In July 1941 Primo Levi graduated from university. He received an illuminated parchment on which was written ‘in elegant characters that one Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derision, half absolution and half condemnation’. Already, he was being reminded that he lived on sufferance, inhabited a parallel universe. Yet it was some time before he felt the blade twist. Indeed in the autumn of 1942 he and his friends went to the theatre and to concerts, spent their time discussing the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder, playing intellectual games, falling in love. As to what was happening ‘during those same months in all of Europe occupied by the Germans, in Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, in the pit of Babi Yar near Kiev, in the ghetto of Warsaw, in Salonika, Paris, and Lidice … no precise information had reached us … Our ignorance allowed us to live, as when you are in the mountains and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe’ (129).

On 11 April 1987, Primo Levi left his apartment, walked across the landing and fell forty-five feet down the stairwell of his apartment building as his grandfather had once jumped to his death out of a window.