[T]he thing I remember most about my brother is that he was just a very kind, loving and gentle person.Anna Maria Levi remembering her brother. She also writes:
Primo was the one who taught me how to read and write. He had learnt at a very early age and he got bored with a younger sister with whom he couldn't communicate, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.(Via Richard.)
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As strange as it may sound, we didn't really know we were Jewish until 1938, when the Race Laws changed everything. I had to leave school, though Primo was allowed to stay on at university because he was already in his second year. After September 8 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies, the Germans still held sway in Turin, which became a very dangerous place for Jews. We had to go into hiding up in the mountains. One night someone shoved a note under the door that said, in the badly written Italian of the local farmers, "We know what race you belong to. If you do not give us 50,000 lire [about £20,000 in today's terms], we will do our duty as Fascists and report you to the authorities." Yet again my mother and I, along with other relatives, had to move and find a new hiding place.However, Primo stayed up in the mountains near Turin with a partisan band who were all just as inexperienced as him. My brother didn't know how to load a weapon, let alone how to fight a guerrilla war. He was captured and, as a Jew, was sent to the holding camp at Fossoli, from where the trains left for Auschwitz.
After Primo returned from Auschwitz he continued to work as a chemist but he also began to write more, as if he was shouldering a huge weight that could only be lifted by telling the world what had happened to him.