The Drowned and the Saved is a book of essays on life in the Nazi extermination camps by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Auschwitz. 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, whereas If This Is a Man (1947) and The Truce (1963) were autobiographical.
Editorial Reviews
“By the end of his life Levi had become increasingly convinced that the lessons of the Holocaust were sooned to be lost as it took a place among the routine atrocities of history. The Drowned and the Saved is a dark meditation on the meaning of the Nazi exterminations after the passing of forty years.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The Drowned and the Saved is his last word on the massacres, on Jews an Germans, and on other related topics. It is a reflective discussion…of what can in some measure be understood, though much lies beyond understanding, like the stone ruins of a civilization to which we have no key.” —The New York Review of Books
“The Drowned and the Saved…is a detonation all the more volcanic because so unexpected….Gradually, cumulatively, rumble by rumble, it leads to disclosure, exposure—one can follow the sizzle flying along the fuse.” —New Republic
“One of the most important and gifted writers of our time.” —Italo Calvino
About the Author
Born to a Jewish family in Turin in 1919, Primo Levi was trained as a chemist. During World War II, he was arrested as a member of a partisan group and deported to Auschwitz. After the camp’s liberation, he returned to Italy and worked as a chemist, writing only on the side. His first book Survival at Auschwitz was a personal account of his year at the camps. The follow-up memoir The Reawakening cemented Levi as a leading authority on the Holocaust. Other books by Levi include Periodic Table, If Not Now, When?, The Monkey’s Wrench, Other People’s Trades, The Drowned and the Saved, and more. Primo Levi died in 1987 after falling down his apartment’s stairway. Biographers remain divided as to whether his fall was a suicide or an accident.
