The Drowned and the Saved is a book of essays by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi on life and death in the Nazi extermination camps, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Auschwitz. The author's last work, written in 1986, a year before his death, The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach, in contrast to his earlier books If This Is a Man (1947) and The Truce (1963), which are autobiographical. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer.
Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II.