Primo Levi's memoir Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man, published in Italian in 1947, English translation 1959) provided one of the foundational literary accounts of the Auschwitz tattooing system, beginning with the scene in which Levi is tattooed with the number 174517. Levi's text transformed this moment of bureaucratic dehumanisation into one of the most powerful images of the Holocaust's attack on personal identity — the replacement of a name with a number on the body itself. The book became a cornerstone of Holocaust literature and a defining meditation on what it means to have one's body inscribed against one's will.

Levi's treatment of the tattooed number as the central symbol of Holocaust dehumanisation established a literary framework for understanding forced body inscription that has influenced decades of subsequent poetry and prose. His precise, scientific prose — the chemist's voice describing the tattooing — created a model for the witness poem that blends clinical observation with moral urgency. The tattooed number in Holocaust literature became a figure for the unbridgeable gap between identity and its administrative reduction, a tension that haunts the work of Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and every poet writing in the tradition of testimony.