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Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a liberal Jewish family. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941.
In 1943 he and a number of comrades took to the countryside and attempted to join the Italian anti-Fascist resistance. Completely untrained for such a venture, he was arrested as a partisan by the occupying German army. When it was discovered that he was Jewish, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and spent ten months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his "shipment", Levi was one of the 20 who left the camps alive.
On returning to Italy, Levi became an industrial chemist at the SIVA chemical factory in Turin. He soon started to write about his experiences in the camp and in his subsequent return home through Eastern Europe in what would become his two classic memoirs, If This Is a Man and The Truce (republished in the US as Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening).
He also wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Moments of Reprieve and The Periodic Table. The first of these deals with characters he observed during imprisonment, while the latter is a collection of episodes from his life, each related in some way to one of the chemical elementGenerally, an element is a basic part that is the foundation of something. For a long time, elements classical element were believed (by the Pythagoreans and alchemists for example) to be the building blocks of all matter in the universe. Similarly, Chines. The ambitious novel If Not Now, When?, which tells the story of a band of Jewish WWII partisans wandering through RussiaThe Russian Federation ( Russian: , transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija , or Russia (Russian: , transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija , is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. With and PolandThe Republic of Poland a country in Central Europe, lies between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia (in the form of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave) t, won the distinguished Viareggio and Campiello prizes when it was published in Italy, and made Levi's name internationally known.
His best-known short stories are found in The Monkey's Wrench ( 1978Events January January 1 The Copyright Act of 1976 takes effect, making sweeping changes to United States copyright law. January 1 Air India's Boeing 747 explodes near Bombay 213 dead. January 4 Referendum in Chile supports policies of Augusto Pinochet.), a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator resembling Levi himself.
Levi retired from his position as manager of SIVA in 1977For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). Events January 1 First woman Episcopal priest ordained January 6 EMI sacks the Sex Pistols January 18 Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious " legionnaire's disease" Januar to devote himself full-time to writing. The most important of his later works was his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, an analysis of the Holocaust in which Levi explained that though he did not hate the German people for what had happened, nor had he forgiven them.
He committed suicide on 11th April, 1987.