His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories, each named after a chemical element which plays a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.

[12] In August 1932, following two years attendance at the Talmud Torah school in Turin to pick up the elements of doctrine and culture, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah.

[8] In July 1934, at the age of 14, he sat the exams for the Liceo Classico D'Azeglio, a lyceum (sixth form or senior high school) specializing in the classics, and was admitted that year.

It was one day before he was to write a final examination on Italy's participation in the Spanish Civil War, based on a quote from Thucydides: "We have the singular merit of being brave to the utmost degree."

As one of 80 candidates, he spent three months taking lectures, and in February, after passing his colloquio (oral examination), he was selected as one of 20 to move on to the full-time chemistry curriculum.

During the liberal period in Italy, as well as in the first decade of the Fascist regime, Jews held many public positions, and were prominent in literature, science and politics.

In July 1938, a group of prominent Italian scientists and intellectuals published the "Manifesto of Race", a mixture of racial and ideological antisemitic theories from ancient and modern sources.

Levi later wrote about that time in the chapter "Iron" in The Periodic Table: “To see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you with the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe [...] He stirred in me a new communion with earth and sky, in which my need for freedom, the fullness of my powers, and the hunger to understand things that had driven me to chemistry converged.”[21] In June 1940, as an ally of Germany, Italy declared war against Britain and France, and the first Allied air raids on Turin began two days later.

Because of the new racial laws and the increasing intensity of Fascist action, Levi had difficulty finding an advisor for his Ph.D dissertation, which was on the subject of the Walden inversion, a study of the asymmetry of the carbon atom.

Levi left the mine in June to work in Milan for the Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer Wander AG, on a project to extract an anti-diabetic from vegetable matter.

[23] In July 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed Mussolini and appointed a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which prepared to sign the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies.

Being pursued as Jews, many of whom had already been interned by the authorities, they moved up the hillside to Amay in the Col de Joux [it], a rebellious area highly suitable for guerrilla activities.

Levi's professional qualifications were useful to the Germans and, in mid-November 1944, he secured a position as an assistant in IG Farben's Buna Werke laboratory that was aiming to produce synthetic rubber.

On 18 January 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march to a site further from the front.

Because of the extremely limited train service, Levi stayed in the factory dormitory during the week, which gave him the opportunity to write undisturbed, and he started the first draft of If This Is a Man.

He and Salmoni made most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride for mirror makers,[33] delivering the unstable chemical by bicycle across the city.

Because one of Levi's primary reasons for writing the book was to get the German people to realise what had been done in their name, and to accept at least partial responsibility, that translation was perhaps the most significant to him.

Under the pen name of Damiano Malabaila, he published two volumes of science fiction short stories which explored ethical and philosophical questions.

He wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve, 1978) and Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975).

The Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979 and brought Levi a wider audience in Italy, though left-wing critics regretted that he did not describe the harsh working conditions on the assembly lines at Fiat.

It traces the fortunes of a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II as they seek to survive and continue their fight against the occupier.

In Israel, a country formed partly by Jewish survivors who lived through horrors similar to those Levi described, many of his works were not translated and published until after his death.

At the time of his death in April 1987, Levi was working on another selection of essays called The Double Bond, which took the form of letters to "La Signorina".

In March 2007, Harper's Magazine published an English translation of Levi's story "Knall", about a fictitious weapon that is fatal at close range but harmless more than a meter away.

[47] The Nobel laureate and fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, at the time, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.

[53] Philip Roth eulogized him as someone who "set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose".

[51] Martin Amis has credited Levi's work with assisting him in writing his own novel, The Zone of Interest, calling him "the visionary of the Holocaust, its presiding spirit and the most perceptive of all writers on this subject.

"[57] Levi vigorously repudiated historical revisionist attitudes in German historiography that emerged in the Historikerstreit, led by the works of people like Andreas Hillgruber and Ernst Nolte, who drew parallels between Nazism and Stalinism.

[80][81][82] His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews were a horror unique in history because the goal was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior.

Levi, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, had not been religiously observant before World War II, but the Italian racial laws and the Nazi camps impressed his identity as a Jew upon him.