The Drowned and the Saved

Levi begins the Preface to this collection of essays with a date: 1942, the year during which news began to emerge of “the Nazi annihilation camps” (1). Reports of widespread cruelty and death spread amongst the public, only to be resisted and rejected, just as the Nazis had hoped. Levi describes the bad dreams that plagued many survivors of the Lagers while they were still imprisoned; in these dreams, they had gone home, and while trying to describe how they had suffered, they “were not believed, indeed were not even listened to” (2). Though much evidence of the concentration camps was destroyed intentionally, enough of the ruins still exist to ensure that “testimony survived” (3); the burning of archives means, however, “that even today there is discussion as to whether the victims were four, six, or eight million” (3).

When the German armies appeared to be winning, the temporary solution of “piling up the bodies, hundreds of thousands of bodies, in huge common graves” (4) seemed workable, Levi explains, but “after Stalingrad, there were second thoughts: best to erase everything immediately” (4). At this stage, the SS began to take “the greatest care to ensure that no witness would survive” (4), and these processes included the protection of secrets even amongst the Nazis themselves. To Levi, “the failure to divulge the truth about the Lagers represents one of the major collective crimes of the German people, and the most obvious demonstration of the cowardice to which Hitlerian terror had reduced them” (6). Though “[w]illed ignorance and fear” (7) likely explains the silence of “many potential ‘civilian’ witnesses” (7), Levi does not pardon the “[s]mall and large industrial companies, agricultural combines, agencies and arms factories [that] drew profits from the practically free labor supplied by the camps” (7).

Levi warns readers of the risks of relying on the perspectives and memories of the survivors when trying to reconstruct this missing history. He explains that “the prisoners could barely acquire an overall vision of their universe” (8) while existing in the inhumane conditions of the Lagers, nor could they comprehend their location or the changes in their conditions. Those “‘normal’ prisoners” (9) who escaped death were “overwhelmed by an enormous edifice of violence and menace” (9) and “paralyzed by suffering and incomprehension” (9). The most reliable historians are ones who had “a privileged observatory without bowing to compromises” (10), and these so-called privileged ones were often the political prisoners, not the Jews and not the criminals.

Levi points out that as time passes, “one [has] begun to understand that the Nazi slaughter was dreadfully ‘exemplary’” (11), but history will suffer from the stylization of memories. As such, “[t]his book means to contribute to the clarification of some aspects of the Lager phenomenon which still appear obscure” (13). Though other tragedies like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, “the shame of the Gulags” (14), the Vietnam War, the genocide in Cambodia and “the desaparecidos  of Argentina” (14) have all been acknowledged as atrocious, Levi asserts that the Nazi concentration camp was unique in its “combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty” (14). Levi feels that his task is to clarify details of the phenomenon; after all, society has tried to explain away “the death of at least sixty million Indios” at the hands of Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century “by declaring that they were ‘things of another time’” (14) and he fears society will do the same when speaking of the Holocaust.