The Drowned and the Saved

Levi, Weisel, and Amery are among three who survived the Nazi extermination camps. Weisel's Night is the "smoothest" literarily, and Amery (who eventually suicided) is the most trenchantly gloomy (to me). Primo Levi has piercing observations of both the victims and perpetrators, and seems to me to be thoroughly unsentimental about the hellish camps, and thus is closer to Dante's Inferno.All three are important for understanding the Holocaust.

A truly sobering book. It is hard to read for long periods of time -- a break is needed just to clear one's head a bit before re-entering that time and place. Levi feared the lessons of the holocaust were being attenuated over time and the fact that this book is hard to get is ironic confirmation of that fear. This is the last book he wrote. The realism and specificity he includes are almost numbing, but they are not gratuitous, which is the book's great strength: the insights he draws from them and the exhortations that come from those insights are personal and persuasive. I would wish this book had wider circulation -- a hard but very valuable and emotional experience "listening" to Levi unburden his heart.

It is redundant to praise this book or describe its background, which has been done very well by other reviewers. This was Levi's final wrestling with the implications of what he called the Lager (he didn't use the term 'Holocaust'), not only as he experienced it, but more generally.Just a few points that may be less obvious. Levi never uses the phrase "survivor guilt," and his choice of terms was never without consideration. Rather, he uses the term, "shame." The chapter that goes by that name is an enormously subtle and evolving one. Levi continues to probe the feeling as he recalls it after "liberation," and there are at least five different concepts of what that "shame" entailed, no one of which did Levi think was definitive. By the way, none of Levi's definitions are the same as the popular notion of "survivor" guilt - that one feels guilty simply for having survived while others did not. The closest he comes is to talk about surviving "in place of another," which is a more complex idea. It refers specifically to the nature of the camps themselves, a horrific "laboratory," as Levi put it, in which selections, influence, luck and more did mean that one's survival always came at someone else's cost. This is a sociological point. It would not the case, for example, for the survivor of a tornado or earthquake.Second, the "grey zone" is very often misinterpreted to suggest that perpetrators and victims met in some "middle ground" somewhere. Levi is definitive about this. The responsibility of the killers and the victims are in no sense, and in no context, equivalent. But in the squalid and horrific world that was the lager, there was an enormous range of types and characters. Levi is arguing mostly against what he calls "stereotypes" - convenient simplifications.Finally, it may be of interest that "the drowned and the saved" was intended by Levi to be the title of his first book, If This is a Man (known in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz). His publisher disagreed, although there is a chapter in If This is a Man called Drowned and Saved. Levi's preoccupation with the role in the camp of differences in power, privilege, luck, and alliances-of-convenience runs throughout his work. It is a topic that still deserves much more attention than it has received.

"The Drowned and the Saved" is the final book of Primo Levi (1919-1987), a Jewish-Italian chemist who survived the death camp of Auschwitz, and turned to authorship in his later years. This book is a group of a half-dozen related essays, each exploring a specific aspect of Levi's view of the Holocaust's causes and effects.He begins with the concept of "good faith", wondering whether believing a lie excuses it. He notes that oppressors lie to save themselves from believing they are evil, and victims lie to save themselves from believing they suffer. He explores the moral zone between black and white, noting that anybody can be a tough killer or a foolish victim: we are all tyrants and victims in our own way.He examines survivor's guilt, and reflects on the roles of luck versus blessing in life, and discusses the ways humans need communication to survive, including the way victims bend language to disguise their intentions, and tyrants twist it to cause confusion among their victims.He tries to distinguish between rationalized evil and collective madness. He believes the spirit and mind can be injured just as the body can, and wonders how a person's perspective plays a role in their survival and psychological health. He describes the various stereotypes people hold when they imagine the stories of those who lived through WWII, e.g., the romantic hero, the evil Nazi, the prisoner who always plots escape, and so on, but explains why they are rough and inaccurate.Each chapter is like a conversation with an intelligent and qualified author. It is thoughtful, and a pleasure to read. It reflects on psychological and historical themes which are important not only to our understanding of the Holocaust, but also more generally human nature. (It appears to be a rumination on subjects discussed in his other books, collected and summarized briefly here.) It is for this reason that the book is successful. It considers the Holocaust in particular, but its themes are actually deeper and more universal."Letters from Germans", the penultimate chapter, is the book's most powerful, noticeably demonstrating the tension between his memory of that time period, and the memory of various Germans, in their own words. He especially berates those who believe they are doing the right thing by speaking out in shame and guilt over theit past, perhaps attacking them a bit harshly, but certainly with justification. The last chapter, "Conclusion", is its weakest. In the opinion of this reviewer, it over-generalizes, and tries to apply retrospective analysis to the world's future. It also calls for unwarranted conclusions, unrelated to the preceding chapters, and perhaps contradicts itself. Luckily it is brief, and does not detract from the excellence of the prior explorations.(For example, he says war is unecessary, and mankind can settle all conflicts around a table, but only as long as we are in good faith. He then calls Hitler a buffoon, implying he cannot be taken in good faith. He next says we need not have good faith to negotiate if we are all equally in fear of war, but this sounds like he is saying war is necessary after all, even if only to remind us there are punishments for negotiation in bad faith!)Despite its conclusion (which many readers will probably enjoy, despite this reviewer's belief it over-reaches), the book is an intelligent and even-handed, but personal assessment of the Holocaust, written in an engaging and intelligent style, with brevity and wit. At 200 pages, it is easy to read. Packed with philosophy and insight, it is worth the investment.

Lacking the gory details (thank God.) of the death camps Levi looks back with a forty year perspective of what he had experienced and survived at the hands of the Nazis. This book is filled with honest reflections of what happened in the hearts of men and women struggling to deal with brutalities that few of us can imagine. If you are looking for black and white answers, you will not find them here. What you will find is a rich tome of wisdom requiring the reader to look deeper within himself and his fellow man.