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Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved
Summary
The first-person narrator becomes a “we” as Levi steps into the classic researcher role, observing from a vantage point in the future looking back at the past. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive “biological and social experiment.” With the rigor of a scientific researcher, he frames the goal of the experiment, describes methods, evaluates hypotheses, interprets data, and reaches conclusions.
The researcher version of Levi aims to discern the necessary intrinsic qualities and external circumstances that aid human survival. The methods he summarizes succinctly: The Nazis gather thousands upon thousands of individuals of all ages, nationalities, languages, cultures, and customs to live under strictly controlled privation. The research subjects are Häftlings of all stripes, that is, prisoners in general, whether Jews, political agitators, or criminals. The controls are free men in civilized life who have spiritual, financial, and legal safety nets. The variables are isolation, starvation, and hard labor.
Levi evaluates several hypotheses, all of which stem from the metaphor that, while in the camp, one must learn how to swim or float to save themselves, or one will sink and drown. The view that once the trappings of civilization are removed, men devolve to brute self-interest, he rejects as simplistic. In contrast, the activity of Darwinian natural selection, the survival of the fittest, can be seen in the statistics of the Lager populations. Levi advances his theory of the drowned and the saved to expand on how individuals develop into the profile needed for survival. The prototype of the walking dead is Null Achtzehn. The models for a survivor are more variable.
By way of illustrating his conclusions, Levi presents four case studies of survivors: Schepschel, the once wealthy, always hard-working Polish saddler who has somehow survived in the camp for four years; Alfred L., a well-groomed man in his fifties; Elias Lindzin, the short but powerful and intense man; and Henri, a twenty-two-year-old prisoner with the ability to develop friendships even among high-placed officials. For each man, Levi imagines an epitaph.
Analysis
The narrator shifts narrative voice, from “I” to “we,” to signal a change in perspective from the present to hindsight. Here at the center of the book, Levi gives the reader the benefit of his observations. He approaches his assessment of the camp experience with the classic rigor of a scientific researcher analyzing the findings of an experiment. He evaluates several hypotheses, marshals the evidence, and draws informed conclusions. Levi places the analysis here to mark the turning point in his memoir just as rising action signals the coming crisis in a novel. The dynamics of the power struggle within the Auschwitz world are rapidly building to a crescendo.
Levi’s metaphor of drowning or being saved illustrates that a person must struggle to survive, must swim to the surface rather than sink to the bottom. The path of least resistance leads to selection by the ruling authorities for the gas chamber. That the majority take this path indicates to Levi that it is the easiest path. They follow orders, eat only what’s provided, and observe the rules. The drowned are alike in that they have no story to distinguish them. The swimmers, however, or those who figure out how to swim and save themselves, all have stories as different as they are from each other. Within the four case studies that Levi presents lie the characteristics that enabled the men to survive. Levi’s keen powers of observation and astute judge of character enable him to activate his own will to live and overcome his own inertia. He still looks for the secret to survival.
