Primo Michele Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, 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.
Levi, c.1950s
IG Farben factory in Monowitz (near Auschwitz) 1941 50°02′10″N 19°16′32″E / 50.036094°N 19.275534°E / 50.036094; 19.275534 (Site of Buna Werke plant approximately 10km or 6.2 miles from Auschwitz)
Rudolf Höss immediately before being hanged
If This Is a Man is a memoir by Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi, first published in 1947. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Monowitz) from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.
Original first edition cover