39adamstrand:Sometime after 10:00 a.m., Saturday, April 11, 1987, on the third floor of a late-ninet

39adamstrand:Sometime after 10:00 a.m., Saturday, April 11, 1987, on the third floor of a late-nineteenth-century building in Turin, Italy, the concierge rang the doorbell of Primo Levi’s apartment. Levi—research chemist, Auschwitz survivor, and the author of some of the most compelling accounts of the Holocaust—had been born in that apartment 67 years earlier. The concierge handed Levi his mail, the way she did almost every day, but by the time she had reached the bottom of the stairs and resumed her usual post, Levi’s body hit the bottom of the stairs near the elevator.Renzo Levi, the writer’s son, said that his father had suffered serious bouts of depression in the last months of his life. He had written to a friend: “I have fallen into a rather serious depression; I have lost all interest in writing and even in reading. I am extremely low and I do not want to see anyone. I ask you as a ‘Proper Doctor’ what should I do? I feel the need for help but I do not know what sort.”Primo Levi had undergone minor surgery and it was suggested that he was also worried about the condition of his 92-year-old mother, who had been partially paralyzed by a stroke.Others tried to link Levi’s suicide with the shadow of Auschwitz. “I think it was the memory of those years which lead him towards his death,” Natalia Ginzburg wrote. His friend Ferdinando Camon, said in an interview: “This suicide must be backdated to 1945. It did not happen then because Primo wanted (and had to) write. Now, having completed his work he could kill himself. And he did.” His son said, “Now everyone wants to understand, to grasp, to probe. I think my father had already written the last act of his existence. Read the conclusion of The Truce and you will understand.” Elie Wiesel said: “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.”Shortly before his suicide, however, Levi dismissed any connections of his depression to Auschwitz. He told a friend the he “was no longer haunted by the camp and no longer dreamed about it.” Levi himself wrote that suicide comes from “a nebula of explanations.”Others do not believe that Levi jumped from the third floor that morning, but accidentally fell.  On the 10th anniversary of his death, however, the Chief Rabbi of Rome came forward and said that Levi had called him a few minutes before the concierge came to the door and said, “I can’t go on with this life. My mother is ill with cancer and every time I look at her face I remember the faces of those men stretched on the benches at Auschwitz.” -- source link

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