That I, a chemist, engaged in writing here my life as a chemist, lived a different experience, has been recounted elsewhere. At a distance of 30 years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517. I must have overcome the harshest trial, that of inserting myself into the Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness, if I was then able not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to undertake a fairly delicate job, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time frenzied by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were within 80 kilometres of us. Despair and hope alternated in a rhythm that would have crushed any normal individual in an hour.

We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (not entirely unpleasant) sensation of someone who has skipped a meal and is sure that he will not miss the next: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had been with us for a year, had put down deep and permanent roots in us, lived in all our cells and conditioned our behaviour. To eat, to get food, was the primary stimulus, which was followed, at a great distance, by all the other problems of survival, and, even farther back, memories of home and the very fear of death.

I was a chemist in a chemical factory, in a chemical laboratory (this, too, has been recounted), and I stole in order to eat. If you don’t start as a child, learning to steal isn’t easy; it took several months for me to repress the moral commandments and acquire the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realised (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving, I a respectable university graduate, the involution-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian and Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his ‘Lager’ of the Klondike, the great Buck, of Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: on every favourable occasion, but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything, except the bread of my companions.

In terms of substances that could be stolen with profit, that laboratory was virgin territory, all to be explored. There was gas and alcohol, banal and troublesome prey: many stole them, at various points of the worksite – the price was high and so was the risk, because liquids require containers. It’s the great problem of packaging, which every skilled chemist knows; the Heavenly Father also knew it, and resolved it brilliantly, for his part, with the cellular membranes, the eggshell, the multipart peel of the orange, and our skin, because in the end we, too, are liquids. Now, at that time polyethylene didn’t exist; it would have been useful to me because it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable, but it is also a little too incorruptible, and not for nothing the Heavenly Father Himself, who, though a master of polymerisation, refrained from patenting it – He doesn’t like incorruptible things.

In the absence of suitable packaging and boxes, the ideal thing to steal should be, therefore, solid, not perishable, not bulky, and above all new. It had to be of a high unit value, that is, not voluminous, because often we were searched at the entrance to the camp after work; and it had finally to be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that made up the complex universe of the Lager.

I had made various attempts in the laboratory. I had stolen a few hundred grammes of fatty acids, with difficulty obtained through the oxidation of paraffin by some colleague on the other side of the barricade: I had eaten half, and it had truly sated my hunger, but the taste was so unpleasant that I gave up on selling the rest. I had tried to make pancakes with cotton wool, which I pressed against the plate of an electric stove; they had a vague taste of burned sugar, but they were so unsightly that I did not judge them to be saleable. As for selling the cotton directly to the infirmary in the Lager, I tried that once, but it was too bulky and had little value. I also tried to ingest and digest glycerin, relying on the simplistic reasoning that, as a product of the splitting of fats, it must surely in some way be metabolised and provide calories: and perhaps it did provide them, but at the cost of disagreeable side effects.

There was a mysterious jar on a shelf. It contained 20 small grey, hard, colourless, tasteless cylinders, and it didn’t have a label. This was very strange, because it was a German laboratory. Yes, of course, the Russians were a few kilometres away, and catastrophe was in the air, almost visible; every day there were bombing raids; everyone knew that the war was about to be over. But, finally, some constants must endure, and among these was our hunger, and the fact that the laboratory was German, and that the Germans never forget labels. In fact, all the other jars and bottles in the laboratory had clear labels, typewritten, or written by hand in beautiful Gothic lettering: that alone did not have one.

In the situation, I certainly did not have available the equipment or the peace and quiet needed to identify the nature of the cylinders. Anyway, I hid three in my pocket and at night brought them back to the camp. They were perhaps 25 millimetres long and had a diameter of four or five.

I showed them to my friend Alberto. Alberto took a knife out of his pocket and tried to cut into one: it was hard, and resisted the blade. He tried scraping it: we heard a small squeak and a sheaf of yellow sparks burst forth. At this point the diagnosis was easy: it was ferrocerium, the alloy used for common flints in cigarette lighters. Why were they so big? Alberto, who for several weeks had worked as a labourer with a team of solderers, explained that they were mounted on the tips of oxyacetylene torches, to light the flame. At this point I felt skeptical about the commercial possibilities of my stolen goods: maybe they could be used to light a fire, but in the camp (illegal) matches were certainly not in short supply.

Alberto reproached me. For him, giving up, pessimism, despair were abominable and culpable. He did not accept the concentration-camp universe, he rejected it with his instinct and his reason, he would not let himself be polluted. He was a man of strong goodwill, and had miraculously remained free, and his words and actions were free: he had not lowered his head, had not bowed his back. A gesture of his, a word, a laugh had liberating virtues, were a hole in the stiff fabric of the Lager, and all who came near him realised it, even those who didn’t understand his language. I believe that no one, in that place, was more loved than he.

He reproached me: one must never be discouraged; it’s harmful, and hence immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: well, now it was a matter of selling it, promoting it. He would see to that, he would turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to give men fire rather than sell it: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided the trouble with the vulture.

We had to be more astute. This topic, the need to be astute, was not new between us. Alberto had often discussed it with me, and before him others in the free world, and still others repeated it to me later on, innumerable times, up until today, with modest results; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency toward symbiosis with an authentically astute person, who would get (or consider that he had got) temporal or spiritual advantages from living with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from exercising his astuteness to my detriment. I didn’t know, but he did (he always knew everything about everyone, and yet he had neither German nor Polish and very little French), that there existed a clandestine lighter industry at the worksite: unknown craftsmen, in their spare time, made lighters for the important people and the civilian workers. Now, for lighters flints are needed, and need to be a certain size: we would therefore have to make those I had in hand thinner. Make them thinner by how much, and how? ‘Don’t create difficulties,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of it. You take care of stealing the rest.’

I had no trouble following Alberto’s advice the next day. Around 10 in the morning, the sirens of the Fliegeralarm, the air-raid warning, broke out. It was nothing new by now, but every time it happened we felt – we and everyone else – stricken to the core by anguish. It was not an earthly sound, not like a factory siren, but a sound of tremendous volume that, simultaneously throughout the entire area, and rhythmically, rose to a spasmodic high note and descended to a rumbling of thunder. It couldn’t have been an accidental discovery, because nothing in Germany was accidental, and, besides, it was too consistent with the purpose and the setting: I have often thought it was elaborated by an evil musician, who had put into it fury and lament, the wolf’s howl at the Moon and the typhoon’s breath; the horn of Astolfo must have had such a sound. It caused panic, not only because it was announcing bombs but also because of its intrinsic horror, like the wail of a wounded beast that reaches as far as the horizon.

The Germans were more afraid than we were of the bomb attacks: we, irrationally, weren’t afraid because we knew they were directed not against us but against our enemies. In seconds I was alone in the laboratory; I put all the cerium in my pockets and went outside to join my Kommando. The sky was already filled with the buzzing of the bombers, and falling from them, uttering softly, yellow leaflets that bore atrocious words of mockery:

Im Bauch kein Fett,
Acht Uhr ins Bett;
Der Arsch kaum warm,
Fliegeralarm!

In your belly no fat,
At eight you go to bed;
When your ass is warm,
Air-raid alarm!

We were not allowed to enter the air-raid shelters: we gathered in the vast spaces that had not yet been built up, on the periphery of the worksite. As the bombs began to fall, and I lay on the frozen mud and sparse grass, fingering the cylinders in my pocket, I reflected on the strangeness of my destiny, of our destinies as leaves on a branch, and of human destinies in general. According to Alberto, a flint for a lighter was worth a ration of bread, that is, a day of life; I had stolen at least 40 cylinders, from each of which could be made three finished flints. In 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: and in the end the cerium would have liberated us. It was an element that I knew nothing about, apart from its single practical application, and that it belongs to the equivocal and heretical family of the rare-earth elements, and that its name has nothing to do with wax, and evokes not its discoverer but, rather (great modesty of the chemists of the past!), the dwarf planet Ceres, the metal and the star having been discovered in the same year, 1801. And perhaps this was an affectionate and ironic homage to alchemical coupling: as the Sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres had to be cerium.

At night I brought out the cylinders, Alberto a piece of metal with a round hole in it: this was the stipulated calibre to which we would have to trim the cylinders in order to transform them into flints and hence into bread.

What followed should be judged with caution. Alberto said that we had to reduce the cylinders by scraping them with a knife, secretly, so that no competitor could steal the secret. When? At night. Where? In the wooden barrack where we slept, under the covers and on top of our pallets filled with shavings; that is, we risked starting a fire and, more realistically, risked hanging, since this was the punishment to which those who, among other things, lit a match in the barracks were sentenced.

One always hesitates to judge rash actions, one’s own or others’, after these have had a good outcome: perhaps they were not, then, so rash? Or perhaps it’s true that there is a God who protects children, fools, and drunkards? Or perhaps again such actions have more weight and heat than the innumerable actions that come to a bad end, and so are recounted more willingly? But we did not then pose these questions: the Lager had given us a crazy familiarity with danger and with death, and to risk the noose for more to eat seemed to us a logical choice, indeed obvious.

While our companions slept, we worked with our knives, night after night. The scene was so grim you could weep: a single electric bulb weakly illumined the big wooden shed, and in the shadowy light, as in a vast cavern, the faces of our companions were visible, overcome by sleep and by dreams: tinged with death, they wiggled their jaws, in dreams of eating. Many had a bare, skeletal arm or leg hanging off the edge of their pallet; others groaned or talked in their sleep.

But the two of us were alive and did not succumb to sleep. We kept the blanket raised with our knees, and under that improvised tent we scraped the cylinders blindly, by feel; at every cut a faint squeak could be heard, and a sheaf of tiny yellow stars could be seen rising. At intervals, we tested the cylinder to see if it fit through the sample hole: if it didn’t, we continued to scrape; if it did, we broke off the pared-down trunk and put it carefully aside.

We worked for three nights; nothing happened, no one was aware of our activity, neither the covers nor the pallet caught fire, and in this way we won the bread that kept us alive until the Russians arrived, and took comfort in the trust and friendship that united us. What happened to me is written elsewhere. Alberto left on foot with the majority when the front was near: the Germans made them walk for days and nights in the snow and cold, killing all who could not continue; then they loaded them onto open train cars, which carried the few survivors to a new chapter of slavery, at Buchenwald and Mauthausen. No more than a quarter of those who left survived the march.

Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains; for some years after the war ended, someone from his town, half visionary and half swindler, lived by peddling to his mother, for a price, false consoling news.

Primo Levi was an Italian-Jewish writer and chemist. His best-known works include ‘If This Is a Man’ (1947), ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ (1986), and ‘The Periodic Table’ (1975), a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element.

“Cerium” is excerpted from The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Vol. II, translated by Ann Goldstein. Copyright © 2015 by Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.