Primo Levi

Italian-Jewish chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz and wrote the most analytically precise accounts of the Holocaust — using a scientist's precision to document the destruction of moral categories.

If This Is a Man: a moral anatomy of Auschwitz — systematic, precise, unillusioned. The gray zone: the concentration camp system deliberately created structures that implicated prisoners in their own oppression — simple moral categories of perpetrators and victims do not hold. The Periodic Table: chemistry as autobiography — each element structures a chapter of his life. The Drowned and the Saved: his last major work, a return to the gray zone question.