I stumbled across this fascinating article (thanks to a posting on Chet Raymo’s excellent Science Musings blog.

It’s an old article, but was news to this monkey. I had always presumed that it was accepted fact that Primo Levi had committed suicide. Virtually every mention of the celebrated Italian chemist/author/holocaust survivor ends noting that Levi eventually succumbed to a dark depression and threw himself over the bannisters into a narrow stairwell in the building where he lived.

Reading through Diego Gambetta’s 2004 article in the Boston Review, what strikes one is how more likely an accidental death was, and yet how determinedly a conclusion of suicide was reached by many.

Any suicide is a tragic event, but Levi’s death, if caused by suicide, becomes a defining act. If the man who surivived Auschwitz, and wrote so clearly about the experience, committed suicide it helps define the evil committed by the Nazis. Escape from the camps was an illusion – there were no survivors from this savagery. Elie Wiesel, for example, famously said of Levi: “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz fourty years later”^[1].

The mistake, though, is to think that if Levi’s death was accidental, that it becomes an opposing commentary – that it somehow diminishes the evil of the Holocaust. Levi was very obviously scarred by the horrors he witnessed – he was one of the most eloquent witnesses not just to the nightmare of living in the camps, but also to the terrible pain of surviving.

There are number of reasons to believe the death was suicide, as Gambetta’s article clearly lays out, but there are also many reasons to believe the death was the result of an accidental fall. It seems to me, though, that were Levi not a survivor of the camps, there would be little hesitation to define his fall as an accidental death.

And that, of course, may be just as much a biased reading of events as the widely-accepted suicide theory…

Notes
¹ Cited from Gabmetta’s article. Orignal source La Stampa, April 14, 1987