In his book The Reawakening, Levi describes how he experienced liberation by the Russian troops: "They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips an bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selctions, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man's crime."
After liberation he started working as a chemist again. Soon he became the manager of a paint factory in 1961. He worked there and then retired in 1977 to pursue his career as a full-time writer. He has contributed much in the field of Holocaust writing with poetry, memoirs, and his autobiography. The title of his memoirs, Il Sistema Periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975), creatively uses chemical elements to symbolize aspects of his encounters with the Nazi’s.
His last work, I Sommersi E I Savati (out of print), was written in 1986 one year before his apparent suicide. His death was the result of a fall down the stairwell of his home on April 11, 1987. In his last work he wanted to distinguish the uniqueness of the Holocaust from all other genocide events while maintaining the importance of the events in Cambodia and South Africa.
