Primo Levi in 1940 … he was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
‘When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, with typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. ’Only a day before’, says Levi, ‘this would have been inconceivable. The law of the camp said: “Eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour.” To do otherwise would have been suicidal. The offer of sharing bread “was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Haftlinge [prisoners] to men again.’
–Primo Levi from his book If This is a Man
Primo Michele Levi was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. Wikipedia
Born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy
Died April 11, 1987 (age 67 years), Turin, Italy