Primo Levi's chemistry degree was stamped with the words of Jewish race
Primo Levi was a Turin chemist who survived eleven months in Auschwitz and turned the experience into If This Is a Man. Decades later he wrote The Periodic Table, stories each named after an element, which the Royal Institution called the best science book ever written.
Levi was born in 1919 into a liberal Jewish family in Turin whose ancestors had left Spain after the expulsion of 1492, and he lived almost his whole life in the apartment where he was born. A shy, frail, brilliant boy, he entered secondary school a year early. At his classical lyceum, whose anti-Fascist teachers included Norberto Bobbio and Cesare Pavese, a book by the English scientist William Henry Bragg persuaded him to become a chemist.
Italy's Racial Laws of October 1938 stripped Jews of civil rights, jobs and property and barred new Jewish students from universities. Having enrolled a year ahead of schedule, Levi was allowed to finish. Finding a supervisor was hard, but he graduated in 1941 with top marks, his certificate carrying the remark of Jewish race. With no regular job open to him, he worked under a false name extracting nickel from mine waste, only later realising it might help the German war machine, then on a doomed project for a Swiss drug firm in Milan.
After Germany occupied northern Italy in September 1943, Levi joined a small, untrained partisan band in the Alpine foothills. Fascist militia arrested the group on 13 December. Fearing execution as a partisan, he admitted being Jewish and was sent to the Fossoli camp near Modena. On 21 February 1944 he was deported to Monowitz, part of the Auschwitz complex, as prisoner 174517. He remained until the Red Army liberated the camp on 27 January 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews on his transport, he was one of only twenty to leave the camps alive.
If This Is a Man appeared in 1947, published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz. In The Periodic Table he recalled his friend Sandro Delmastro, who taught him mountain hiking in 1939 and made him forget, for a while, the nightmare gathering over Europe. Levi died in 1987 after a fall from a third-floor landing; it was officially ruled suicide, though some friends believed it was an accident.
Source: Primo Levi
