chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man
, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp
in Nazi
-occupied Poland. He was an atheist.
Levi was born in Turin
at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz
and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based.
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.
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.
In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: "to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away."