The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

[Diane]

The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi
4.5/5 stars

The third book in the Auschwitz trilogy. The author, a survivor, committed suicide at 68 one year after its publication. This book looks at society 40 years after the Holocaust. Given that the author committed suicide you can see the darkness in its pages. Focusing on humans who do the inhumane, an important story told from first person knowledge but not for the faint of heart. I could only handle one chapter a day due to the seriousness of the matter. Primo Levi is told by a religious friend that one of the reasons he survived is to bear witness which is one of the reasons he wrote his books. I can tell that he takes this responsibility seriously and he still has guilt for surviving.

[Gail]

The Drowned and the Saved is a collection of essays that speaks to Primo Levi's experience in the concentration camp Auschwitz looking back after 40 years. In the book he concisely details how the Nazi dehumanized their victims both to make it easier to control them and also to make it easier to annihilate them. He speaks of people brought down to the level of animal need for food with loss of any human dignity and how that contributed to their shame and guilt. He speaks to how the real witnesses to the tragedies are all gone, as those that truly felt the full measure died, only those who were lucky, or in some small way privileged even if the privilege was that they healthier to begin with or had a trade the Nazi needed at the moment, lived through it. He also speaks to the nature of memory, both in the individual and in society. He was fearful that not only would the world forget, that it would not brace itself to defend against other horrors against humanity in the future. A most depressing and yet important book.

[Kristel]

I read this in 2010....This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. The problem of the fallibility of memory, the techniques used by the Nazis to break the will of prisoners, the use of language in the camps and the nature of violence are all studied. It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in Auschwitz. It is well written. My Levi is an agnostic. He makes reference and quotes many works of literature such as Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and Mazoni's The Betrothed and especially Dante.

[Tatjana]

My rating 5 stars.
I really liked the book. I will just repeat that I was amazed how Levi describes people. I think that those features of people he was pointing at are universal, but just become extremes in extreme conditions such is the camp. This argumentation of how people will behave among oppressors was so convincing. Also, how after everything was over people will try to defend themselves in terms of guilt. How people will twist their memories and convince others in something they would like to believe. It is the best part of the book, according to my opinion. This is why I particularly liked the first few chapters of the book.

[Jessica]

I rated this one between 4 and 4.5 stars. I finished reading it yesterday evening.

The Drowned and the Saved is a collection of essays by Primo Levi where he analyzes the experience of himself and others in Nazi concentration camps. Levi approaches the topic from several different angles..psychologically, scientifically, philosophically. A lot of the focus is on the fallibility of memory and how people want to make things black & white...good guys vs. bad guys. He also discusses techniques that the nazis used to dehumanize the prisoners in order to both control them and to decrease their guilt over their treatment of their fellow humans. A repeated theme is how he believes that only those who were privileged in some way (whether healthier to start with or by taking up a job for the nazis at the camp, etc. ) survived the camps and that the true victims died. He states that those were died are the ones who could've truly shared the TRUE experience of being in a concentration camp. Overall, this was a powerful, emotional but important read.

[Pip]

5 stars
This is a collection of essays about the questions that writing about the Holocaust raises. It was written 40 years after his book If This Is a Man. He seems to be dispairing that the Holocaust may be forgotten, or worse, replicated. He addresses the reasons why some managed to survive, and how their survivors' guilt affected the rest of their lives; why some prisoners became collaborators, and how memories are individual and changeable. It is an extremely intelligent and provocative read that was appropriate to finish on Holocaust Memorial Day.

[Diane]

Rating: 5 stars

A powerful collection of essays relating to the author's experience as a concentration camp prisoner 40 years prior. The book addresses the motivations and behaviors of some of the prisoners in their efforts to survive.

[Pamela]

This third part of the Auschwitz trilogy consists of a number of essays written in the 1980s, looking back to Levi’s experiences in Auschwitz and attempting to understand and explain aspects of these experiences. He refers to characters and events documented in the previous two volumes of memoir If This Is a Man • The Truce

Given the 40 years that passed since the events of the earlier books, this has a more detached and restrained tone and it lacks their painful immediacy. The issues explored are interesting, such as the question of how certain people managed to survive, the experience of survivors guilt and shame, and the reactions of readers in Germany to his books. As someone who has studied languages, I was particularly interested in the essay on communication, which focuses on the jargon of the Lager and the impact that linguistic ability (for example, understanding some German) could have on survival.

I found this less compelling and emotionally impactful than the memoirs, but still worth reading for the clarity of ideas and the practical challenges contained within the intellectual ideas.

[Rosemary]

This is an amazing book, very thoughtful and incisive on how something like the Holocaust can happen and play out as it did.

One of the few non-fiction books on the list and perhaps the only one that is not memoir? But I may be wrong about that.

[Jenna]

Levi is a clear, careful writer. But he is wrestling with the foggiest of topics, memory, especially memory of trauma, and so sometimes this loses the thread. His most interesting statements are early on - having survived he is not really a witness to the worst, because the worst did not happen to him. Experiences ranged the gamut: no one is by definition a good or bad person based on intrinsic characteristics, only by their behavior, and that there are egoists, sadists, criminals and cowards to be found in all human groups, just as there are heroes. People can genuinely fool their own memories and make things go away, restructure past actions. This seems an important idea to hold on to just now - behave as you should, hold to your moral code, project yourself into the future with the true memories of todays actions. You might be able to hide from your own memory in the future, but others will remember you as you are, wouldn't you rather be proud to remember yourself truly?