The Drowned and the Saved

In his Introduction to The Drowned and the Saved, Paul Bailey begins by maintaining Primo Levi’s “deeply held conviction” (ix) that the survivors of the Holocaust are not “in full possession of the terrible truth” (ix). The true witnesses are the drowned of the book’s title: “the drowned, the submerged, the annihilated” (ix). Levi, like the others who were the saved, “speak in their stead, by proxy” (x).

Bailey asserts that the book “dispels the myth that Levi forgave the Germans for what they did to his people” (x). Levi is not able to forgive, but neither does he give in to the easy emotion of hatred; rather, he is “dismayed by the lack of reasonableness in his fellow human beings” (x). Bailey employs quotes from one of Levi’s other books, If This Is A Man, to reinforce this point, and he also mentions Levi’s correspondence with German readers during which Levi “received penitent letters from the innocent, not the guilty” (xi).

Bailey mentions other important points that Levi makes in The Drowned and the Saved, including the fact that “[t]here were no ‘beautiful words’ in the Lagers” (xiii). Instead, each Lager (the German military term for camp), “had its own peculiar