The death of hope
Caroline Moorehead
THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED by Primo Levi Michael Joseph, £10.95, pp. 170 A, the end of The Truce, first pub- lished in Italy in 1963, Primo Levi writes about a dream that continued to visit him long after his liberation from Buna- Monowitz and return to Turin. In it, he is sitting at a table with his family or some friends; he feels relaxed. Gradually every- thing starts disintegrating around him: people, scenery, walls, all collapse, one by one; he is left in chaos, in the centre of a 'grey and turbid' nothing. He knows per- fectly well what it means, and he has always known it. 'I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside it'.
Levi never really left that Lager. His
new and last book, The Drowned and the Saved, published on the anniversary of his death last year, is all about remembering. The survivors of the Nazi concentration camps never truly forget, he says, and indeed they should not do so. The impulse that leads him and others like him to speak out, a 'strong and durable impulse', comes either out of a moral obligation they owe to those who died, or because it is the only way that they can exorcise the memory of what happened to them. 'We must be listened to', Levi concludes in the closing pages of the book, 'above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively been the witnesses of a fundamental, unex- pected event, fundamental precisely be- cause unexpected, not foreseen by any- one. . . It happened, therefore it can hap- pen again: that is the core of what we have to say'. In structure, The Drowned and the Saved is like a series of essays on the themes of complicity, shame, the distortion of mem- ory and the complicated aftermath of survival. Levi talks of shades of grey there is even a chapter entitled 'The Grey Zone' — but in reality he returns most often to polarisations: the drowned and the saved, those who remain silent and those who speak, those who helped and those who stood by. His is not a grey world, but one of human perfectability, albeit that of rational man.
Liberation should have brought happi- ness to the survivors; in fact, for most of them, it brought anguish. They found their countries devastated, their families dead, and as they felt themselves becoming men again, that is to say responsible, so the 'sorrows of men returned'. That anguish rapidly became not precisely shame, though it was seen as such: the guilt of having lived, at not having been among those who died. 'I felt innocent', writes Levi, 'yes, but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others'. Elsewhere in the book, he says:
The just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the mis- deeds that others and not they had commit- ted, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
Nor was it enough that the survivors should do the one thing that they could do, bear witness, for by definition they were not the 'true witnesses'. Levi has written of this before: that only those who died are the true witnesses, for the dead alone are in possession of all the facts.
What, then, is being witnessed? In what is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, chapter two, Levi picks his way through the degrees of complicity, from the 'picturesque fauna' of the sweepers, kettle-washers and interpreters, whose guilt he considers minimal, and the 'crema- torium ravens', the unhappy squads of men who fed the gas ovens with their victims, for whom he asks that 'a judgment . . . be suspended', to the kapos, whose powers were unlimited and who as human beings he declares 'execrable'. Any notion that Levi forgave the Germans is finally dispel- led. He sought to understand them, and he refused to succumb to the 'bestial voice of hatred', but he remains unforgiving. 'I repeat', he writes, 'the true crime, the collective, general crime of almost all Germans of that time was that of lacking the courage to speak'. Some Germans became murderous, corrupted by National Socialism to a point that they were barely human; but as a race they were cowardly. The 'negators of truth', then and now, those who sought to deceive themselves and continue to do so today, are 'man- kind's mortal enemy.'
There have been, Levi goes on to argue, other mass atrocities this century: Hiroshi- ma, the Gulags, the Vietnam war, and particularly the Cambodian killings of the mid- to late-1970s. But the concentration camps remain a unique phenomenon. 'Never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ing- enuity, fanaticism and cruelty.' That it might soon reoccur he considers unlikely in the West, or in Japan, where people remember. As for the rest of the world, 'it is prudent to suspend judgment'.
Levi has covered much of this territory before. The Drowned and the Saved can be read as an extra chapter, an appendix to a monumental and remarkable work on the concentration camps that began with If This is a Man and that has continued ever since, through both fact and fiction. As with everything he writes, he has a form of poetic clarity, an always intelligent and clear appraisal of men and their behaviour towards one another. Few have written as well about human suffering.
Paul Bailey, in an introduction, is right to argue that the time has come to stop speculating on why precisely Levi commit-
ted suicide, on whether he was ill, worried about his mother, or that the anguish of his memories proved too overwhelming. Yet there is something different, a new and sadder tone, in The Drowned and the Saved. Levi's earlier books left room for hope; here there is none. Not for sommer- si, the submerged, but not for the saved either, or indeed for mankind in general. It is as if, for more than 40 years, he sifted through the material in his mind and was able to find that it contained at least the possibility of optimism; but that at the end he perceived the good to be an illusion, and that only anguish was real.
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