Primo Levi Quotes


Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify...no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human.


Citations

Levi, Primo. "Appendix." Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening: Two Memoirs, translated by Stuart Woolf, Summit Books, 1985, p. 395.

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Primo Levi
Primo Levi
  • Born: July 31, 1919
  • Died: April 11, 1987
  • Nationality: Italian
  • Profession: Writer

Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.