The Drowned and the Saved Chapter Summary & Analysis - Chapter 3, Shame Summary

Chapter 3, Shame Summary and Analysis

Few survivors feel at Liberation the happiness depicted in literature and the movies, for most are too surrounded by tragedy, exhausted, and alone. All humans know that anguish whose cause cannot be labeled. The shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his registration number to the to-be-gassed list.

Discomfort over re-acquired freedom is different for each, but all feel diminished by having lived at an animal level, without emotions and with their moral yardstick changed by filth, promiscuity, and destitution. All steal, all forget country, culture, family, past, and planned future. Suicides are rare before Liberation, because suicide is non-instinctive,...
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