Reviews for The Drowned and the Saved

The average rating for The Drowned and the Saved based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-05 00:00:00 Adam Howard This is a eyes wide open analysis of many aspects of what Auschwitz and the other Nazi atrocities meant to writer and survivor Primo Levi. Beautifully written prose full of warmth despite the gruesome topic. Especially interesting were the chapters on Gray Areas (Kapos and other collaborators in the camps), Stereotypes, and the Letters From Germans he received after publishing the German translation of his first book Survivor of Auschwitz/If This Is A Man. Sadly, 34 years after its publication, the errors he warns about are being made again and the risk of a slip towards brutality and horror could truly reoccur. There are some remarkable and terrifying insights brought here by Primo Levy: The pressure that a modern totalitarian state can excercise over the individual is frightful. Its weapons are substantially three: direct propaganda or propaganda camouflaged as upbringing, instruction, and popular culture; the barrier erected against plurialism of information; and terror. Nevertheless, it is not permissible to admit that this pressure is irresistable, especially in the brief twelve-year term of the Third Reich. (p. 29). In year 3 of Trumpism, Fox is definitely used as armed propaganda and entertainment and is clearly a barrier to plurality of viewpoints and the terror of child-parent separation, the absence of the rule of law, the blatant corruption...all are rather eerie signs of an uncertain future. When dump tried to compare sides between the white supremacists and the black populations they intended terrorise in Charlottesville (albeit with tiki lamps), it is a very close parallel to how the Nazis terrorized Jews (in fact, Goebbels and Hitler borrowed heavily from their vocabulary and techniques while finding them crude), Levy reminds us "I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer." (p. 48) The Jews were taken only because they were Jewish, not for any other reason whatsoever, just like people of color are vilified by the extreme right in the US. In the excellent chapter, The Grey Zone, Levy dissects the problem of guilt for the victims calling it "National Socialism's most demonic crime" because in order to survive, the victims in Auschwitz were obliged to become amoral (stealing bread, resisting the urge to help others, and forced in the case of the Sonnerkommando to operate the machines of death). This institution represented an attempt to shift onto others - specifically the victims - the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence. (p. 53) Primo asks us to make a thought experiment and imagine that we are someone who lived for months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, fatigue, promiscuity, and humiliation; that [we have] seen die around [us], one by one, [our] beloved; that [we are] cut off from the world, unable to receive or transmit news; that, finally, [we are] loaded onto a train, eighty or a hundred persons to a boxcar; that [we travel] into the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and that [we are] at last flung inside the walls of an indecipherable inferno. (p. 59) It is truly hard to unflinchingly perform this thought experiment without damp eyes if one is perfectly honest with oneself. He closes this chapter with a moving and vivid passage: 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. (p. 69) In the next chapter about Shame, he talks about suicide and why it was rare in the Lager (the German word for Concentration Camps) on page 76: (1) suicide is the act of man and not of animal and the prisoners were reduced to the state of feral, starving animals (2) when one is dying, one is much to busy to think about death. All one's organism is devoted to is breathing (This is actually a quite from Italo Svevo's excellent The Confessions of Zeno that Levi uses.) (3) there was no need to punish oneself by suicide because of a (true or presumed) guilt: one was already expiating it by one's daily suffering. The sad coda to this section is that it is likely that Levy actually committed suicide in 1987, 41 years after coming home after all the suffering and less than a year after publishing this incredibly lucid analysis of his ordeal. Besides this shame induced in the victims, he also calls out the vaster shame, the shame of the world...there are those who, faced by the crimes of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not to feel touched by it. (p. 85). This is precisely the same shame coming from racism that white supremacists repress when they try to proclaim that slavery was better than life back in Africa for african americans. And, for Levy, is a poor, invalid excuse for inaction or active participation in crimes. In the chapter on Communication, he details how important language was in the camps and how the prisoners (and particularly the Jews) who were not even called "men" but rather "Häftlinge" or prisoners and how the rubber truncheon was called der Bolmetcher, the interpreter: the one who made himself understood to everybody. (p. 92) Beyond the specific context of the Lager, he gives another example how the modification of communication operates at the state level:in countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. The well-known example of this is the crazed genetics preached in the USSR by Lysenko, which in the absence of discussion (his opponents were exiled in Siberia) compromised the harvests for twenty years. (p. 103). One does not need to think too hard to see how this still applies to the world we live in now where anyone who speaks up against the current US administration is vilified on Twitter and the red base just repeats empty MAGA(t) slogans while the environment is destroyed, Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid are slashed, and illogical trade wars decimate the heartland. There are startling stories of resistence throughout, such as that of Mala (p. 156) who had resolved to die her own death and rather than being hanged cut her wrists with a razor and was trampled to death and died before being taken to the crematorium. There is a chapter of exchanges between Primo and Germans after the translation of his book into their language that is quite relevatory. In the Conclusion, there is a warning for us: It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. I do not intend to nor can I say it will happen; as I pointed out earlier, it is not very probable that all the factors that were unleashed by the Nazi madness will occur again simultaneously but precursory signes loom before us. Violence, "useful" or "useless," is there before our eyes: it snakes either through sporatic and private episodes, or government lawlessness, both in what we call the first and second worlds...In the Third World it is endemic and epidemic. It only awaits its new buffoon (there is no dearth of candidates) to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory, and so contaminate the world. (p. 199-200) Who could not read this and not feel a shiver down their spine at calling Mexicans "rapists," separating children from parents, erecting a useless wall (not as promised paid for by Mexico), etc. etc. The warning signs are all there. Sadly, in the 34 years since this book was written, we seem to have come full circle. As for the passive German population during this period, we would be wiser to heed the lessons of history: The term torturers alludes to our ex-guardians, the SS, and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greatest part, diligent followers and functionaries, some fanatically convinced of Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient. All of them had been subjected to the terrifying miseducation provided for and imposed by the schools created in accordance with the wishes of Hitler and his collaborators, and then completed by the "SS" drill, Many had joined this militia because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence, or even just to escape family problems. Some, very few in truth, had changes of heart, requested transfers to the front lines, gave cautious help to prisoners or chose suicide. Let us be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted it in the beginning, out of moral laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the "beautiful words" of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game. (p. 202-203) Wake up, ghost. We cannot allow history to repeat itself. Again and again. Fino's Reviews of Books about the Holocaust Nonfiction: If This Is A Man/The Truce by Primo Levy The Periodic Table by Primo Levy The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levy The Night by Elie Wiesel Auschwitz by Laurence Rees Fiction: The Tatooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris Travel to Krakow to visit Auschwitz: Krakow:City Guide [Blue Guides]

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-01 00:00:00 Eric Caldwell "The drowned and the saved" is a thoughtful, lucid reflection on the Holocaust phenomenon. Primo Levi tries to find answers for different aspects of the concentration camps. He explains the behavior of the inhabitants and of those who guard them. This book tries to explore the psychology of this tragedy, and to offer insight in the human condition. It is very different from his memoir Survival in Auschwitz (and his second book The Reawakening) which gave a more thorough, detailed account of his life and experiences in the Lager. Although Survival in Auschwitz was written several decades before this book, It should be read first, as Levi refers to it often. Kenzaburō Ōe already stated in his book Hiroshima Notes, that he regards the victims of the A-bomb as moralists, as 'interpreters of human nature' and that they have unique powers of observation and expression concerning what it means to be human. This can also be applied to the victims of the Holocaust, especially to Primo Levi. In each of his essays in this book, Levi offers an intellectually stimulating viewpoint of the human condition. His writings go far beyond just a depiction of life in the Lager. Primo Levi argues that the survivors, who were the opportunists, are not the true witnesses. The true witnesses were the ones who suffered the most but did not survive. The survivors only speak in stead of these true witnesses. Only by listening to them, we can remain true human beings. The only regret I had after reading this book, is that I don't understand Italian well enough to read the original version. I don't know if it was the Dutch translation, but some parts were hard to read because of uncommon word combinations and unusual, complicated sentences. 8/10