The Drowned and the Saved | 
|  | | | Title: | The Drowned and the Saved | | Author: | Primo Levi | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 23 April, 1989 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 067972186X / 9780679721864 | | List Price: | $12.95 | | You Save: | $2.59 | | Amazon Price: | $10.36 | |
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Product Description
Levi wrote of the moral collapse that occurred in Auschwitz and the fallibility of human memory that allows such atrocities to recur. Levi's last book published before his death in 1987.
Amazon.com Review
This book, published months after Italian writer Primo Levi's suicide in 1987, is a small but powerful look at Auschwitz, the hell where Levi was imprisoned during World War II. The book was his third on the subject, following Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963). Removed from the experience by time and age, Levi chose to serve more as an observer of the camp than the passionate young man of his previous work. He writes of "useless violence" inflicted by the guards on prisoners and then concludes the book with a discussion of the Germans who have written to him about their complicity in the event. In all, he tries to make sense of something that--as he knew--made no sense at all.
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Customer Reviews:
• As Important As A Book Gets 04 August, 2007
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1U6C0LGA2H2Q2
• A Note 12 June, 2008
Just a note to correct the Amazon book description that states that Levi committed suicide. He did not. He fell to his death down a staircase in his apartment house.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AT4GDM7LT6B7J
• Trying To Understand The "un-understandable" 06 August, 2008
How does anyone explain the murder of hundreds of thousands by other human beings? Whether it's Armenians by Turks, Poles by Germans, Soviets by Soviets, Rwandans by Rwandans, Cambodians by Cambodians, Croats by Serbs, Serbs by Croats, Bosniaks by Serbs, Darfuris by Sudanese; the cruelty involved in the murders far outweights the "reasons" for the crimes.
No matter how angry one is with his fellow human beings, the systematic murder of ones neighbors is unfathomable. The murders in the ex-Yugoslavia are as random and systematic as those by Nazi Germany. Ethnic cleansing (to give it a title like a TV commercial) is no less horrendous than religious zealousness. To search out you fellow human being, and then murder them without rhyme or reason, except for their religion or the language they speak (is Serbo-Croatian that different from Croato-Serbian?) or the religious hierarchy they follow seems as absurd as to murder all the left-handed blonds with blue eyes.
Primo Levi spent the forty years after the Holocaust trying to fathom how one (anyone) survived in the "Lagers" (his name for the Camps). He was 'lucky' in that he was taken in 1944, when some prisoners were kept for their 'knowledge' as opposed to the immediate extermination of all who came off the trains. But even then, how does one live with the knowledge of what one human being can do to another, sometimes out of no other reason than boredom?
What is interesting in this volume is his discussion of the reaction of 'everyday' Germans, to the original volume, "Survival in Auschwitz". While most of his letters of from 'young Germans', born during and after The War, those by the older Germans are most enlightening. This book is important in the unbridled descriptions or the uselessness of torments for no use other than the pleasure of the torturers.
Zeb Kantrowitz
- Reviewed by customer ID: AKB2PYODH0TKS
• Astonishing And Vivid 11 July, 2007
Primo Levi's final memoir about the Nazi Holocaust is among the most provocative and compelling accounts of the Shoah in the entire literature. Indeed, it is one of the great political memoirs of recent years. Levi was an Italian chemist, anti-Nazi activist, and Jew who was sent to Auschwitz and famously documented the atrocities that he experienced in `Survival at Auschwitz,' one of the first memoirs to be widely read in Germany. This book is a profoundly introspective rumination, not on the particular horrors of the camps, but of their philosophical implications for human beings as a whole. In `The Grey Zone,' Levi explores the moral ambiguity of this moment in history, both in terms of the work of the Kapos and the rare but meaningful resistance from the Germans. Levi is open to the possibility of a moral spectrum, yet he remains unequivocally vociferous in his condemnation of National Socialism, and of the German people's complicity with this movement. There are many striking and haunting moments in `The Drowned and the Saved,' such as Levi's discussion of the Musselman, or the experience of palpable shame on the part of the Jewish victims. This book is a special memoir because Levi refuses to draw the reader via an explicit recollection of the litany of horrors that he experienced, but because he is willing to penetrate into the meaning and truth of the holocaust as human abomination. A true masterpiece, both in approach and in execution.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A114YQ7ZT9Y1W5
• Witnesses For The Lost 10 August, 2008
"The Drowned and the Saved" by Primo Levi, is different in one aspect from his earlier works dealing with his experiences in Auschwitz: in the previous books, he was still an impassioned young man, racing as it was to record his memories and experiences. For later in life, memory can become less exact and true, as he recounts in this book, a collection of reflections and observations about his experiences and what they have to say about that time and humanity in general. "The Drowned and the Saved" is a bibliography of sorts, an examination of one man's search to make sense out of the senseless, to open the eyes of those who were not there, to make sure that this horror is never forgotten, or repeated.
Primo Levi, while Jewish by birth, was agnostic by the time he was taken as a political prisoner to Auschwitz. He survived, thanks in part to his job as a chemist, but was still just as affected by the savagery around him. Levi explores different topics within the Lagers, and while distanced by time and experience, his observations are still cutting. Levi deftly talks of various topics - the useless violence inflicted upon prisoners, the shame that they felt in their situation, how language itself became degraded within the camp system, and how there are grey areas where blame and judgment are not necessarily easy or concrete. Levi closes his book with a look at correspondence he has received from Germans after the translation of "Survival in Auschwitz": almost all of them try to explain away their lack of knowledge and courage, and while Levi may be able to forgive, he isn't able to forget.
Primo Levi and other writers who share their experiences about the Holocaust are often referred to as witnesses: but Levi insists that the true witnesses of the darkest horrors are those who did not survive. It is truly impossible to know what their experiences were like because they are not here to tell. Levi also admonishes the easy and placating stereotypes that have arisen in recent times, offering that the actions of the Germans and the world during WWII cannot be judged by the standards of today. "The Drowned and the Saved" is an informative and thought-provoking book, offering insights into lessons that should never be forgotten, but existing in a world where this is a very real and terrifying possibility.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1NC9AGZOBI0M1
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