Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish man of many talents – chemist by trade, writer, Holocaust survivor – was born to a liberal family in Turin, Italy in 1919. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi’s first published piece, written just two years after the conclusion of World War II. Rather than focusing on Levi’s early life and the beginning of his career as a chemist, the memoir opens with Levi’s capture by the Fascists and subsequent deportation to a detention camp. After a period of time spent at the Italian detention camp, Levi and his fellow prisoners are transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest of the many camps spread throughout Europe. Through Levi’s chilling and brutally honest style of writing, influenced by his scientific background, Survival in Auschwitz illustrates the systematic dehumanization of these men in the eyes of the Nazis, a notion which begins to pervade the minds of the prisoners themselves.
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Many of his early primary and grade-school teachers noted his remarkable academic potential – one of his Italian teachers even commented that she expected a plaque reading “Primo Levi studied here” to be hung up in her classroom some day in the future. Outside of school, Levi was an avid reader – he read Darwin’s famous On the Origin of Species by age 13, and the entire Mondadori popular science series by age 16. His interest in chemistry primarily stemmed from the realization that chemistry, like most other science and mathematics-based fields, was devoid of ideology. The subject is not easily distorted due to its foundations in experimentation, reason, and proof – there is always a clear right and a wrong answer. In essence, chemistry provided Levi with the order and the autonomy that Fascism and the chaos of his surroundings threatened to take away from
Many of his early primary and grade-school teachers noted his remarkable academic potential – one of his Italian teachers even commented that she expected a plaque reading “Primo Levi studied here” to be hung up in her classroom some day in the future. Outside of school, Levi was an avid reader – he read Darwin’s famous On the Origin of Species by age 13, and the entire Mondadori popular science series by age 16. His interest in chemistry primarily stemmed from the realization that chemistry, like most other science and mathematics-based fields, was devoid of ideology. The subject is not easily distorted due to its foundations in experimentation, reason, and proof – there is always a clear right and a wrong answer. In essence, chemistry provided Levi with the order and the autonomy that Fascism and the chaos of his surroundings threatened to take away from