The Drowned and the Saved

In this chapter, Levi writes of the human need to communicate, describing the absence of communication as “ambiguous, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion” (95). He discusses incommunicability in the context of language barriers; he observed his fellow deportees from Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, Poland, Germany, and Hungary struggle. Everyone realized quickly that “knowing or not knowing German was a watershed” (97-98) after observing “the black men” (98) shouting in anger and impatience to make uncomprehending listeners “more responsive to the tone than the content of the message” (98). This treatment revealed that “[f]or these people we were no longer men; as with cows or mules, there was no substantial difference between a scream and a punch” (98).

According to Levi, the “frightfully uncultivated” men of Hitler believed that “whoever did not understand or speak German was a barbarian by definition” (99) and treated as such. Many of the prisoners who neither spoke nor understood German “died during the first ten to fifteen days after their arrival” (100) as they were unable to “orient themselves” (101). The survivors who lived through these early days without language experienced “a curious effect of this void and need for communication” (101) because “the undernourished brain suffers from a specific hunger of its own” (102).