31, 1919 in a Jewish family but not very observant. In his opinion, Primo Levi would only become aware of it with the appearance of the mentalit antis mite in Italy, around 1938. After taking chemistry courses, he left to settle in Milan. In 1943, he joined the Giustizia e Liberta (an anti-fascist organization installed in the Italian Alps) and was arrested on 13 December of the same year, the age of 24, by the fascist militia. He is interned at the Carpi-Fossoli camp, far from the Austrian front.
In February 1944, the camp, which had been kept until then by an Italian administration, passed into German hands: it was transferred to Auschwitz. It was liberated on January 27, 1945, the date of the camp’s liberation by the soldiers. Once the war is over, he will push Lucia Morpugo, have two children and run a chemical company. During the last months of his life, Primo Levi was deeply affected by the rise of visibility and intelligence. Deeply in love, on April 11, 1987, he threw himself into the stairwell of his building. On his grave are inscribed his name and 174,517, his number: Auschwitz.
Primo Levi: the man
The ports are sometimes ashamed of what happened to them: Levi, for his part, uses any situation to mock what happened to him. It is a form of being a sister: a fight against forgetting in everyday life; her language, her person, are proofs that support what she has written. Ferdinando Camon wrote thus Primo Levi in the foreword of his collection of conversations:
"Levi did not shout, did not insult, did not accuse, because he did not want to scream, he wanted much more: to make him scream. He denied that his own action changed from our action, all of them. His reasoning focused on the long hard e. His mod ration, his gentleness, his smile -which had something shy, almost childish- were r alit his weapons".
Primo Levi: the Crivain
His first book, If it’s a man, published in 1947, is a kind of diary of his life and one of the first times he lived at Auschwitz. He will write other works such as The Tr ve in 1963 (under the pseudonym of Damiano Malabaila), as well as fictions inspired by his experience as a chemist such as Les Naufrag s and Les Rescap s in 1986, which will be his last book, the darkest of all.