The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust and for the all the people who risked their lives to protect the persecuted ones.
27 January is the date, in 1945, when the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet troops. The Holocaust Remembrance Day is also a national event in Italy.

This year, for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Firenze University Press wants to share "Molecules of an author in search of memory", the english version of "Molecole d'autore in cerca di memoria" by Luigi Dei (translated by Emma Garner).
This digital book also has a preface written by the Nobel Prize for Chemistry Roald Hoffmann.

Loosely based on Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, the play has a Fahrenheit 451 setting, in which Science, Technology and Nature free a man without memory from his state of not-knowing, by giving him scientific knowledge and understanding.

The play finds its catharsis in a deeply moving passage, inspired by the chapter Carbon, which creates an atemporal connection between a carbon atom from the smoke of a crematorium chimney and one residing in the body of any one of us: a poetic parable of a science firmly anchored in the life and history of man.

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Luigi Dei is a scholar of international renown in Materials Chemistry at the «Ugo Schiff» Department of Chemistry at the University of Florence, where he teaches chemistry in the Science School.
He's author of numerous scientific articles appeared in international journals; he also dedicates himself to the popularisation of science, and to the relationship between science, art and literature.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U.S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public. As a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and books.