Primo Levi

Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor, and writer (1919–1987)

AI overview

Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who survived the Holocaust and later became one of the most important witnesses to that atrocity through his writing, most notably his memoir "Survival in Auschwitz." His accounts of his experiences as a prisoner and his reflections on the Holocaust remain widely read and studied because of their clarity, humanity, and insight into one of history's greatest tragedies.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 31 July 1919
Died: 11 April 1987
Works: 84

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: Torino
Active from: 1919-07-31
Active to: 1987-04-11

Discogs

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 38
Total plays: 265

via Last.fm · Primo Levi

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,320x
Metagenomic biomarker discovery and explanation
· 2011 · cited 13,750x
Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017
· 2018 · cited 10,795x
Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 7,708x
The Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia enables predictive modelling of anticancer drug sensitivity
· 2012 · cited 7,151x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
“We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”
“I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.”
“And we must remember that [Hitler and Mussolini's] faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
“A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.”
“I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Wikidata facts

Image: Primo Levi.jpg

Show 9 more facts

date of birth: 1919-07-31
date of death: 1987-04-11
Commons category: Primo Levi
name in native language: Primo Levi
start of work period: 1947-00-00
end of work period: 1987-04-11
pseudonym: Damiano Malabaila
birth name: Primo Michele Levi
P12674: Anita

Sources (13)

via Wikidata · CC0

Works in European collections

1 object attributed to Primo Levi, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana

Untitled

~39 min read

Article

Primo Michele Levi ( Italian: [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. 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 (Se questo è un uomo, 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 which plays a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.

Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-storey apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although that has been disputed by some of his friends and associates and attributed to an accident.