The Drowned and the Saved

First published in Italy in 1986 as I sommersi e i salvati, The Drowned and the Saved, is a collection of eight essays by Primo Levi about his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The book was translated into English in 1988 by Raymond Rosenthal. Some critics categorize The Drowned and the Saved as a memoir, while others believe it to be an autobiography; still other critics name this book a treatise in which Levi conducts a systematic analysis of abstract concepts such as hatred, cruelty, and the fallibility of memory within the context of the Holocaust.

Levi was born in 1919 to Italian-Jewish parents, and, from a young age, proved himself to be a talented student with a keen interest in reading. As Fascist forces began to take over his home country in 1943, Levi and his family left for the north of Italy, where Levi joined the Italian resistance movement. After he acknowledged his Jewish background, Levi was sent to an Italian prison camp in 1944. He was soon deported to Auschwitz, a prison camp in Poland under German control. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army liberated the camp in January of 1945, enabling Levi to return home. More than 7,000 Jewish Italians were deported to concentration camps over the course of World War II; Levi was one of approximately 700 who survived.

Levi explores various facets of his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz throughout the essays. He focuses on the many different ways humans can treat other humans inhumanely, and employs first-person narrative to emphasize his analysis of experiences like trauma, shame, and imprisonment. By using stories to illustrate his points, Levi invites the reader to take part in witnessing the horror of the concentration camp phenomenon. Highly rational, Levi rarely engages with emotional language or excessive descriptions of suffering; rather, he allows the facts to speak for themselves, revealing awful truths with his characteristic lucid concision.

In one essay, Levi explores the consequences of entering into a complex collaborative relationship with the Schutzstaffel (SS), a relationship that improved one’s chances of survival in the concentration camp. Trained as a chemist in Italy, Levi possessed skills valuable to his captors. He became a member of a “privileged” set of prisoners whose status in the camp improved due to their ability to work with the SS.

The Drowned and the Saved was Levi’s last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. Some historians believe that Levi committed suicide, overwhelmed by a penetrating sense of guilt at having survived an experience that killed so many. Others believe that Levi could never have committed suicide and that his death was accidental; according to these historians, Levi was too much of a humanist and a believer in the power of reason to give in to such an impulse.