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Both for critics and for Levi himself, there has long been acknowledged a deep and remarkable bond between his chemistry and his work as a Holocaust survivor, writer, and witness. Many have noted Levi’s calm, detached, observational and analytical acuity, in If This is a Man and elsewhere, of the systematic degradation of the prisoners at Auschwitz, the moral destruction of human dignity designed to facilitate the physical annihilation that was to follow. And many have linked this observational, analytical capacity to the eye of the young chemistry graduate of 1941 – to Levi the laboratory animal.⁵

In The Periodic Table, Levi described how he came to write If This is a Man in 1946-47 in two distinct phases, and two successive states of mind. First came a phase of trauma, of outpouring, of catharsis, when he wrote “bloody, concise poems” about the camps and button-holed strangers like Coleridge’s ancient mariner.

But then, he says, he somehow reached calmer waters:

My very writing became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a begging for compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid building, which now was no longer solitary: the work of a chemist who weighs and divides, measures and judges on the basis of assured proofs, and strives to answer questions. Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant. (Periodic Table, p. 153; emphasis added)

The chemist’s vocation is lucid, rational, measured and measuring. Elsewhere, Levi regularly compared his writing to the drafting of a laboratory report.

There are also, however, more troubling bonds between Auschwitz and Levi’s science. In a much bolder, riskier formulation, Levi also insisted in If This is a Man on a darkly fundamental undertow to the Nazi system at Auschwitz, on its status and validity as itself a scientific experiment, whose results need writing up and analysing:

the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment. Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs, and which is much more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life. (If This is a Man/ The Truce, p. 93; emphasis added)

Indeed, Levi and his doctor friend and fellow-Auschwitz-survivor Leonardo Debenedetti had themselves written a “lab report” in 1945-46, a medical report on the hygienic and sanitary conditions in Monowitz. It was published in Italy’s leading medical journal, Minerva medica, in 1946, but was only rediscovered in the 1990s.⁶