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Levi also joined the anti-Fascist resistance, and in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz. His experience in the death camp is the subject of two haunting books, published in English as If This Is a Man (1959) and The Reawakening (1965). In The Periodic Table, the author once again stirs the embers of his agonized memory. The indomitable prisoner Alberto, a memorable figure in If This Is a Man, re-emerges in the chapter "Cerium" to join Levi in a lifesaving enterprise. As a slave laborer in an Auschwitz chemical laboratory, the writer stole some rods of ironcerium, an alloy used to make flints for cigarette lighters. The flints that Levi and Alberto perilously whittled from the rods could be exchanged for bread in the camp. As Levi puts it, "The total: 120 flints, two months of life for me and two for Alberto, and in two months the Russians would have arrived and liberated us."
The last chapter is a meditation on carbon, "the element of life." Levi traces the journey of a carbon atom from its original place in a limestone ledge. As 100 years pass, the atom enters the lungs of a falcon, pauses in a sun-struck leaf and lodges in the eye of a moth. Finally it enters the author's bloodstream and, ultimately, his brain. Levi closes his book with these words: The atom "is in charge of my writing . . . guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one."
Distillates of Levi's chemistry and life, the potent images in this book illustrate the insight of that great master of the extended metaphor, Herman / Melville. In Moby Dick, Ahab reflects, "Not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." The Periodic Table offers fresh proof of that assertion on every page.