The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved forms the third book in what is called the Auschwitz Trilogy. The earlier books, If This is A Man, and The Truce recount Levi’s actual experience of surviving the camp and returning back home via USSR.

Levi, in this book, explores the barren landscape left in the wake of the second world war, as he tries to make sense of what he suffered through his period of suffering as a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Recurring themes of guilt, memory, anger, and shame are discussed with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of understanding the functioning of the camp, and the hateful psychology that inspired it. Levi explains how despite the popular narrative, things in these camps were hardly morally show more binary. There was an imminent presence of a “grey zone”: prisoners being complicit in the oppression of their fellow prisoners due to the distorted illusion of choice. A group of Jews were tasked with herding the unfortunate Jews into the gas chambers, and later cleaning out the corpses and burning them. The ashes were used as tar to be sprinkled on the roads outside the camps. This group was fated to be the victims of gas chambers themselves, with another group of Jews taking their role in the slaughter. Levi explains the Nazi mentality behind such acts of passive aggression as being manipulative towards the victims, in order to fabricate the narrative of Jews themselves being part of the atrocities committed against their own people. Another recurring theme is that of the survivors’ guilt. The feeling that you made it out alive because you were a part of the system that killed so many others, and you are implicitly responsible for so many who couldn’t make it out alive. The shame of being reduced to living out of animal instincts, the abject departure of brotherhood, empathy, humanity, and every other lofty virtue that humans boast of in times of comfort and peace.

Levi also emphasises on memory, and how the society tries to undermine the horrifying aspects of its past, how the memories are distorted or even denied to fuel a certain narrative. He sadly reflects that the true abomination of Holocaust will never be known because those who suffered it never made out alive to tell their tales. It was them who actually witnessed the absolute destruction of the facade of civility that men hide behind. There were no true survivors of the Holocaust, only hollowed out souls inside breathing shadows. It is no surprise that many survivors of the camp committed suicide in later stages of their lives, including Primo Levi in 1987.

Reading this book can be an emotionally harrowing experience, but the lucid and reflective tone of the prose will help you understand the human nature like never before. The question still lingers like an afterthought, whether what took place over the course of five years between 1940 to 45 in Nazi camps, in the heartland of Europe which claimed to bring the light of civilisation to the world, is true humanity unmasked, or was it merely a product of its time, a lesson of history that shall never be repeated, or forgotten? show less

The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi
4 stars
The Drowned and the Saved was Primo Levi’s last book, published shortly before his death. The book is comprised of 8 chapters that read like short essays or meditations. The book explores the rationale behind the concentration camps during World War II and attempts to explain the mindset behind both the oppressors and the oppressed. Levi draws on his own experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz. There are chapters on memory, shame, gray zone (e.g. blurred lines between “us vs. them,” the situation of the intellectual prisoner, communication, and useless violence.

This was a wonderfully written and smart book. Levi’s speculations about various aspects central to the existence and show more consequences of extermination camps are fascinating. He writes in a way that is passionate, yet at the same time, he is able to reflect on what was a traumatic time in his life in a way that is intellectual rather than emotional.

I particularly appreciated the chapter on shame. He links this sense of shame to rates of suicide following liberation. I am a psychologist and I’ve worked with military Veterans including a few from WWII. I will never forget one WWII vet that I worked with who had witnessed and experienced many traumatic events during his service, but what he was most affected by was his experience of liberating one of the extermination camps. Like Levi, he talked about the differences between the movie versions of liberation as being joyful and big celebrations and his own experience seeing prisoners when he arrived at the camp. He talked about the pervasive sense of shame and anguish that preceded the immediate liberation.

The last chapter of the book is a series of excerpts from letters between Levi and German readers who responded to the first published German translation of “Survival in Auschwitz.” It is a powerful chapter that explores some of the perspectives of Germans citizens living during the time of the Holocaust.

Quotes:
The World into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model; the enemy was all around but also inside, the “we” lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us.
Thus the Lager, on a small scale but with amplified characteristics, reproduced the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state, in which all power is invested from above and control from below is almost impossible.
Conceiving and organizing the squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime. Behind the pragmatic aspect other more subtle aspects can be perceived. This institution represented an attempt to shift onto others – specifically the victims – the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.

A single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.
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Shortly after completing THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, Primo Levi committed suicide. The matter of his death was sudden, violent and unpremiditated, and there were some who argue that he killed himself because he was tormented by guilt - guilt that he had survived the horrors of Auschwitz while others, better than he, had gone to the wall.

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED is Levi's impassioned attempt to understand the 'rationale' behind the concentration camps, was completed shortly before his tragic death in 1987.

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED dispels the myth that Primo Levi forgave the Germans for what they did to his people. He didn't and couldn't forgive. He refused, however, to indulge in what he called 'the bestial vice of hatred' which is an show more entirely different matter. The voice that sounds in his writing is that of a reasonable man...it warns and reminds us that the unimaginable can happen again. A would-be tyrant is waiting in the wings, with 'beautiful words' on his lips. The book is constantly impressing on us the need to learn from the past, to make sense of the senseless' PAUL BAILEY show less

C'est arrivé et tout cela peut arriver de nouveau : c'est le noyau de ce que nous avons à dire. ' Primo Levi (1919-1987) n'examine pas son expérience des camps nazis comme un accident de l'histoire, mais comme un événement exemplaire qui permet de comprendre jusqu'où peut aller l'homme dans le rôle du bourreau ou dans celui de la victime. Quelles sont les structures d'un système autoritaire et quelles sont les techniques pour anéantir la personnalité d'un individu ? Quel rapport sera créé entre les oppresseurs et les opprimés ? Comment se crée et se construit un monstre ? Est-il possible de comprendre de l'intérieur la logique de la machine de l'extermination ? Est-il possible de se révolter contre elle ? Primo Levi ne show more se borne pas à décrire les aspects des camps qui restaient obscurs jusqu'aujourd'hui, mais dresse un bilan pour lutter contre l'accoutumance à la dégradation de l'humain. show less

Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved" is a collection of essays focused on his life as a Polish Jew who survived interment at Auschwitz and went on to write a series of books about his experiences.

Levi's essays are thought provoking as he attempts to understand why he survived and others did not; the reasons that much of a country allowed this to happen and how a traumatic event can form and individual but not define them.

I probably would have given this an even higher rating had I read Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz" first, as it contains more thorough account of his experiences (apparently) and is referred to often in "The Drowned and the Saved." Even without knowing the background material, I still found these essays to be show more powerful and thought provoking. show less

The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi is quite the intense and thought-provoking book. It is the kind of writing that leaves one speechless long after reading it.

Memory is fallible through the years. And, often we choose to remember what we want. No matter, Levi believes that we must remember, in order to combat the disease that ran rampant within the Nazi culture, and the Jewish inmate population. Primo Levi remembers all too well, and does not lessen his participation in being part of the “saved”. He acknowledges his acts, and remembers all the demeaning events and situations, for the future of mankind, hoping that no similar events will occur again.

Another one of Levi's profound memoirs which speak to not only the horrors of the concentration camp, but to the moral "gray zone" found in all of us. We tend to look at things in terms of white and black -- good and evil; but sometimes, as in Levi's case, humans are faced with the truth that things they would not normally do are the only options for survival. This, to me, is levi's best work and should not be missed.