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
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