Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. In his book The Question of German Guilt, first published in German in 1947 and in English-language translation in 1948, Karl Jaspers suggests a framework for evaluating German responsibility. IN HIS MUCH-DISCUSSED CHAPTER "The Gray Zone" from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi recounts the disturbing story of the morally corrupt Judenrat leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, whose willing collaboration with the Nazis nonetheless failed to save him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. The Drowned and the Saved ( Italian: I sommersi e i salvati) 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 ( Monowitz ). The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. All of these unusual conditions, together with the fact that no selection took place when the prisoners were finally transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, meant that a much larger number of prisoners survived here than in other such camps. But, because of the extenuating circumstancesthe ways in which Nazism degraded its victimswe have no right to judge them. The words "gray zone, useless violence and shame" pay special attention to the inmates who had survived the initial selection and continued increasing their chances of survival. In 1946, Gandhi said in an interview that if he had been a Jew under the Nazis he would have committed public suicide rather than allow himself to be re-located into a ghetto.4 From this perspective, there is no question that the members of the Sonderkommandos would be condemned as collaborators and murderers. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in . Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). Each individual is so complex that there is no point in trying to foresee his behavior, all the more in extreme situations; nor is it possible to foresee one's own behavior" (60). Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12. Even so, Melson contends that his parents should be located at the outer edges of the gray zone because they, too, were forced to make choices that should not be judged according to everyday standards of moral behavior.30 For example, his parents initially asked friends to give them their identification papers so they could move to a different part of Poland and live there under the friends identities. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. Victims would do better psychologically to hate their oppressors and leave the understanding to non-victims: One almost regrets Levi's commitment to his project of understanding the enemy (for his sake, not for ours: as readers we are only enriched by his accomplishment). Privilege defends and protects privilege. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. In her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt famously criticizes those Jews who, she believed, collaborated with the Nazis. Sander H. Lee, Primo Levi's Gray Zone: Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Fall 2016, Pages 276297, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcw037. Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary and Analysis Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. Furthermore, Levi states: If I were a judge, even though repressing what hatred I may feel, I would not hesitate to inflict the most severe punishment or even death on the many culprits who still today live undisturbed on German soil or in other countries of suspect hospitality; but I would experience horror if a single innocent were punished for a crime he did not commit.50 Todorov's misinterpretation of Levi makes it possible for others to include non-victims in the gray zone, a mistake that I believe diminishes the value of an otherwise useful distinction and opens the door to a form of moral relativism that I believe Levi would abhor. Indeed, the primary purpose of the concept of the gray zone is to point out the morally dubious actions of many of the Jewish victims. This violates the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, which requires that we always treat others as ends in themselves and never as means (to survival, in this instance). This was the chief method employed by the Germans to break the prisoners' spirits. This is what makes him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. In his recent book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, Berel Lang argues that Levi opposes this view. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. For example, in her memoir Strange and Unexpected Love, Fanya Heller describes her relationship as a teenager with a uniformed Ukrainian with the right to grant or take her life. As the repeated urging of her parents to be nice to Jan reminds us, love was a viable currency in the genocidal economy.33 While Heller suggests that her relationship was uncoerced and that she and Jan were able to create their own private and contained world, removed from the horrors outside of it, there was no chance that the affair would continue after the war, much less that she and Jan would marry. In 'The Grey Zone', the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into 'us' and 'them . "Communicating" (4) deals with the emotional and practical consequences of not being able to understand the German commands of the captors, or the conversation of the mostly German speaking prisoners (Levi was Italian but spoke some German). It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. Part of my disagreement with Petropoulos and Roth returns us to Levi's discussion of SS-man Eric Muhsfeldt. As Berel Lang clearly states, the concept of The Gray Zone applies to morally charged conduct in a middle ground between good and evil, right and wrong, where neither side of these pairs covers the situation and where imposing one side or the other becomes itself for Levi a moral wrong.56 Levi speaks above all of the situation of Holocaust victims, whose choices were fundamentally choiceless. An editor I suffer because of your anguish, and I don't know how I'll survive thiswhere I'll find the strength to do so.21 But Rubinstein does not find this apparent agonizing to be credible: This speech exemplifies Rumkowski's mindset and modus operandi. The SS never took direct control. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . Using bribery and payoffs (including the extortion of sexual favors from female prisoners), Wilczek became a Jewish Fhrer comparable to, and, some would say, even more immoral than Chaim Rumkowski. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. . John Roth. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). Heller's parents suggest that she, too, should keep quiet. . " resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Indeed, the last lines of The Drowned and the Saved make Levi's position on this issue explicit: Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [perpetrators] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the beautiful words of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.55. Are there different kinds of violence? It seems to me that Levi views the Hobbesian world of the Lager as so insane, so far removed from the niceties of everyday reality, that we do not have the moral authority to judge the actions of its victims. Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. There are various ways in which they were able to do this, not least, starving them and working them to the point of exhaustion. Ross, hold that the moral worth of an act is intrinsic to the act itself, while consequentialists, including Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, believe that the moral worth of an act lies primarily in its consequences. In his landmark book The Drowned and the Saved (first published in 1986), Primo Levi introduced the notion of a moral "gray zone." The author of this essay re-examines Levi's use of the term. In her essay, Sexual Abuse and Holocaust Literature, S. Lillian Kremer states: Although male writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi convey the effect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreational anxieties dominant in women's writing.36 Horowitz thus does a service by drawing our attention to the specific ways in which the gray zone was even more complicated for female victims than it was for their male counterparts. He is the author of Woody Allen's Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films (2013); Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002); and Rights, Morality, and Faith in the Light of the Holocaust (2005). When those pleas were denied, he returned to his office and committed suicide, leaving a note that said: I can no longer bear all this. He suggests that Levi strove to understand the Germans not as monsters, but as ordinary people caught up in a totalitarian hell in which no one could be held morally responsible for his or her acts, no matter how brutal. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . . Horowitz begins by examining the myth of the good in the historically discredited story of ninety-three Jewish girls living in a Jewish seminary in Cracow who, according to the story, along with their teacher, chose mass suicide rather than submit to the Nazi demand that they provide sexual services to German soldiers. The 'grey zone' is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. Throughout the book, Levi returns to the motif of the Gray Zone, which was occupied by those prisoners who worked for the Nazis and assisted them in keeping the other prisoners in line. . See Helga Varden, Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door One More Time: Kant's Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis, Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. The Gray Zone Chapter 3, Shame Chapter 4, Communicating . Not affiliated with Harvard College. As Christopher Browning and others have demonstrated, no one was forced to become a perpetrator: Browning's groundbreaking study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows that members of police formations, at least in this case, could choose not to participate in atrocities. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. Abstract. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. Given his belief that humanity's moral nature is immutable, and that many people chose to display ordinary virtue and act intersubjectively even in the camps, he can have little use for Levi's notion of the gray zone. To an extent apparently unsurpassed by any other Nazi-appointed Jewish leader, he was the Fhrer of his tiny kingdom for much of his reign, a role he appears at times to have savored.22. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. In her next section, Horowitz compares the portrayal of female collaborators to that of men in Marcel Ophuls's films The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. Examining the actions of people in extreme situations, including inmates of camps such as Auschwitz, Todorov concludes that horrific conditions did not destroy individuals capacities for acts of ordinary virtue, but instead strengthened them. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption, against which it is difficult to guard oneself. While one may disagree specifically with his way of making these distinctions or the conclusions he reaches in each of these areas, I believe that this approach is much more useful than the multiplication and stretching of Levi's gray zone in ways that were clearly unintended. . The speech also gives expression to his rationalization of the grisly task.23 For Rubinstein, as for Kant, good will is a necessary precondition for the possibility of morally justifiable behavior. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Does Levi really mean to suggest in this haunting passage that we all exist in the gray zone nowthat none of us deserves to be judged morally because our current situation is indistinguishable from that of the Jewish victims in the ghettos and death camps? Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? This view holds that life has become so complicated and difficult that the job of ethics is no longer to determine the proper course of action and to correctly assign moral responsibility to those who have failed to live up to the appropriate moral standards. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. Lang explains this point first by demonstrating that, as I argued earlier, Levi rejects Kant's Categorical Imperative: Kant's critics have argued that neither life nor ethics is as simple as he implies, and Levi is in effect agreeing with this. She argues, as did Gandhi, that had Jewish leaders simply refused to cooperate with the Nazis, many fewer Jews would have been killed: after all the Nazis did not have enough men to drag every Jew from his or her home to the camps. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. Bulgarian-born philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has written extensively about moral issues relating to the Holocaust, perhaps most famously in his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. While there is no question that Wilczek used his power to gain advantages for himself and for members of his family, Browning points out that he also used his influence with a factory manager named Kurt Otto Baumgarten in ways that benefitted the entire community. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. Levi begins it by discussing a phenomenon that occurred following liberation from the camps: many who had been incarcerated committed suicide or were profoundly depressed. Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. In doing so he relies on Levi's own criteria and the essential element of mortal risk. They also informed on their fellow prisoners, usually so that they would get better treatment or additional food for themselves. Todorov presents himself as an admirer of Primo Levi, and in this book he refers to or quotes from Levi on forty-six of his two hundred and ninety-six pages. My primary purpose has been to argue that Primo Levi's term gray zone should be reserved for the purpose for which he intended it. . In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). Quite the contrary, it is at once morally tough-minded and morally imaginative. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). As head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), Rumkowski chose the utilitarian approach to his dilemma: he hoped that by working with the Nazis, and proving to them that the d ghetto was so productive that it was worth maintaining, he could save as many Jewish lives as possible. His . Still others are willing to defend Rumkowski. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 1, The Memory of the Offense Summary & Analysis Primo Levi This Study Guide consists of approximately 34 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. . Levi, however, was never a believer, although he admits to having almost prayed for help once, but caught himself because "one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, not when you were losing" (146). The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. What Rubinstein finds despicable about Rumkowski is that he so obviously relished his position of authority and his God-like power to determine who lived and who died. Levi gives another example of the gray zone when he writes about Chaim Rumkowski, the Elder of the Jewish Council in the ghetto in d, Poland. Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. The prisoners would find intricate ways of communicating with each other outside of the guards' hearing and at night they would talk whilst crammed by the hundred into their tiny huts. . The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. On the other hand, he did argue that, because of their status as coerced victims, we do not have the moral authority to condemn their actions. In this chapter he considers also whether religious belief was useful or comforting, concluding that believers "better resisted the seduction of power [resisted collaborating]" (145) and were less prone to despair. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. Instead, as some seem to suggest, the job of ethics, in the face of postmodern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality, without condemning them for doing so or demanding their punishment. Robert Melson's Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side also usefully expands Levi's original concept of the gray zone, applying it to Jews living on false papers. Melson describes the experiences of his own parents as they managed to obtain falsified identity papers allowing them to evade the Nazis throughout the war. For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. We are neither angels nor demons but ordinary human beings comprising both good AND evil. http://www.amazon.com/review/R3GSXXVIVI3IV5/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0691096589&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books (accessed March 16, 2016). For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). Lang uses the following quotation to demonstrate Levi's staunch refusal to identify himself with perpetrators such as the infamous Eric Muhsfeldt: I do not know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. In "The Intellectual in Auschwitz" (6) Levi speculates about how and in what circumstances being educated or cultured was a help or hindrance to coping with the situation. . Melson describes his parents feelings of guilt at their inability to save his maternal grandparents from death in the ghetto; after the war, his mother suffered from depression and required electroshock treatments to deal with her guilt.
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