One of Auschwitz’s few survivors, Levi returned home to Turin, Italy in 1945, where he soon met his future wife Lucia and began working as a chemist. The year that Levi spent in the concentration camp is described in Survival in Auschwitz. He was taken from Italy to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Levi and several of his friends fled to the Alps and formed a small anti-Fascist coalition, but they were arrested by the Fascist militia later that year, who turned them over to the SS. After the Fascist leader Mussolini was deposed by his own government in 1943, German forces occupied northern and central Italy, established Mussolini as a puppet governor, and increased the persecution of Jewish people.

He studied chemistry at Turin University, but the the 1938 Italian Racial Laws (which encouraged heavy discrimination against ethnic Jews) made it difficult for him to find a supervisor for his thesis as well as his first job. As a teenager, Levi joined Italy’s Fascist youth movement, as was expected of all young men. A small, shy child and the only Jew in his school, Levi was often bullied by his classmates, but he excelled academically. Primo Levi was born to well-educated Jewish parents in 1919.

Rules of survival summary