Primo Levi

How do we triumph over those who would destroy us? Survive, remember and share our stories.

Today we note the birth date of Primo Levi (July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) novelist, memoirist, poet, and holocaust survivor.

Born in Turin, Italy, Levi earned a PhD in chemistry at the University of Turin. After joining the Italian anti-Fascist resistance, he was arrested by the Nazis in late 1943 and imprisoned at Auschwitz in early 1944 where he worked in a chemical laboratory.

After the war, he returned to Turin, managing a paint factory for nearly 30 years while publishing memoirs and fiction drawing primarily on his experience as a survivor of Auschwitz and his training as a chemist.

His best-known works include “If This Is a Man” (1947), published as “Survival in Auschwitz” in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and “The Periodic Table” (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.

Shema *

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

    Consider whether this is a man,
    Who labours in the mud
    Who knows no peace
    Who fights for a crust of bread
    Who dies at a yes or a no.
    Consider whether this is a woman,
    Without hair or name
    With no more strength to remember
    Eyes empty and womb cold
    As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

 --Primo Levi
[Translated by Ruth Feldman And Brian Swann]

* Shema Yisrael (שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל) (“Hear, O Israel”) are the first two words of a section of the Torah that is the centerpiece of the morning and evening prayer services, encapsulating the monotheistic essence of Judaism:

“Hear, O Israel: G‑d is our L‑rd, G‑d is one.”