The Drowned and the Saved

In this chapter, Levi discusses the predicament of prisoners who were coerced into collaborating with their captors, an experience that often led to deep feelings of shame and guilt when these prisoners survived. This situation is a difficult one to describe in unambiguous terms, Levi explains, because “the network of human relationships inside the Lagers was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors” (32-33). No solidarity amongst the prisoners existed, for example; rather, “there were instead a thousand sealed-monads” (33) and their manner of dealing with each other was often characterized by aggression and harshness. This aggression was planned, as the concentrationary system was designed to ensure that all prisoners viewed each other as adversaries.

A small group of prisoners were considered privileged, and “they represent a potent majority among survivors” (37); these survivors typically engaged in acts “astute or violent, licit or illicit, to lift oneself above the norm” (37). They experienced for themselves “a gray zone, with ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants” (38). Within this gray zone, “collaboration is born from multiple roots” (39), and prisoner-collaborators were bound to the Lager authorities via a deliberate and devious strategy that “burden[ed] them with guilt, cover[ed] them with blood, [and] compromise[d] them as much as possible” (39).

Levi discusses the motives behind collaboration after warning his readers that “it is imprudent to hasten to issue a moral judgment” (40) on the prisoners who felt compelled to collaborate: “the greatest responsibility lies with the system” (40). Levi himself “would lightheartedly absolve all those whose concurrence in the guilt was minimal and for whom coercion was of the highest degree” (40) like the low-ranking, non-violent “checkers of lice and scabies, messengers, assistants, assistants’ assistants” (40) whom he considered “coarse and arrogant […but] not regarded as enemies” (41). Levi is less able to pardon the chiefs, or Kapos, noting that “power corrupts” (43). The situation is complicated because the Kapos “were punished or deposed if they did not prove to be sufficiently harsh, but there was no upper limit” (43). As a result, “inside the Lager, on a smaller scale but with amplified characteristics, was reproduced all the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state” (44). This environment “attracted the human type who is greedy for power” (44), like many a Kapo who were formerly criminals “to whom a career as torturers offered an excellent alternative to detention” (45). Levi also acknowledges that the position of power enjoyed by the Kapos “is sought by the many among the oppressed who were contaminated by the oppressors and unconsciously strove to identify with them” (45). These “gray, ambiguous persons” (47) likely experienced “doubts or discomfort, or were even punished” (47), but no matter what they did, “the prisoners’ errors and weaknesses are not enough to rank them with their custodians” (47). For Levi, their need to survive explains everything.

Levi examines closely the situation of one particular group of prisoner-collaborators whose responsibilities included running the crematoria at the extermination camps; they were members of the “‘Special Squad’” (48). Though they enjoyed some privileges, most of them died before they could tell anyone about their experience. The few that did survive to see the Liberation are largely unwilling to speak of their time in the camps as members of the squads. Levi explains that the prisoners selected for the Special Squads were chosen according to their appearances of physical strength; the squads were “largely made up of Jews” (50), and because these prisoners understood the darkest secrets of the Lagers, they were separated from the other prisoners as well as from the outside world. Rumors about the Special Squad circulated amongst the others, but the details of “the intrinsic horror of this human condition” (51), even now, are hazy; alcohol was readily available to keep the members of the Special Squad in a state of “complete debasement” (51). Levi describes the creation of these squads as “National Socialism’s most demonic crime” (52) because the very existence of the squads sent a message from the members of “the master race” (52) to the people they desired to annihilate: “we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours” (53).

Levi relates an episode experienced by a survivor of the squads named Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian physician whose medical expertise was prized by the SS. Nyiszli remembers a time when two groups played soccer together, one group representing the Special Squad and the other representing the SS. Men from both groups spectated, “as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green” (54). This incident is memorable because nothing like it could have ever happened with any other group of prisoners; only the Special Squad would have experienced “equal footing” (54) of this kind.

Nyiszli had another remarkable experience that “deserves to be meditated upon” (54). Once, a young woman was found alive in the crematorium; she somehow survived the gas chamber, and the men of the Special Squad hid her and brought her food. These men, “debased by alcohol and the daily slaughter” (55), were changed by her presence having re-discovered their capacity for compassion. The girl is killed soon after her narrow escape from the gas, and Levi concludes his discussion of this event by asking important questions about the members of the Special Squad: “Why didn’t they rebel? Why didn’t they prefer death?” (58). Levi answers his own questions: some of the men did rebel and die for their attempts to revolt, but the others who “preferred a few more weeks of life (what a life!) to immediate death” (59) do not deserve to be judged. They have experienced a “death of the soul” (60) at the hands of the Nazis and cannot be held responsible for their actions.

Levi concludes the chapter with a story about a coin in his possession, “a coin for internal use in a ghetto” (61) in Lodz, Poland. The president, or Elder, of this ghetto was Chaim Rumkowski, an “energetic, uncultivated and authoritarian man” (63) who loved being in a position of power that “constituted social recognition” (63). For four years, Rumkowski was the leader of this Jewish community, and during that time, he minted money that was used to pay workers and to spend on food rations. Levi calls Rumkowski an “autocrat” (64) who organized police forces, gave speeches in “the oratorical technique of Mussolini and Hitler” (64) and decided that he was “a savior of his people” (65). Though Rumkowski enjoyed this position of authority and was complicit in many of the Nazi efforts, he did not receive special treatment. After the Nazis liquidated the ghetto in Lodz, Rumkowski received “a letter addressed to the Lager of his destination” (68) that promised him and his family special treatment. However, his position of privilege didn’t change the fact that his fate, like that of other Jews, was death in the gas chamber. Levi leaves the reader with a warning not to be like Rumkowski, who was “so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility” (71).

This chapter begins with a description of the stereotypical notions around the liberation of the camps that suggest “all hearts rejoice[d]” (72) upon the arrival of Allied forces. In reality, the opposite happened, and “almost always it coincided with a phase of anguish” (73). Levi describes how reactions differed amongst the prisoners, and many memories “are unconsciously stylized” (74) according to what others might conventionally expect rather than genuine memory. Levi mentions a memoirist named Filip Müller as an example of someone who “shuns rhetoric” (74); throughout his three-year imprisonment, Müller imagined being freed, but when the event took place, he felt depressed and “‘simply lay down on the ground in the woods and fell asleep’” (75), according to a passage from his book.

Levi writes of his own feelings upon being liberated, which he describes as “a vague discomfort” (76) that “contained diverse elements, and in diverse proportions for each individual” (78). A sense of shame sometimes originated in a recognition that “we had lived for months and years at an animal level” (78) and “our moral yardstick had changed” (78). Levi explains that everyone had stolen something at some point during their imprisonment, from each other and from their captors. When the prisoners were released, many reflected on their experience and found looking back too difficult; for this reason, “so many suicides occurred after (sometimes immediately after) the liberation” (79).

Historians point out that suicide during imprisonment rarely took place, and Levi offers three explanations for this fact. First of all, “suicide is an act of man and not of the animal” (79). Secondly, prisoners were too busy thinking about matters of survival to contemplate suicide. Thirdly, many suicides stem from a feeling of guilt, and “the harshness of imprisonment was perceived as punishment” (80), so few had a need to punish themselves with suicide when they were already suffering so intensely.

Levi describes the guilt experienced by many survivors upon their liberation as a realization that “we had not done anything, or not enough, against the system into which we had been absorbed” (80). He acknowledges that this reaction is not rational, but the fact remains that “almost everybody feels guilty at having omitted to offer help” (82). Since the prisoners were in a situation where it was “mandatory that you should first of all take care of yourself” (83), the survivors of the camps were most likely prisoners who lived by this truth and felt the shame of it later. Levi’s own experience with shame is demonstrated by a time when he shared a drink of water with one man, but not another; Levi had “chose[n] the third path, that of selfishness extended to the one who is closest to you” (85). Many months after the liberation, the man who did not drink confronted Levi about what happened; when they met as survivors, “the veil of that act of omission, that unshared glass of water, stood between us, transparent, not expressed, but perceptible and ‘costly’” (85).

After he returns home, Levi receives a visit from a religious friend who believes that “my having survived could not be the work of chance” (87), a notion Levi finds “monstrous” (87). The survivors of the Lagers were not “those predestined to do good” (87), but “the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the ‘gray zones’, the spies” (87). Though the friend thought that Providence saved Levi so that he could “bear witness” (88), Levi believes the true witnesses are the ones who did not survive the camps. These witnesses “lost the ability to observe, to remember, compare and express themselves” (90) so “[w]e speak in their stead, by proxy” (90).

Levi concludes the chapter with a mention of “the shame of the world” (91), experienced by those who are unable to enjoy the “screen of willed ignorance” (91) that Levi believes most Germans employed during the twelve years of Hitler’s regime. Levi cautions readers, explaining that the factors that led to the existence of the Lagers “can occur again and are already recurring in various parts of the world” (93).