Okay, I want to start today with a bit of a showdown,
a literary heavyweight fight, if you will. But
it happened in a place you might not expect.
A showdown? I'm intrigued. Who's fighting? Where
are we? Picture this. It's 2006. We are at the
Royal Institution in London. And, you know, for
context, this is Hallowood Ground for Science.
This is where Faraday did his lectures. Right.
This is the heart of the British scientific establishment.
Exactly. And they decide to settle this massive
debate. What is the single best science book
ever written? The best science book ever. That
is a... That's an incredibly heavy title to hand
out. You're talking about a canon that goes back
centuries. Right. And look at the contenders
in the ring. You had the absolute heavy hitters.
You've got Charles Darwin with The Origin of
Species, which basically redefined how we see
life on Earth. The foundational text of modern
biology. You've got Watson describing the double
helix. You have the foundational texts of physics.
All the big names are there. And the winner.
The book that beat Darwin. I think I see where
you're going with this one. It wasn't a biology
textbook. It wasn't a treatise on quantum physics.
It was a collection of autobiographical stories
by an Italian paint factory manager named Primo
Levi. The periodic table. Exactly. The periodic
table. And that right there is the hook, isn't
it? Because when most people hear the name Primo
Levi, they don't think science writer. No, not
at all. They think Holocaust survivor. they think
of the witness and that is the tragedy and the
triumph of levi's life all wrapped up in one
single knot he is without a doubt one of the
most lucid profound witnesses to the holocaust
But the reason his testimony is so unique, the
reason it cuts so much deeper than almost anyone
else's, is precisely because he was a scientist.
That's the premise we are unpacking today. We
aren't just looking at a survivor memoir. We
are looking at a chemist who was dropped into
the ultimate laboratory of hell Auschwitz and
managed to survive and then, you know, analyze
it. Yes, analyze it. That's the key. He didn't
use mysticism. He didn't use political rage.
He used the cool observational eye of a man used
to study molecular structures. It's a fascinating
lens. He treated the concentration camp like
a massive, terrifying experiment. He observed
the properties of the elements around him, the
victims, the oppressors, the hunger, the cold,
just as he would observe a reaction in a beaker.
And so that's our mission for this deep dive,
to understand how a rational mind processes irrational
evil. Exactly. We're going to map out his life
from his early days in Turin, how chemistry became
his anchor against fascism, to his 11 months
in Auschwitz. We need to look at the specific,
tangible factors that allowed him to survive.
When almost everyone else from his transport
didn't. Right. Then there's his literary career,
how he balanced running a paint factory with
becoming this world -renowned author. And finally,
we have to get into his controversial death,
the debate between suicide and accident, which,
as we'll see, still divides historians and biographers.
this day and we have a massive stack of source
material to get through we're pulling from his
biographies his memoirs like if this is a man
and the truce the history of the italian resistance
and the philosophical debates he sparked later
in life so let's start at the beginning before
the camp before the war who was primo levi before
the world broke Well, to understand Levi, you
have to look at the geography of his life. It's
actually quite unusual. He was born in 1919 in
Turin, Italy. And specifically, he was born in
an apartment at Corso Riamberto 75. And when
you say he lived there, you mean he really lived
there? I mean, he really lived there. He was
born in that apartment in that very building.
And aside from the year in Auschwitz and a brief
period of work in Milan. He lived in that same
apartment until the day he died. That's incredible.
He was incredibly rooted. That's rare, especially
for a 20th century European Jew. Usually that
story involves displacement, exile, moving from
country to country. But he was a Turin boy through
and through. Completely. A creature of habit
and a creature of that specific city. And as
a child, the sources describe him as delicate.
He was thin, shy, prone to chest infections.
He considered himself... Ugly. So not an athlete.
No, definitely not the captain of the football
team. He was the kid in the corner reading books.
Academically brilliant, but socially very withdrawn.
Tell me about the family dynamic. What kind of
house produces a primo Levi? It was a liberal
Jewish household, but very, very Italian. His
father, Cesar, was an interesting character.
He was an autodidact, a self -taught man who
worked for a manufacturing firm. He loved books,
had a sharp wit, but was also a bit of a philanderer.
Levi had a somewhat distant relationship with
him. And his mother. His mother, Rina, was the
steel in the family. She was highly educated,
played the piano, spoke fluent French. She was
the one who really ran the household. Now, I
think it's important we clarify what Jewish meant
to them. at this point in history, right? Because
later on, his identity becomes this matter of
life and death. But growing up, it was secondary,
maybe even tertiary. They were Italians first.
Levi was secular. He had a bar mitzvah, sure.
But he later admitted he just memorized the Hebrew
phonetically without really knowing what it meant.
It was just a ritual you did. Exactly. It was
a cultural thing. He was just a smart, shy Italian
kid. In fact, like all Italian schoolboys in
the 1930s, he was part of the avant -gardiste.
The young fascists. The young fascists. It wasn't
a choice. It was the law. You had to join. He
wore the black shirt uniform. He even joined
the ski division to avoid rifle drills because
he hated the idea of marching. He wasn't political
yet. He was just trying to get by. trying to
blend in. But then in high school, he finds his
thing, his anchor. He discovers his superpower,
chemistry. Chemistry. He reads a book by Sir
William Bragg called Concerning the Nature of
Things. And something just clicks in his brain.
You have to imagine the environment he's living
in. Fascism is all about rhetoric, emotion, the
glory of Rome, the spirit of the nation. It's
all words. And a lot of it is just, you know,
nonsense. It's fluid. It changes based on what
the leader says today. It's not based in reality.
Precisely. But chemistry. Chemistry is matter.
He realizes that the world isn't just a messy,
chaotic place of human emotions and fascist lies.
It's made of atoms. It follows laws. If you mix
an acid and a base, they react. They don't care
if you're Jewish or Catholic or fascist. It's
verifiable. That is the key word. Verifiable.
Levi found a moral anchor in the periodic table.
While the radio was pumping out propaganda lies
about national destiny, he was in the lab finding
truth. He later wrote that the periodic table
was his Bible. It was the one place where things
made sense. But then the lie comes for him. The
irrational world crashes into his rational one.
1938, the racial laws. The turning point. Up
until 1938, Italy's fascism hadn't been explicitly
anti -Semitic in the same way Germany's was.
I mean, it wasn't good, but it wasn't genocidal.
Jews held public office, right? There were generals,
professors. Exactly. It was a very integrated
community. Then Hitler's influence grows. Mussolini
wants to align closer with Germany, and he issues
the Manifesto of Race. And overnight. Levi's
world just shrinks. Drastically. It was a civil
death before the physical death came later. Jews
lose their civil rights. Jewish books are banned.
You can't publish in magazines. You can't own
a radio in some cases. And critically for Levi,
Jewish students are barred from entering university.
But he was already in, wasn't he? There was a
loophole. He had matriculated a year early because
he was so bright. That loophole allowed him to
stay and finish his degree, but it was a lonely
existence. I can imagine. He's in the chemistry
labs, but the atmosphere has changed. People
are distant. Former friends literally cross the
street to avoid him. He struggles to find a professor
willing to be his thesis advisor because, while
he's Jewish, it's politically sensitive to help
him now. But he does find one. A physics professor,
actually. And he graduates. He graduates with
full marks. Summa cum laude. But there's a sting
in the tail, a final bureaucratic cruelty. His
degree certificate has a stamp on it. What does
it say? Of Jewish race. It was a mark of shame,
but it was also a professional death sentence.
The laws meant he couldn't be hired by state
institutions or major Aryan companies. So here
is this brilliant young chemist, 1941, degree
in hand, top of his class, and he is legally
unemployable. So what does he do? He can't just
sit at Corso Riomberto and wait for the world
to end. He goes underground, professionally speaking,
and this leads to one of the most ironic chapters
of his life. He takes a clandestine job at an
asbestos mine in San Vittore. A mine? Yeah. He
has to work under a false name because he's not
legally allowed to be there. A chemist and a
mine. What was he doing exactly? They were trying
to extract nickel from the mine, spoil the waste
rock. It was a complex chemical puzzle. How do
you get this tiny amount of valuable metal out
of this mountain of trash? And Levi loved the
challenge. It was pure problem solving. But here
is the massive irony. Yeah. Later, he realizes
why the mine wanted that nickel so badly. He
did. Nickel is essential for making armor plating
and armaments. So he was secretly, unknowingly
producing material to help the German war effort.
Wow. The complexity of that. He's a Jewish man
hiding from the fascists, working under a fake
name while helping them build tanks. It highlights
the gray zone we will talk about later. You are
never fully outside the system, even when you
think you are. After the mine, he moves to Milan
to work for a Swiss firm, Wander AG. They were
trying to extract an anti -diabetic agent from
vegetable matter. Okay, that sounds a bit more
humanitarian than tank armor. In theory. But
the project was a total failure. Scientifically,
it was impossible. Levi realized pretty quickly
that the chemistry didn't work. But he also realized
that nobody at the company wanted to admit it.
Why not? Because as long as the project continued,
they all had jobs, and more importantly, they
didn't have to go to the front lines. It was
a futile project that kept him safe. He spent
his time in the lab reading philosophy and writing
poetry in the margins of his lab notes. So he's
living this double life, chemist by day, non
-person by law. But then 1943 hits, Mussolini
falls, the Germans invade Norzern, Italy, and
Levi decides he can't just hide in a lab anymore.
This is the moment the delicate, shy intellectual
decides to pick up a gun. He moves into the hills
of the Aosta Valley with his mother and sister
to hide. He meets up with other dissidents and
joins a partisan group. The group was called
Justice and Liberty. I have to pause here. Primo
Levi. The guy who considered himself physically
weak, the bookworm who skipped rifle drills to
go skiing, is now a guerrilla fighter in the
Alps. Fighter might be a generous term. Levi
himself admitted later that they were the most
disarmed partisans in Piedmont. They had no idea
what they were doing. None. They were totally
untrained. They were a ragtag group of intellectuals,
students, and refugees. They had one pistol between
them that didn't work properly. They were playing
at soldiers. And the reality caught up with them
very, very fast. It didn't last long. Not at
all. December 1943. The fascist militia Italians,
loyal to the puppet government set up by the
Nazis, they raid their hideout. Levi is captured.
And this brings us to a terrifying calculation.
A moment of game theory where the stakes are
his life. Walk us through the choice he had to
make. This is a critical moment. He's being interrogated.
He has two secrets. One, he is a partisan. Two,
he is a Jew. The interrogator asks who he is.
Levi processes the logic in a split second. If
he confesses to being a partisan, that is a political
crime. Partisans are being shot against the wall
immediately as traitors. Okay, so confessing
to being a partisan equals immediate execution.
Right. But if he confesses to being a Jew, well,
in Italy in late 1943, the final solution wasn't
fully understood yet by the general population.
The Italians knew Jews were being sent to internment
camps. Yes, like... Fossily. Which was just a
holding camp near Medina. Right. There were no
gas chambers there. It was bad, but it wasn't
Auschwitz. So in that moment, it seemed like
the safer option. So he gambles. He says, I am
a Jew. He chooses the identity he thought would
save his life. He is sent to Fossily. And for
a brief moment, he was right. Fossily wasn't
terrible. They could receive mail. They had food.
Families were kept together. But he had made
a miscalculation about the timeline. Because
the Germans were taking over everything. Exactly.
The Germans took direct control of the Italian
camp system. And in February 1944, the order
came down. The camp was to be emptied. Levi and
all the other Jewish prisoners were put on a
transport. This is the number that always staggers
me, the transport statistics. It really brings
home the scale of the loss. It is brutal math.
There were 650 Italian Jews on that train, 12
cattle trucks crammed in like livestock, no water,
barely any air. The Johnny took days. Unimaginable.
When that train arrived at its destination, the
SS did their selection on the platform. Old men,
women, children, the sick sent to the gas chambers
immediately. The fit men entered the camp. Of
those 650 people who left Italy, only 20 would
ever return. Primo Levi was one of the 20. And
the destination, of course, was Auschwitz. But
not the main camp, not Birkenau, which is what
we usually think. No. Specifically, he was sent
to Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III or Buna
Monowitz. We usually hear about Birkenau, the
extermination center. What was Monowitz? Monowitz
was a laborer. The same company that made Zyklon
B. The very same. They were trying to produce
synthetic rubber buna because Germany was cut
off from natural rubber supplies during the war.
It was a chaotic, freezing, muddy construction
site where slaves were literally worked to death.
What was the life expectancy there? For a new
entrant. Three to four months. That was the calculation.
You were a consumable resource, you were a unit
of labor, and when you broke, they replaced you.
Levi survived 11 months. Okay, this is the core
of our deep dive. How? How did the delicate chemist
beat those odds? The outline mentions specific
factors, and I want to unpack them. It wasn't
just luck, was it? Though I'm sure that was a
huge part of it. Levi would be the first to tell
you that luck was 90 % of it. He was obsessed
with this idea. If you got an infected blister,
you died. If a guard didn't like your face, you
died. If you were standing in the wrong line
at the wrong time, you died. But within that
slim margin where personal agency existed, Levi
had tools that others didn't. He analyzed his
own survival like a scientist. Let's break these
down. Huge. Perhaps the most critical early factor.
Most of the Italian Jews who arrived in Auschwitz
were completely lost. They were confused, terrified,
and spoke only Italian. The orders were screamed
in German. Fast barking orders. Leaks. Ricks.
Exactly. Left, right, cap off, soup bowl out.
If you didn't understand, you were beaten, sometimes
beaten to death for not complying quickly enough.
And Levi knew German. He knew scientific German.
In university, he had to read heavy technical
German chemistry textbooks because that's where
the best science was happening at the time. It
wasn't conversational German. He didn't know
the slang or the swear words, but he understood
the structure. He could decipher what was being
shouted. He could anticipate commands. That gave
him a split -second advantage. A life -saving
advantage. And crucially, he realized the importance
of language immediately. He didn't just rely
on what he knew. He found another prisoner, a
criminal prisoner, not a Jew, and paid him a
ration of bread to give him private German lessons.
He traded food, which was the most valuable thing
in the universe in that place, for information.
Because he understood that information was survival.
If you understand the rules of the game, you
can navigate the maze. If you don't, you just
hit a dead end, and that dead end is death. Okay,
that makes sense. So factor number two, the chemistry
exam. This sounds like something out of a hallucination.
A university exam in a death camp. It is one
of the most surreal scenes in his memoir, If
This Is a Man. IG Farben, for all its brutality,
needed actual chemists for the Buna rubber production.
They were running out of German experts due to
the war. So in this twisted bureaucratic logic,
they decided to screen the slave labor force
for scientific talent. And Levi applies. He applies.
He is marched into a clean, warm office to face
a German engineer, a man named Dr. Panwitz. Paint
the scene for us. The contrast must have been
insane. Imagine it. Levi is starving. He's filthy,
covered in lice, wearing striped rags. His head
is shaved. He's standing in these awful wooden
clogs. And across the desk is Dr. Panowitz. Clean
suit, well -fed, manicured hands, probably smelling
of soap. And Panowitz looks at Levi not as a
human, but as a specimen. Levi described the
look as being across the glass window of an aquarium.
Just complete dehumanization. And he has to take
a test, a doctoral -level oral exam on organic
chemistry. Penwitz asks him about polymerization,
about specific reactions. Levi, despite the hunger
fogging his brain, snaps into focus. The chemistry
is still there. He answers the questions. He
passes. And that changes everything for him.
It takes a while to kick in, but eventually,
in November of 1944, just as the harsh Polish
winter is setting in, he gets moved to the laboratory
commando. This meant he worked indoors. That's
the difference between life and death right there.
I mean, that's everything. It is. The temperature
outside was minus 10, minus 20 degrees Celsius.
Working construction in that kills you in weeks.
Our body just burns itself up trying to stay
warm. Working in a heated lab allowed his body
to conserve precious calories. Plus, the lab
itself was a resource. An incredible resource.
He could steal things. Like what? There's a famous
chapter in the periodic table called cerium.
He found these little rods of iron cerium, alloy
ferrocerium. They're the things in cigarette
lighters that make the spark. He stole them,
smuggled them back to the barracks, ground them
down into small flints, and traded them on the
camp's black market for bread. He literally turned
chemistry into calories. He turned matter into
life. It's the ultimate proof of his worldview.
His knowledge of the elements saved his life
in the most direct way possible. So, language
and chemistry. Those are his skills. But then
there's the third factor, and this one isn't
about skill. It's about humanity. Lorenzo Peron.
Lorenzo. In a place designed to strip everyone
of their humanity, Lorenzo was a miracle. He
wasn't a Jewish prisoner. He was an Italian civilian,
a bricklayer from a town near Turin, who had
been brought there as a forced laborer but had
slightly better privileges. He lived in a different
barracks, had better food. And he meets Levi.
He hears Levi and his friend Alberto speaking
Italian on a construction site. And for six months,
every single day, Lorenzo brings Levi a hidden
ration of soup and a slice of bread and a misplaced
pot. And he didn't ask for anything in return?
Nothing. In the camp economy, everything was
a transaction. I give you a spoon, you give me
your bread ration for tomorrow. I give you this
shirt, you give me soup. Lorenzo refused to take
anything. He risked his life every day smuggling
that soup. He even offered to send a postcard
to Levi's mother in Italy to let her know he
was alive. Why did he do it? Levi thought about
this for the rest of his life. He said that Lorenzo
saved him not just because of the calories, though
the extra soup probably kept him from starving,
but because he reminded Levi that a world outside
of the camp still existed. A world with normal
human decency. Yes, that there were still people
who were pure and whole and not corrupt. Levi
wrote that thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to
forget that I myself was a man. He actually named
his children after him later, right? He did.
His daughter, Lisa Lorenzo, and his son, Renzo.
It was a lifelong tribute to the man who kept
his soul alive. Lorenzo, sadly, died shortly
after the war, broken by alcoholism and the trauma
of what he saw. But Levi carried his name forward.
So we have language, chemistry, Lorenzo. And
finally, the fourth factor, the final brutal
stroke of luck. Which sounds completely counterintuitive.
Usually if you got sick in Auschwitz, you went
straight to the gas chamber? Correct. If you
were useless, you were disposed of. But the timing
here is everything. It is January 1945. The Russians
are coming. You can hear the sound of their artillery
getting closer and closer. And just then, Levi
falls ill with scarlet fever. He is admitted
to the Kabe, which was the camp infirmary. Now,
normally, the Nazis would have killed all the
sick before fleeing, but everything was in chaos.
The SS decided to evacuate the camp. They rounded
up all the healthy prisoners, about 60 ,000 of
them, and forced them on a death march towards
Germany in the middle of a blizzard. And Levi.
He was too sick to walk, so he was left behind
in the infirmary with a few other sick men, expecting
the SS to come back at any moment and shoot them
all. They didn't. They fled. And the marchers?
Almost everyone on that march died. They froze
to death. They starved, or they were shot if
they fell behind. If Levi had been healthy, he
would have been on that march, and he almost
certainly would have died. His illness saved
his life. He watched through the infirmary window
as his friends marched away into the snow to
their deaths. So the Red Army arrives January
27, 1945. Liberation. But not freedom. Not yet.
This is the part of the story I think fewer people
know. The war ends, you go home. That's how we
imagine it. If only. Levi's journey home is the
subject of his second book, The Truce. And it
is a bureaucratic, almost Kafkaesque nightmare.
The Russians liberate the camp, but they don't
have the resources to just fly everyone home.
The rail lines are bombed out. Europe is a complete
wreck. Levi ends up in a Soviet transit camp
system. And looking at the map. He goes the wrong
way. He goes massively the wrong way. To get
from Poland back to Italy, he ends up traveling
through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria.
It takes him nine months to get home. An odyssey.
Truly. It's picaresque. He meets con artists,
former soldiers, Greek Jews, Russian nurses.
It was a truce, a pause between the hell of the
camp and the difficulty of returning to normal
life. He was seeing Europe in ruins. He was seeing
the chaos of millions of displaced people. And
he was starting to heal. Slowly, he learned to
laugh again. And when he finally walks into Corso
Riomberto 75 in October 1945. He is unrecognizable.
He's wearing an old, ragged, Red Army uniform.
His face is bloated from malnutrition edema.
His family thought he was dead. And suddenly,
this ghost walks through the door. And almost
immediately. He feels this compulsion. He needs
to tell the story. It was a physical need. He
described it as a violent impulse. He would get
on trams in Turin and just start talking to strangers,
telling them what happened. He needed to unload
the trauma to bear witness. He starts writing
furiously. But he also needs a job. He has to
become a chemist again. Right. He gets a job
at a paint factory called Duyuko. And this is
the image I love. By day, he's checking varnish
formulas, dealing with suppliers, being a manager.
By night, he's in the factory dormitory scribbling
on train tickets, scraps of paper, the backs
of laboratory notes, typing like a maniac. And
the result of that manic writing is, if this
is the man, or as it's known in the U .S., survival
in Auschwitz. A masterpiece. One of the greatest
books of the 20th century. But the publishers
didn't think so at first. No. He took it to Einati,
the big, sophisticated publishing house in Turin.
Rejected. He tried to get it published in America.
Little, Brown rejected it. Why? I mean, how could
they reject that? It seems insane now. You have
to remember the time. It was 1947. The wounds
were too fresh. People didn't want to read about
the death camps yet. They wanted to rebuild,
to forget. They wanted to look forward, not back
at the horror. Also, Levi's style wasn't what
they expected. It wasn't a scream of rage. It
wasn't melodramatic. It was calm, analytical,
almost detached. It unnerved people. So it gets
published by a tiny amateur press. Yes, a man
named Franco Antonicelli. They printed 2 ,000
copies. It barely sold. It sat in a warehouse
in Florence and a bunch of copies got damaged
in a flood. And for a while, Levi just went back
to being a chemist. He thought that was that.
The centaur. That is his symbol for himself.
Half beast, half man, half chemist, half writer.
He spent the next 30 years running a paint factory.
He eventually moved to a company called Siva.
He rose to be technical director. He was a businessman.
He dealt with resins, enamels, wire coatings.
There's a great story about him traveling to
Germany for business in the 60s. Yes. He would
have to meet - with German chemical suppliers,
former IG Farben affiliates sometimes. And he
made a point of always wearing short -sleeved
shirts in the meetings. To show the number. 114517.
Tattooed on his left arm. He wanted them to see
it. He wouldn't say anything. He would just let
the number sit there in the boardroom while they
discussed resin prices. He wanted to see if they
would react, if they would acknowledge it. And
did they? Most didn't. They would studiously
look away. That is a power move. Yeah. Quiet,
but devastating. It speaks to his character.
He wasn't seeking revenge. He was seeking recognition,
acknowledgement of reality. He wanted them to
know that he knew they knew. Let's talk about
his writing, specifically the periodic table,
since we started with it. It's structured in
such a brilliant, unique way. Every chapter is
named after an element. It connects the material
world to memory. Iron is about his friend Sandro,
the one he hiked the mountains with before the
capture round. Sandro was strong, resistant,
pure, like iron. Cerium, as we mentioned, is
the story of the theft in the camp. And vanadium,
that one is an incredible story. Vanadium is
a crazy story. It's years after the war, Levi
is working at his paint factory, and there's
a problem with a batch of varnish from a German
supplier. He writes a letter of complaint. The
German chemist from the supplier replies, and
Levi recognizes a specific spelling error. The
man writes Naftan instead of Nafslin that he
remembers from the lab in Auschwitz. No way.
Yes. He realizes the man on the other end of
the letter is Dr. Müller, a civilian chemist
who worked in the lab at Monowitz. The element,
vanadium, becomes the detective key that unlocks
the past. So what does he do? They start a correspondence.
Levi confronts him. Were you the Dr. Müller from
the Buna lab? Muller admits it. He tries to apologize,
but it's clumsy. He claims he tried to help,
that he was just a cog in the machine. Levi is
conflicted. He wants to forgive, but can't fully
absolve him. They plan to meet in person, but
before they can, Muller dies. It's a ghost story
told through chemistry. And then there is The
Wrench, La Chiavi Estella. This one surprised
me. It's not about the Holocaust at all. It's
a celebration. It's his love letter to work.
It's about a rigger named Fossone who travels
the world building cranes and suspension bridges.
Levi believed that loving your work represents
the best, most concrete approximation of happiness
on earth. That's a profound statement coming
from a guy who is a slave laborer. Exactly. Slave
labor is the absolute opposite of meaningful
work. It is work designed to destroy you. It
is digging holes and then filling them back up
again. But good work solving problems, making
things that stand up, being competent, that restores
human dignity. Levi was a chemist. He loved getting
the formula right. He honored the competence
of the maker. Okay, we have to move to his darkest
and perhaps his most important philosophical
contribution, The Drowned and the Saved. His
final collection of essays, written in 1986,
just a year before he died. This is where he
takes the gloves off. It's much less narrative,
much more analytical. He analyzes the memory
of the offense, and he introduces the concept
of the gray zone. What is the gray zone? This
is a huge idea, and you really have to get your
head around it to understand Levi. We tend to
think of the Holocaust in black and white. Evil
Nazis, innocent victims, Levi said. Yes, that
is true on a macro level. The Nazis were the
aggressors. But inside the camp, inside the lager,
the line blurred. To survive, prisoners were
often forced to compromise. You know, the things
like the kapos. Exactly. The capitalist prisoners
who are put in charge of other prisoners, often
brutally, and the sonderkommandos, the Jewish
prisoners, who are forced to work the gas chambers
and crematoria. Levi argues that the system was
diabolical because it was designed to implicate
the victims in their own destruction. It offered
tiny privileges, an extra bowl of soup, a better
pair of boots in exchange for betraying or policing
your fellow man. And he refuses to judge them.
He refuses to judge them from the outside. He
says we in our comfortable living rooms have
no right to judge the morality of a man who has
been driven insane by hunger and fear. He says
if you haven't faced that choice, be silent.
But he also refuses to call them innocent. They're
in the gray zone. It's a muddled, tragic space
where morality collapses under pressure. He also
had very strong views on the difference between
the Soviet gulag and the Nazi lager, the concentration
camps. Oh, very firm on this. In the 80s during
the Cold War, some historians were trying to
say, well, Stalin had camps too, so Hitler wasn't
that unique. Levi said, no, stop. The gulag was
a slave labor system. It was brutal. Millions
died. But the purpose was labor. The Nazi lager
was a death machine. Its purpose was extermination.
Its purpose was biological annihilation. The
death rate in the Gulag was around 30%. In Auschwitz,
for Jews, it was 90 to 98%. The industrialization
of it, using human ash to pave roads. He said
that was singular in human history. He was terrified
of revisionism, of people softening the edges
of what happened. It's interesting, given all
this, he never hated the Germans as a collective
people. He was very precise about this. He said
hating a whole people is what the Nazis did.
If he hated all Germans, he would be using their
logic, their racism. But, and this is a crucial
distinction, he did not forgive. He didn't forgive
the culprits. He didn't forgive the culprits.
And maybe more importantly, he didn't forgive
the willful ignorance. He was furious with the
Germans who said, we didn't know, he said. You
knew enough. You saw the trains leave. You saw
the smoke from the factories. You smelled it.
You chose not to look. That silence was their
crime. This brings us to the end of his life
and to the mystery. April 11th, 1987. Levi is
67 years old. He's a celebrated author, a global
figure. And on that morning, the concierge of
his apartment building at Corseri and Berto finds
him at the bottom of the stairwell. He had fallen
from the third floor landing of the apartment
he was born in. The coroner ruled it a suicide.
Yes. And for many, this became the defining tragic
end to his story. Elie Wiesel famously said,
Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later.
The idea being that the trauma finally caught
up with him. Right. That the poison of the camp
had a delayed fuse, and there was evidence for
it. He was suffering from depression, his elderly
mother was dying of cancer, he couldn't bear
to watch her suffer, and he was terrified of
losing his own mind, his memory. It fit the narrative
of the tragic survivor. But not everyone agrees.
Not by a long shot. No. This is where it gets
incredibly complicated. Many of his close friends
and experts, like the Oxford sociologist Diego
Gambetta, argue it was an accident. What's the
evidence for an accident? Well, first, there
was no note. Levi was a writer. He explained
everything. He was a man of meticulous detail.
To leave no words, that is strange. Second, he
had plans for the future. He had appointments
booked. books he was working on. He had just
bought new shoes that day. And his health. He
had been complaining of dizziness from a recent
prostate surgery. The theory is that the stairwell
railing in his building was famously low. Gambetta
suggests he might have felt faint, leaned over
the railing to call out to the concierge below,
which he often did, and simply lost his balance.
So why does it matter? Why do people fight over
this so passionately? Because if it's suicide,
it feels like a defeat. It feels like the Nazis
won in the end. Like the poison they injected
into his soul in 1944 finally killed him in 1987.
It makes his message of rational survival seem
undermined. But if it's an accident, he remains
the rational man who defied them to the very
end. He's a man with a medical condition who
fell. I suppose we'll never know for sure. We
won't. And perhaps we shouldn't let the mystery
of the death overshadow the clarity of the life's
work. Whether he jumped or fell, he had already
won by writing the books. His legacy is massive.
He's more than just a writer. Martin Amis called
him the visionary of the Holocaust. But I think
his legacy is more specific. He taught us to
look at horror without blinking. And he refused
false consolation. He was an atheist before,
during, and after the camp. He didn't find God
there. He didn't find a happy ending. He found
truth in all its terrible detail. And he asked
us to look at ourselves. That feels like the
real takeaway. That's the provocative thought
to leave with, isn't it? Levi's work wasn't just
about 1944. It's about now. He warns us that
the gray zone is always waiting for us. Every
time we make a small compromise with power, every
time we look away from injustice because it's
inconvenient, every time we choose comfort over
doing the right thing, we are stepping into that
zone. There's a line from that TV show Black
Earth Rising regarding a character dealing with
intense trauma. They say something like, if I
choose to attend suicide, I'll take a leaf out
of Mr. Levi's book. It just shows how deeply
his end has permeated the culture. for better
or for worse. It does. It's become a sort of
grim shorthand, but I prefer to remember him
as the voice of memory, the chemist who turned
matter into words and words into a shield against
oblivion. He made sure we couldn't say we didn't
know. That is Primo Levi, the chemist in hell.
Thanks for diving in with us. Thank you.