Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Levi's book was originally published under the title If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, in the original Italian). Bad news: It was rejected by the first publisher (who ended up publishing it later, anyway, after it became popular). (Source)
Perhaps not surprisingly, Levi didn't trust his German publisher: "I wrote him an almost insolent letter: I warned him not to remove or change a single word in the text, and I insisted that he send me the manuscript of the translation in batches [...] I wanted to check on not merely its lexical but also its inner faithfulness." (Source: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 39.)
Primo Levi took his own life in 1987. Elie Wiesel, another Auschwitz prisoner who wrote the famous memoir Night, had this to say about his death: "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later." (Source)
David Blaine, a Jewish-American magician, has Primo Levi's prisoner number (174517), tattooed on his forearm, since Survival in Auschwitz moved him so much. (Source)