The War Against Forgetfulness THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED by Primo Levi Translated by Raymond Rosenthal; Summit; 203 pages; $17.95

By R.Z.Sheppard

Eight months ago, Primo Levi leaped into the stairwell outside the fourth- floor Turin apartment where his family had lived for three generations. There was little question that he killed himself intentionally. Renzo Levi said that his 67-year-old father had been depressed; friends spoke of Levi's dark moods. Yet despair was not what the outside world detected last year after Philip Roth climbed those stairs to interview Levi in his study. "He seemed to me," wrote the American novelist, "inwardly animated more in the manner of some little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest's most astute intelligence."

To say nothing of his fine nose for moral rot. Of all the witnesses who have written memorably of Nazi evils, this retired chemist at a Turin paint factory was the most discriminating. His books Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening and Moments of Reprieve read as if revenge (a dish best eaten cold, advises the proverb) were a matter of patient qualitative analysis. In The Periodic Table (1984), Levi even used the known basic elements as metaphors for human characteristics. His Jewish ancestors from the Piedmont, for example, resembled argon: "Inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion."

The insular world of these fathers ended with World War II. In 1943 Levi joined a band of partisans to fight Italy's Fascists and the Germans. He was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist kept him alive. He worked as a slave at a privately owned I.G. Farben laboratory, which was part of the death-camp complex.

That free enterprise can be free of all restraint is only one of the facts of life thrown out for consideration in The Drowned and the Saved. Levi's last writings about the unspeakable quietly fill in the blanks of a subject that is in danger of becoming an abstraction. "For the young people of the 1950s and 1960s," he observes, "these were events connected with their fathers: they were spoken about in the family; memories of them still preserved the freshness of things seen. For the young people of the 1980s, they are matters associated with their grandfathers: distant, blurred, 'historical.' "

This is probably the reason that Levi seldom uses the word Holocaust, a term that has come to invite an automatic and generalized response at the expense of the particular. Levi provides the wire, barking guards, sadistic Kapos and the ovens, which, we learn with devastating offhandedness, were manufactured by Topf of Wiesbaden, a company that went on to produce crematoria until 1975. There are also the moral zombies who planned and managed the Lagers (camps), and the scientists who acted in the name of higher learning. Of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian physician and chief doctor of the Birkenau SS, Levi writes dryly, "Nyiszli was supposed to devote himself in particular to the study of twins: in fact, Birkenau was the only place in the world where it was possible to study the corpses of twins killed at the same moment."

Most of what passed for life in the Lagers took place in what Levi calls the "gray zone," an area of collaboration with the persecutors that, adds the author, "contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge." Some jobs brought a prisoner an added ration of soup, perhaps the difference between starvation and survival. Levi absolves the sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, lice checkers and bed smoothers, those "who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square." Mercy is more strained for the Kapos, who were in charge of barracks and work details and whose own lives frequently depended on the ferocity they displayed toward their fellow prisoners. Throughout the Reich, the Nazi system spawned flunkies of almost opera-bouffe dimensions. The megalomaniacal Chaim Rumkowski, a failed Jewish industrialist who, probably with Nazi support, set himself up as the president of the Lodz ghetto, had the power to print his own currency and stamps bearing his portrait. In the end Rumkowski came to believe he was the savior of his people, who nevertheless were shipped to the camps when the Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1944. According to one version of + Rumkowski's fate, he demanded and got a special car to transport him and his family to Auschwitz, where, to his surprise, his reign ended in the gas chamber.

Levi is obsessed with the structure of complicity that made the Lagers run. The camps were literally concentrated worlds where pain, humiliation, fear and base human nature were intensified. To the familiar images of families tumbling out of boxcars to be greeted officially by insults and clubbings, Levi adds the reception that older prisoners gave to new arrivals. "Rarely was a newcomer received, I won't say as a friend but at least as a companion- in-misfortune; in the majority of cases, those with seniority . . . showed irritation or even hostility."

The Nazis aimed at the complete moral collapse of their victims, because a degraded people would do the dirty work of their tormentors, and because those deprived of their humanity could be tortured and killed without unduly disturbing the sensibilities of their murderers. Levi's logic leads him to burdensome conclusions, not the least of which is that the saved were not the best but the worst, "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone.' " Levi's troubled honesty is not what usually gets hailed as a triumph of the human spirit. His work dispels such cliches: it is a victory, against great odds, for the preservation of memory.