The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

First published:I sommersi e i salvati, 1986 (English translation, 1988)

Type of work: History; essays; meditation

Overview

Primo Levi died in Turin, Italy, on April 11, 1987, an apparent suicide. It was reported that he had been depressed following minor surgery. In reality, his suffering had been ever-present since the 1940’s. His great works, beginning with Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, 1959; revised as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, 1961) and culminating with The Drowned and the Saved, all dealt with the crucial task of analyzing and facing the Holocaust.

Levi was born in Turin in 1919. He was trained as a chemist, joined the antifascist resistance, and was captured. He was turned over to the Nazis when he identified himself as a Jew in a gesture of courageous, whimsical defiance. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. He owed his life to his training as a chemist, for he was put to work in one of the slave-labor industrial complexes in the camp. After liberation, he traversed Eastern Europe and wrote about his wanderings in his second book, La tregua (1963; The Reawakening, 1965). In 1977 he retired as the manager of a Turin chemical factory to devote himself to writing, a sign that he believed that the story and significance of the Holocaust could never be exhausted and that more than ever it had to be conveyed to a new generation far removed from the experience and even the memory of those events. His later works included Il systema periodico (1975; The Periodic Table, 1985), Se non ora, quando? (1982; If Not Now, When?, 1985), and These Moments of Reprieve (1986). He was awarded Italy’s highest literary prize. The fires of Auschwitz had transformed a talented chemist into one of the greatest writers and most astute observers of his century.

The Drowned and the Saved was Levi’s last completed work. It represents the summation of his life’s work and refers to many of his previous writings. It is not a novel but a series of vivid and meditative essays that are a systematic analysis of the extermination camps. These essays are replete with penetrating insights and stunning conclusions.

What seems to have motivated the writing of this great work was Levi’s fear that the memories of the Holocaust—the greatest single crime in human history—would dim with time and would ultimately become a legend. Levi sees himself as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, having to retell and to clarify the terrible tale for a new generation.

The Drowned and the Saved is divided into a preface, eight concise chapters, and a powerful conclusion. Its overwhelming concern is the need to remember for the sake of justice. Levi recounts the story of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) officers who told the Jewish concentration camp prisoners that no one would later believe their tales of horror because they were too horrible to be believed. This became one of the prisoners’ worst nightmares.

In his second chapter, “The Gray Zone,” Levi shows that there were degrees of evil in the camps, although the difference between the murderers and their victims was clear. The Nazis were guilty of murder, whereas the German bystanders were guilty of turning away and of refusing to help the victims. It is tragic, however, that some of the victims were forced to do things in the camps that they would never have done in normal life. For example, the Sonderkommando, or “Special Squad,” those prisoners of Auschwitz who worked near the crematoria, were given more food and were kept alive for a short time so that they could do their horrendous work of disposing of the dead bodies. Also belonging to this “gray zone” were the functionaries of the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis to administer the ghettos. Levi brilliantly characterizes Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “Jewish elder” of the Łódź ghetto in Poland, as a man who was corrupted by power yet sought to save Jews.

Chapter 3 deals with the shame of the victims who survived. According to Levi, the prisoners who survived were privileged because of their skills, their knowledge of German, and their connections with the political underground. Many survivors felt guilty for having to look out for themselves and their close friends. Levi reminds the reader, however, that the greatest shame of all belongs to the murderers who planned the crime and to the civilized world that stood by.

Levi devotes a chapter to the importance of communication in human affairs. Those who understood some German in the camps might learn the skills of surviving. What could not be so easily grasped was the useless, gratuitous violence that the Nazis practiced. The extermination of the Jews was preceded by savage and calculated violence and humiliation. The prisoners were tattooed, stripped, and humiliated specifically to destroy their humanity before they were killed.

The final chapters of The Drowned and the Saved are devoted to the exploration of stereotypes of the Holocaust in the present generation and to the analysis of letters to Levi by German readers of his works. One question that is particularly troubling is why inmates did not revolt against such treatment. Levi poses a crucial question for a later generation to illustrate the plight of the Jews on the eve of the Holocaust: Why are people not leaving Europe now under the threat of a possible nuclear holocaust?

The Drowned and the Saved shows Primo Levi to be one of the great masters of modern prose. His style and tone produced a stunning combination of cool, dispassionate description, uncompromising honesty, righteous indignation, extremely vivid imagery, and an uncanny ability to relate the past to the present.

Levi clearly belongs in the classical tradition. He writes with great clarity without oversimplifying the complexities of his forbidding subject. His prose is concise, balanced, carefully molded, yet extremely powerful. Like the great Greek and Roman historians, he combines narrative with reflection. He also reflects the influence of his medieval forerunner Dante, who wrote the Inferno (c. 1320), that epic on punishment for sins and the portrayal of degrees of guilt. In the Inferno, however, those who have sinned have been punished as a result of their actions. In the Holocaust the Jews were exterminated because they had been born, something Dante would have had trouble imagining. Levi also acknowledges the Italian Romantic writers of the nineteenth century who strove to make patriotism a humane value rather than a doctrine of superiority and who glorified the individual human being. Levi was also influenced by the early twentieth century realist Italo Svevo. Levi quotes Svevo’s remark that a dying man is too busy to think about death. Levi sees this as a valid statement about the camps.

Above all, Primo Levi stands in the tradition of the Enlightenment. He is a true moralist following in the footsteps of Jonathan Swift. His book is aimed primarily at the human intelligence as he constantly struggles to bring the reader back to the reality of the Holocaust and its implications for the present and the future.

Although influenced by his friend Jean Améry, Levi could not agree with the passion of his friend, who would uncompromisingly return blow for blow with the enemy and who would permit his life to be consumed by the memory of the tortures and humiliations he suffered. Levi preferred to trust in the laws of civilized society (however imperfectly applied) and to discourage feelings of revenge, as opposed to cheap forgiveness. The suicide of Améry seems to have haunted Levi, and a controlled anger smolders throughout this work and breaks out during key portions.

Levi’s anger is directed primarily against those who would construct convenient truths about the terrible past, confuse the perpetrator with the victim, and oversimplify and stereotype reality. Like the ancient Greeks, Levi believes in the existence of the Furies, the ancient goddesses of the earth who would pursue tormentors and murderers and give them no rest. The sufferings of the Holocaust, however, gave the victims no peace. The only way to achieve any hope for justice is to cry out to anyone who would listen to the tales of injustice. Levi did this for forty years.

In the tradition of a true classic, The Drowned and the Saved is a treasure trove of unforgettable stories and eminently quotable, brilliant flashes of insight. Future editions of this work should be annotated in the manner of Dante’s Inferno to identify the rich variety of literary and historical references.

At least three gripping stories are bound to remain with the reader. The first concerns an ordinary, but surrealistic, soccer game played by the Nazi SS and the special squad of prisoners they forced to tend the crematoria. What enabled such a game to happen at all was the bond of death—the mounds of dead bodies caused by the SS and disposed of by the special squad. Next comes a heartbreaking tale of a teenage girl found still alive after a mass killing in the gas chamber. She is no longer anonymous but a person. The prisoners try to save her, but the SS cannot let her live to tell her tale to the other inmates; the Third Reich was at war with memory itself. The third story shows how the memories of the Holocaust can be difficult to communicate to a later age. When Levi tried to tell the story of his life in the camp to a fifth-grade class, a boy drew a diagram to show how he would have escaped from the camp. Such is the difficulty of communicating the impossible situation faced by the Jews.

Levi had much less sympathy for a German who wrote to him saying that Adolf Hitler was a madman and a devil who misled the German people. Levi wrote back that no church gives indulgences to those who follow the devil. In addition, he noted that no one obliged the I. G. Farben Company to conscript thousands of slaves and work them to death and that no one forced the Topf Company of Wiesbaden to build the enormous multiple crematoria for Auschwitz. From where, he asks, did the average German think that the millions of children’s clothes and shoes that flowed back to Germany during the war were coming?

Above all, Levi is most disturbed about the human frailties of self-deception and love of power. He finds that human beings today are distrustful of grand truths but are disposed to accept small truths. This is much too dangerous in the light of what happened during the Holocaust. Levi’s statements on power and human corruptibility are reminiscent of Plato and Thucydides. Like Plato, Levi asserts that all tyrants go mad because they lose touch with reality. This was particularly true for Hitler. The goals of the Third Reich went far beyond an attempt to gain living space or to protect itself; Hitler’s Germany sought to achieve immortality by killing and humiliating millions of innocent people. Such a society was bound to destroy itself.

The corruptibility of man is epitomized for Levi in the figure of Rumkowski, the head of the Łódź ghetto. Rumkowski was an elderly failed industrialist. He hoped that he could save the Jews of Łódź by working for the German army, but he became drunk with power, coining his likeness on the money of the ghetto and exhorting poets and schoolchildren to praise him. In 1944 the ghetto was liquidated, and Rumkowski was sent on a special train to Auschwitz, where he perished. Levi concludes:

We are all mirrored in Rumkowski. . . . His fever is ours. . . . Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.

Levi thus concludes that the human race is in the same boat, interdependent, vulnerable as ever.

As one of the tormented saved, Levi speaks for the drowned of his generation. It is hard to disagree with his findings and conclusions. He is not a professional historian or social scientist (although his reading is wide and his research accurate) but a supremely intelligent survivor and humanist. In his words, the camp “was a university. It taught us to look around and to measure man.” More than many historians and social scientists, Levi has brilliantly captured and effectively communicated many of the crucial elements and implications of the human dimensions of the Holocaust.

If This Is a Man was Primo Levi’s first work, and it remains one of the most perceptive eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Many fine works flowed from his pen in the course of the next forty years, but The Drowned and the Saved was his most condensed and powerful work. It distills the insights achieved during a lifetime of emotional struggle and intellectual reflection.

It is fitting and proper that Levi would set aside an important chapter for Jean Améry, his friend, fellow survivor, and creative thinker about Auschwitz. Améry’s work Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigen (1966; At The Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1980) is a useful counterpart to Levi’s last work. Améry’s work is much more introspective, intensely angry, and militantly rebellious in tone and much more concerned with the problem of Jewish existence. Despite their differences and their disappointments, however, Levi and Améry kept their faith in the struggle for enlightenment and human decency. For them this is the only possibility for the salvation of humankind. Nevertheless, Levi is the better writer of the two, for he writes with great economy and controlled passion.

Like many Holocaust survivors who went on to become great writers, Primo Levi and Jean Améry took their own lives. Why they did so is open to many explanations, but these great souls who had suffered beyond all measure had made it clear that they feared that the Holocaust would be forgotten, would be obscured with convenient truths, and would lose its crucial lessons for humankind. These morally indefatigable men devoted their lives to telling their civilization about the mortal threats that lurk within it.

Primo Levi was the Dante of the twentieth century, the indispensable guide to the hell that was created on Earth. To read his works, particularly The Drowned and the Saved, is to be given some hope for an escape from the suffering from which he was not saved.

Sources for Further Study

Angier, Carole. The Double Bond: Primo Levi—A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Angier, Carole. “Second Opinion: Defender of the Memory of Auschwitz Gave Primo Levi His Subject, but Did That Make Him a Writer?” The Guardian, November 18, 1992.

Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. Translated by Steve Cox. London: Aurum, 1998.

Hartley, James. Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility After the Irreparable. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Leiter, Robert. “The Science of Life: The Literary Insights of a Chemist Turned Survivor.” Jewish Exponent 216, no. 14 (June 1, 2004): 20.

Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi: A Life. London: Hutchinson, 2002.