The Drowned and the Saved.

• Author: Montgomery, Charles

The Drowned and the Saved. Primo Levi. Summit, $17.95. Judeo-Christian culture takes comfort in believing that men who suffer unjustly, enduring privation and physical torture, can retain their moral fortitude and even draw strength from it. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, shows how this notion stopped at the door of the Nazi death camps. History may portray the prisoners as martyrs, but Levi believes they were far from innocent. Rather than sanctifying its victims, Levi writes, Nazism degraded them.

To survive, one had to live as an animal in a state of nature. Constant theft forced the prisoners to cling to their meager possessions at all times. Unselfish prisoners, those who assumed the burdens of the weak or shared their rations with the starving, were among the first to die. "Men died not despite their valor but because of it," Levi writes. The shame Levi felt from his failure to maintain solidarity with other Jews grew more acute after his liberation from Auschwitz. His postwar experience, like that of other survivors, refutes the myth that liberation brings "quiet after the storm."

Levi leaves no doubt that he finds the Nazis guilty for their crimes. He is less certain about Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. The collaborators ranged from the low-ranking functionaries to the "Kapos," the chiefs of the labor squads who beat the prisoners and participated in their selections for the gas chambers. Levi maintains that the need to survive--for collaboration was the prisoner's only hope--makes it difficult to judge guilt or innocence by conventional...