- Person
- Primo Levi
- Lived
- 1919–1987
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Italian
The story
The phrase "the drowned and the saved" had followed Primo Levi since the beginning of his career. It was the working title of the manuscript that became If This Is a Man, and a chapter of that book used it to describe the two kinds of people that emerged when prisoners were pushed to the extreme. Four decades after his liberation, he returned to it for his last book.
Published by Einaudi in April 1986, a year before his death, The Drowned and the Saved was the summation of all his reflections on the camps. Where his earlier books had told his own story, this one took an analytical approach. Its chapters examined the memory of the offence, shame, communication, useless violence, the intellectual in Auschwitz and stereotypes, and one gathered the letters he had received from German readers.
The best known essay is The Grey Zone. In it Levi looked at the prisoners who had been forced or tempted to work for the Germans, helping to keep the rest of the inmates in line. He asked what could turn a concert violinist into a callous taskmaster. In his typical style, he refused to pass easy judgement. Instead he presented the evidence and asked the questions, showing how a system of terror could draw its victims into complicity.
Other essays dealt with the unreliability of memory and with the question of what ordinary Germans had known. Levi concluded that most of them had not known the full extent of the crimes because they did not want to know. The book is careful, honest and often uncomfortable, and it refuses both accusation for its own sake and easy consolation.
The essay's title has passed into wider use. It gave its name to the 2001 film The Grey Zone, based on a book by Miklós Nyiszli, and Levi's grey zone is now widely used as a moral concept in discussions of how people behave under extreme pressure. The book remains one of the most important works of reflection written by a survivor of the Holocaust.
Why it matters
The 'grey zone' gave historians, philosophers and students a precise way to think about complicity, coercion and moral responsibility under tyranny.
About Primo Levi
Turin chemist and Auschwitz survivor whose If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table and The Drowned and the Saved are among the most important writings on the Holocaust.
More about Primo Levi
- Primo Levi made sure Germans could read his testimonyPrimo Levi closely supervised the German translation of If This Is a Man, published in 1961, which he considered perhaps the most important translation of all.
- Primo Levi wrote one of the defining Auschwitz testimoniesMonths after returning from Auschwitz, chemist Primo Levi wrote If This Is a Man. First printed by a small press in 1947, it became one of the most widely read accounts of the camps.
Sources
- Primo Levi Wikipedia
- Biography Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi
- The Drowned and the Saved Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.