The Drowned and the Saved.

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 standards.

The lost morality of Auschwitz prevented Levi from believing in any form of divine providence. A secular Jew, he is proud to have overcome the impulse to pray for divine intervention on the threshold of the gas chamber. The shattering of this faith by the senseless violence of National Socialism is the theme of the book.

Levi speaks frequently about the incidence of suicide among the survivors following their liberation. He tells the story of Jean Amery, a respected French intellectual before the war whose life after liberation was a continual battle against humiliation and depression. "Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured...," Amery says. "Faith in humanity...is never acquired again." He committed suicide in 1978.

The reference to Amery is haunting, for Levi threw himself into the well of the four-story spiral staircase in his apartment building last April. One cannot know the exact reason for his apparent suicide, but the death is a tragic if logical conclusion to his life. A chemist by profession, Levi worked for 30 years in a paint factory, writing mostly on weekends. He wrote out of an absolute need to tell about Auschwitz, and his lucid and unpretentious prose reflects the simple drive of the storyteller. Yet Levi's story, one of shame and anguish, offered no chance of full recovery.