Location: Cimitero Monumentale di Torino, Turin, Piemonte, Italy
Cause of death: Suicide - fall
Photo taken by: DeadGoodBooks
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Italian chemist and author of memoirs, poems, and novels. In 1941 he graduated from the University of Turin with a degree in chemistry. He joined the Italian anti-Fascist resistance in 1943 but was arrested and sent to the Nazi internment camp for Jews near Modena. In 1944 he was transferred to Auschwitz where he spent eleven months before the camp was liberated.
When he returned to Turin he became an industrial chemist. He wrote about his experiences in his classic memoirs If This Is a Man and The Truce. Levi also wrote the memoirs Moments of Reprieve (dealing with the characters he witnessed during imprisonment) and The Periodic Table (a collection of short pieces from his life related to chemical elements). His novel, If Not Now, When?, tells the story of Jewish partisans in World War Two, and it made him known internationally. In 1977 gave up his career as a chemist to write full time. In his last work, The Drowned and the Saved, he stated that though he did not hate the German people for what had happened, he had not forgiven them.
Levi died after falling from the landing of his 3rd floor apartment. Although friends argued that the fall was accidental the coroner gave a verdict of suicide. His gravestone has the number 174517 carved on it – it was his prisoner number at Auschwitz.
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