The Drowned and the Saved

"Primo Levi’s books all reflect his experiences in Auschwitz . Perhaps because he was a scientist, he wrote with a precision and definiteness, at the opposite pole from rhetoric. This gives his books immense power, as what he describes could only be diminished by any striving for effect. The Drowned and the Saved is his most reflective book on the Nazi genocide and on his own experiences and what he saw in other people. The chapter on “The Grey Zone” is a brilliant discussion of tragic choices and moral ambiguities. The Nazis made people operate the gas chambers as a way of deferring their own deaths. One of the most evil things about the Nazis was the way they tried to destroy not only their victims’ lives but also their moral integrity, by means of coercive moral dilemmas. “If you cooperate with us in rounding up your fellow Jews, we will take fewer of them than if you do not.” Levi writes about all this with great understanding of the pressures and how difficult they were to resist. He retains moral standards by which to judge people, but without glib moralising. Few people were either pure saints or pure villains. Those of us without his experience are rightly reluctant to criticise people who failed tests we have not had to face. But because Levi had experienced what he describes, his careful discriminations between degrees of good and bad in the “grey zone” have great authority."