The Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi spent a long year of his life at the Auschwitz concentration camp between 1944 and 1945. Once freed from the camp, he starts to write his memoirs of this period and publishes his first book "If this is a man" in 1947, followed by others, including fiction. However, he always questioned whether it was worthwhile to recover and leave records of what he witnessed in the camp. If, on the one hand, he thought of his writing as some sort of duty of memory that could result in a legacy for future generations thus preventing barbarities of this kind to repeat, on the other, he felt the need to forget, given the trauma experienced and the shame at what human beings were capable of doing to other human beings. By examining his work as a whole, we will take a closer look at the complex relation between memory, forgetting, narrative and their importance to history.
memory; narrative; Primo Levi