Finally, from todays Writers Almanac Today is the birthday of Jewish-Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (1919) , born in Turin, Italy. He graduated from the University of Turin in 1941, and two years later he went to northern Italy intending to join the resistance against the Nazis. He was captured instead, and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he worked as slave labor in a rubber factory until Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. He wrote two memoirs of his wartime experiences: If This is a Man (1947) and The Truce (1963). He also wrote novels, stories, and poems, as well as several essays, and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element. He died in 1987 after a fall, or a jump, from his third-floor balcony in Turin. Fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said at the time, Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier. The coroner ruled his death a suicide, and its true that he had been suffering from depression. Others argued that he had complained of dizziness a few days earlier, and that, as a chemist, he would have chosen a more foolproof method with less risk of paralysis, had suicide been his intent. He said, 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.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 12:05:09 +0000
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