The Drowned and the Saved
Forty years on, about the grey zone and about the shame carried by those who came back.
Written four decades after his imprisonment at Auschwitz, this set of essays records what Primo Levi came to understand about the camps once time had passed. The opening essay treats memory as an instrument that alters what it holds: the offender revises, the injured party rehearses, and the account hardens into a version that stands in for the event. Levi then examines the grey zone, the band of prisoners drawn into operating the machinery of their own destruction, where the line between victim and collaborator dissolves under coercion. A later essay on shame sets out the weight carried by those who returned: not relief but a persistent sense of having lived in another's place.
Levi works from his own testimony, doubting it as he goes, and separates what can be reconstructed from what memory has quietly rearranged. The Italian text appeared in 1986; Raymond Rosenthal's translation followed in 1988. For clinical work, it gives a measured account of survivor guilt, shame, and the slow deformation of traumatic memory.
About the author
Primo Levi
Primo Levi (1919 to 1987) was an Italian writer and chemist. Born in Turin, he graduated in chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941. As a Jew active in the anti-fascist resistance, he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where his training as a chemist helped him survive until the camp was liberated in 1945. He returned to Turin and wrote as a witness, most notably in If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved.
Details
- 1986
- Italian
- Abacus
- Abacus
- 9780349138640