My own feeling is that Leonardo had the greater part, both in the original writing and the later reworking. He was the doctor whom the Russians commissioned; he was the senior partner; and his letters from Katowice show that he, too, had an observant eye. Certainly, the section on the infirmary is far more by Leonardo than by Levi, and many of the most striking episodes here — the ‘life test’, the punishments, the blood donations — do not appear in If This Is a Man, for which Levi on principle restricted himself to his own experiences.
Then, during the reworking period, Levi was writing If This Is a Man, and as Gordon says it was Leonardo, the doctor, who probably placed the Report in Minerva Medica. It is hard to imagine that Levi would have spared much time from his book; and the Report’s errors — especially one about Levi himself — show that he did not even proofread it, presumably at either stage. He was famously ‘pignolo’ (fussy), and would never have let his own work go uncorrected. No: he contributed information and collaborated on the writing, but we will never know how much.
The Auschwitz Report is important, but let’s not exaggerate, as the Piedmontese say. And not about its value as compared to that of If This Is a Man, either, despite Sebald.
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