The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

I woke up this morning, sat on the end of the bed and allowed myself five minutes on gloom on hearing the news that corpulent fascist Nick Griffin has been elected MEP for the North West. Yes, that hallowed subsection of Englsih turf from whence I come, that produced a generation of my family that fought the Nazis, that sacrificed six years of their lives on aircraft carriers, in munitions factories and in the deserts of North Africa, has now produced one to represent us. There was, in this instance, only one place to turn, and that was to Primo Levi's final work, The Drowned and the Saved.

The biographical etails of Levi are easy enough, as an Italian Jew living in Mussolini's Italy he joined the anti fascist resistance in 1942. Levi always saw himself as being an italian first and foremost, but after his experiences at the hands of the Germans he felt consigned to be Jewish to be 'other' permanently.
He was caught in 1944 and was taken to an Italian holding camp and then transported to Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist kept him alive, working in a synthetic rubber factory shed during the freezing winter of 1944. I have read this book many times, and I have recently lent it to one of my pupils, who, i is my great pleasure to say, wnt on to read Levi's The Periodic Table.
Levi was consumed by guilt, by a shame that comes with surviving, he writes that the real witnesses to the holocaust were those that did not survive. Whilst he did not leavea suicide note when he fell to his death in 1987 it is widely speculated that the guilt of surviving had been a contributing factor.
Levi left the world with a hauntingly bleak poetic descriptiveness of life as a prisoner and a survivor. He expains in the book that the prisoner, on liberation has two responses, to turn inwardly and never speak of his torment and shame, or to adopt the opposite position and 'precieve in their imprisonment, the centre of thier life, the event that for good or evil has marked their entire existence'. Of escape he writes 'Even admitting that they managed to getacross the barbed wire, the electrified grille, elude the patrols, the surveillance of the sentinels armed with machine guns in sentry towers, the dogs trained for man hunts: In which direction could they flee? To whom could they turn for shelter? They were outside the world, men and women made of air'. The scope and depth of the powerlessness resonates through the reader with every word, the extent of our luxury, our privilge, our freedom is only tangible when we read such words. It becomes clear also that the privileges that we enjoy in a period of historically unrivalled peace and material prosperity have left us blind and deaf to such terrible and degrading violence.
That is why this is such a potent and timely book, it is written as a simple guide to the utterly incomprehensble, the testimony of a wise and moral individual who at the end of his life could nor forgive but strove always to understand.