Primo Levi

Primo Levi was a Turin chemist and member of the Italian resistance who was arrested in 1943, deported to Auschwitz, and survived because his chemistry was useful in the rubber factory and because the camp was liberated as he lay in the infirmary with scarlet fever. If This Is a Man, written within a year of his return and refused by the major publishers, is the calmest and most exact account of the camps that exists, an examination of what they did to the human being rather than an accusation. The Periodic Table and The Drowned and the Saved followed. He fell to his death in his apartment building in 1987.