The Drowned and the Saved

About The Drowned and the Saved

Overview

The Drowned and the Saved is a book of essays by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi on life and death in the Nazi extermination camps, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Auschwitz (Monowitz). The author's last work, written in 1986, a year before his death, The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach, in contrast to his earlier books If This Is a Man (1947) and The Truce (1963), which are autobiographical. Contents Preface The Memory of the Offense The Gray Zone Shame Communicating Useless Violence The Intellectual in Auschwitz Stereotypes Letters from Germans Conclusion Miscellaneous The title of one essay (The Grey Zone) was used as title for the film The Grey Zone (2001), which is based on a book by Miklós Nyiszli. See also Social Darwinism

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
— Interview with Daniel Toaff, Sorgenti di Vita (25 March 1983); translated by Mirto Stone
“We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”
— As quoted in The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994) by Eric J. Hobsbawm
“And we must remember that [Hitler and Mussolini's] faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
— The New Republic, Primo Levi's Heartbreaking, Heroic Answers to the Most Common Questions He Was Asked About "Survival in Auschwitz", Translated from Italian into English by Ruth Feldman (February 17, 1986)
“It is a pretty structure isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that “beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.”
— On the structure of alloxan, in "Nitrogen".
“The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.”
— "Ex-Chemist"
“To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.”
— "The Irritable Chess-Players"

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.