Levi Primo The Drowned And The Saved Sparknotes

With all that was happening in Europe at the time its good to have someone that survived the events that happened in Germany during WWII. Levi Primo was that survivor and is now regarded as one of the best sources of what really happened in the concentration camps (he was in Auschwitz in 1942). He does a great job right at the beginning drawing you in and earning your trust when he explains "This very book is drenched in memory . . . it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, 34) he is saying that these are just memories and stories, they become distorted with time and influence. Also the only people with the real full experience were the ones who died (drowned) and the survivors
(saved) would just have to try and tell the real story. Throughout the whole time Levi was in the Auschwitz he talks a lot about how he feels this intense shame, and how that shame causes him to lose self-respect, dignity and motivation. He explains how the only thing that mattered while in the camp from day to day was survival. You had no time to think about anything else, if you stopped to help someone else you risked making yourself vulnerable. “The selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" survived” (Levi, Primo, 82). You just kept to yourself and made sure you survived. He says he feels shame and guilt (which he seems to use as synonyms) because he never stopped to try and help anyone. This is especially true after he is liberated; he felt as if because he had survived he should have done something and owed something to those who died. Levi wants to explain to us the real story of what it was like to experience this first hand and make sure that nothing like this will ever happen. When Levi starts to talk about how the Nazi guards used “useless violence” (Levi, Primo, 5) to install fear into the inmates. They would beat them and do things to them that no one would ever wish upon another soul, he talks about the “senseless and symbolic violence” (Levi, Primo, 5) that they used. If a guard was beating another inmate for no reason and you even looked at him the wrong way you could be next, so it was best just to keep to yourself and try and survive day by day. With all of this violence going on there is no wonder how the prisoners felt this shame that he talks about. As much as one might have wanted to help someone else out who was about to get beat or killed you just couldn’t. Levi says with both the shame that they all felt and the constant fear that any day they could be killed, their moral “yardstick” (Levi, Primo, 75) was lowered. This means that they felt so bad about themselves that their morals were basically gone and all that really mattered to them was survival they really didn’t have time to think about anything else. He admits that those who had faith in religion may have had a little bit of an upper hand because they had something to believe in after death and they knew if they didn’t make it out of this that there was still hope for them in the after life. Levi himself was not religious but does admit to one time when he was at his worst to almost praying for help but he says this "one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, not when you were losing" (146). When Levi and the rest of the prisoners were finally liberated from the camp he tells us that many of them went on to commit suicide because they couldn’t handle that they had let this happen and that they were so distraught and mentally unable to cope with what had happened that this was their way out.
They had endured some of the worst possible things that you could imagine and when they got out they just couldn’t handle the normal things of everyday life. Levi explains that when he got out he felt so much shame because he wasn’t able to prevent or help any of those people that had lost their lives in the concentration camp. He goes on saying that the only real people that felt the full power and horribleness of the camps were those who actually died and those that survived were just trying to explain what it most have felt like to have been one of those who had died. One of the most important things that Levi wants us as readers to understand is that because this happened and the Germans tried to cover it up after, that we need to learn about what really happened so that history does not repeat itself. Although history is bound to repeat itself we need to make sure that nothing like this happens again, at least to this degree, some people would argue that it has already happened but we need to make sure that in our life time nothing like this happens
again.
Throughout the whole book Levi has a couple of main topics and they are the shame that he and all of the other prisoners felt and then that of whom he kind of blames the German people for all of this. The shame comes from the horrible conditions and the lack of moral dignity, but the anger that he as towards the German people as a whole is because even though most of them know what was going on they choose to do nothing about it. What he really wants us to take out of the book is that these are the real experiences that people went through and not the made up stories by the Germans to cover their butts. Now that we know what really happened in these camps he passes on the responsibility to us to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.