THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED <i> by Primo Levi; translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal (Vintage International: $8.95) </i>

Author of such compelling works as “Survival in Auschwitz,” bearing witness to the atrocity that was the death camp, as well as works of fiction (“If Not Now, When?” and “The Periodic Table”), Primo Levi discusses in this volume the phenomenon that was Nazi Germany and the Final Solution.

“Notwithstanding the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shame of the Gulags, the useless and bloody Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide, (and) the desaparecidos of Argentina, the Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum. . . . Never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.”

Levi writes that the SS guardsmen and functionaries were not “twisted individuals” but actually “made of the same cloth as we . . . some fanatically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient.”

He writes as well of the shame that plagues death camp survivors (“Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another?”) and of the feelings of guilt at survival that often led to suicide not during imprisonment but after Liberation. Levi quotes the Austrian philosopher Jean Amery, who was tortured by the Gestapo: “Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world.” Amery killed himself in 1978.