The Drowned and the Saved

Levi writes about his survival of Auschwitz factually, describing the movements and decisions that led to his survival in precise detail. Even as death surrounded Levi while he was imprisoned, he chose to focus his limited energies on living, displaying a remarkable capacity for resilience. The humanism of Levi’s writing on resilience and survival is apparent in his focus on his own powers of observation. He does not attempt to dissect or explain the evil of his captors; rather, he focuses his eye, and his pen, on the details of the experience of imprisonment and the stories of his compatriots in the camps. By giving more space and language to the lives of the prisoners, and less to the descriptions of the Nazi commanders of the camps and the supporters of Hitler who enabled such atrocities to take place, Levi emphasizes the values of rational thought and human experience and deemphasizes the powers of evil and sadism that characterize the Holocaust in general.