Italian · 1919–1987
Italian chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz and bore witness. Born in Turin to an assimilated Jewish family, he was deported in 1944 and worked in the camp's synthetic rubber factory. If This Is a Man, written immediately after liberation, became the essential Holocaust testimony. The Periodic Table interwove chemistry and autobiography. He wrote novels, short stories, and poems while working as an industrial chemist. His death—a fall down a stairwell—may have been suicide. The prose combines scientific precision with moral clarity.