Primo Levi

Levi took a chemistry degree in 1941 with a note on his diploma recording that he was of the Jewish race, joined a partisan band in the Alps, was captured within weeks, and was deported to Auschwitz in February 1944 with six hundred and fifty others, of whom about twenty came back. He survived, he always said, by luck and by chemistry: a laboratory job in the synthetic rubber plant kept him out of the winter, and scarlet fever left him in the infirmary when the camp was evacuated on foot.

If This Is a Man, written in the year after his return, is deliberately unemotional — the tone of a laboratory report — and was turned down by the major publishers before appearing in a print run of two and a half thousand. He worked as an industrial chemist for thirty years and wrote in the evenings. The Periodic Table takes twenty-one elements as chapters of a life. The Drowned and the Saved, his last book, is about the grey zone and about how memory softens, and it argues that the ordinary people who ran the camps are the point, not the monsters. He died at sixty-seven in a fall down the stairwell of his building in Turin, where he had lived nearly all his life.