Geoff Wisner

The Drowned and the Saved

by Primo Levi. Summit Books. 203 pages, $17.95.

There are at least four kinds of books about the Holocaust -- leaving aside the "revisionist" tracts that have appeared in recent years, seeking to convince a forgetful world that it never really happened. The histories -- like Raul Hilberg's monumental Destruction of the European Jews -- attempt to record all that is known about this enormous crime, to document it and set it in order for future generations. The memoirs and the novels provide the necessary human dimension to set against what can be the numbing mass of cruelty described in the histories. And finally there are the meditations, which undertake the slow, faltering process of understanding the Holocaust, of defining just what sort of people organized the deportations, manufactured the poison gas, carried out the selections, operated the crematoria, and collected the hair and the ashes and the gold teeth.

The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi's last completed work, is a meditation that that amplifies and deepens his earlier memoirs, which include the classic Survival in Auschwitz. Levi's intent is to understand, but he does not hold with the proverb that to understand is to forgive. Similarly, he avoids the slippery concept of "collective guilt," which so easily becomes the guilt of no one in particular.

I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.

Levi is interested in judging those responsible for the deaths and the gratuitous suffering, whether by their actions or their silence, and he realizes that as a witness and survivor he is one of the few with both the knowledge and the moral right to make those judgments. Still, he makes them with caution. His first chapter, "The Memory of the Offense," deals with the "drifting" of memory that reorganizes and falsifies events and emotions over the course of years. "The Gray Zone" discusses some of the many morally ambiguous cases, such as the "crematorium ravens" -- prisoners who for a few extra months of life were willing to do much of the dirty work of the mass killings, but who in some cases also helped organize the few revolts that broke out among the starved and brutalized prisoners.

The chapter on "Shame" patiently analyzes the cruel paradox of the crippling self-reproach that survivors often felt after their liberation. This feeling had many sources: the realization that one had been living like an animal, that one could have done more for one's fellow victims, and that it was rarely the very best people -- the kindest, bravest, most principled -- who survived. As a survivor one was in the company of those who looked out for themselves, who made compromises, who may even have betrayed their fellow prisoners. That this was done under excruciating and inhuman pressures did not always diminish the shame.

How much of this undeserved shame Primo Levi may have felt as one of the "saved" he does not say. We have no way of knowing how much it may have contributed to his "apparent suicide" in April last year. Suicides, he himself cautions us, admit of a "cloud of explanations." The important thing for us is how very much he was able to endure, and to remember, and to understand.

Published in the Harvard Post, March 4, 1988.



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Geoff Wisner The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. Summit Books. 203 pages, $17.95. There are at least four kinds of books about the Holocaust -- leaving aside the "revisionist" tracts that have appeared in recent years, seeking to convince a forgetful world that it never really happened. The histories -- like Raul Hilberg's monumental Destruction of the European Jews -- attempt to record all that is known about this enormous crime, to document it and set it in order for future generations. The memoirs and the novels provide the necessary human dimension to set against what can be the numbing mass of cruelty described in the histories. And finally there are the meditations, which undertake the slow, faltering process of understanding the Holocaust, of defining just what sort of people organized the deportations, manufactured the poison gas, carried out the selections, operated the crematoria, and collected the hair and the ashes and the gold teeth. The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi's last completed work, is a meditation that that amplifies and deepens his earlier memoirs, which include the classic Survival in Auschwitz. Levi's intent is to understand, but he does not hold with the proverb that to understand is to forgive. Similarly, he avoids the slippery concept of "collective guilt," which so easily becomes the guilt of no one in particular. I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth. Levi is interested in judging those responsible for the deaths and the gratuitous suffering, whether by their actions or their silence, and he realizes that as a witness and survivor he is one of the few with both the knowledge and the moral right to make those judgments. Still, he makes them with caution. His first chapter, "The Memory of the Offense," deals with the "drifting" of memory that reorganizes and falsifies events and emotions over the course of years. "The Gray Zone" discusses some of the many morally ambiguous cases, such as the "crematorium ravens" -- prisoners who for a few extra months of life were willing to do much of the dirty work of the mass killings, but who in some cases also helped organize the few revolts that broke out among the starved and brutalized prisoners. The chapter on "Shame" patiently analyzes the cruel paradox of the crippling self-reproach that survivors often felt after their liberation. This feeling had many sources: the realization that one had been living like an animal, that one could have done more for one's fellow victims, and that it was rarely the very best people -- the kindest, bravest, most principled -- who survived. As a survivor one was in the company of those who looked out for themselves, who made compromises, who may even have betrayed their fellow prisoners. That this was done under excruciating and inhuman pressures did not always diminish the shame. How much of this undeserved shame Primo Levi may have felt as one of the "saved" he does not say. We have no way of knowing how much it may have contributed to his "apparent suicide" in April last year. Suicides, he himself cautions us, admit of a "cloud of explanations." The important thing for us is how very much he was able to endure, and to remember, and to understand. Published in the Harvard Post, March 4, 1988.