John Roth. Collaboration springs from the need for auxiliaries to keep order as German power is overtaxed, and the desire to imitate the victor by giving orders. From the heroic perspective, it does not matter that the Warsaw Rising failed. 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. 1The '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. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. On Amazon.com one reviewer of Todorov's Hope and Memory was inspired to claim that Levi talks about a Gray Zone inside which we all operate. While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. There are various ways in which they were able to do this, not least, starving them and working them to the point of exhaustion. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. It is well known that the members of one Sonderkommando rebelled on October 7, 1944, killing a number of SS men and destroying a crematoriumyet many scholars would still argue that this episode is not enough to exculpate the many who did not rebel. The prisoners were to an equal degree victims. Summary In a seminal 1986 essay, Primo Levi coined the term the "Grey Zone" to describe the morally ambiguous world inside Auschwitz concentration camp, where the clear-cut victim/perpetrator binary broke down. Levi wonders about the nature of these men and considers whether their "survival of the fittest" mentality is the natural reaction to being imprisoned in a death camp where they might be killed at any moment. He reassures us that morality survived the evil of the Holocaust: Morality cannot disappear without a radical mutation of the human species. In other words, intersubjective morality is intrinsic to human nature. Death and destruction were the only absolutes in this moral universe. With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. . The fact that they may have had a few more choices and that making those choices saved more prisoners does not change their status any more than the status of the rebelling Sonderkommandos of 1944 would have changed had they somehow miraculously survived the war. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. 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. Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. . To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski, the d merchant, together with his whole generation, was fragile.28, Levi concludes his chapter with a poetical comparison of Rumkowski's situation to our own: Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. 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. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto, adopted the opposite approach. Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). 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. . The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. 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 . 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. While I would agree that circumstances varied in the zones of German domination and some bystandersfamilies with young children to protect, for examplecould not have been expected to act heroically, I would still contend that their circumstances were not sufficiently dire to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. 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. These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. While some scholars have expanded Primo Levi's term gray zone in appropriate and insightful ways, others have misused it so completely that it is now in danger of losing its essential meaning. Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. Levi claims that only those willing to engage in the most selfish actions survived while the most moral people died: The saved of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good, the bearers of a message: what I [saw] and lived through proved the exact contrary. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. In her final section, titled The Gray Zone, Horowitz examines the moral ambiguities present in stories of Jewish women who survived by trading sexual services for food or protection. I would argue that it is appropriate to expand Levi's zone beyond Auschwitz so long as its population is made up only of victims. 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). The gray zone is NOT reserved for what Lang calls suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight. Some argue that we have no right to judge the actions of people who could not have known what we know today. In The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, she explores the images of good and evil associated particularly with women under Nazism, as these shape our perception of the Holocaust.32. 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. For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. Had they liberated it in 1942 instead of January 1945, Rumkowski might have been credited with saving thousands of lives: What if Joseph Stalin's hopes of a decisive victory in early 1942 had been realized, and, as a result, the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, d, and perhaps even Warsaw, as well as many others had been liberated in the spring or summer of 1942? The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. I will show that certain misuses of the term travel far from Levi's original intention and become part of a relativistic challenge to contemporary ethics. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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. Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. If one passed the Nazis genetic test, one's choices did make a difference. 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). The inequalities between them were just too great. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. thissection. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. 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. Privilege defends and protects privilege. This would have created little risk for their friends, the Zamojskis; as members of a once-noble family, they would have no trouble getting replacement papers. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. For them, all Jews were condemned by genetics; there was literally nothing a Jewish person could do or say to escape annihilation. This is the essence of Levi's notion of the gray zone. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. He sees Rumkowski as an example of Anna Freud's concept of identification with the aggressor.17 Rumkowski did not simply comply with the Nazi orders so as to save liveshe thought like a Nazi and acted like one. In discussing Chaim Rumkowski and the members of the Sonderkommandos, Levi acknowledges that we will never know their exact motivations but asserts that this is irrelevant to their occupancy of the gray zone. . The saved are those who learn to adapt themselves to the new environment of Auschwitz, who quickly learn how to "organize" extra rations, safer work, or fortuitous relationships with people in authority. Unable to pay the fee, Melson's mother tricked them into showing her their papers. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . Some might respond that the members of these special squads had no choice because the Nazis forced them to act as they did. Primo Levi. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books By the end of his life survivor Primo Levi had become increasingly convinced that the lessons of the Holocaust were destined to be lost as. To his parents disgust, the Zamojskis demanded an exorbitant sum of money. One may absolve those who are heavily coerced and minimally guilty: functionaries who suffer with the masses but get an extra (read more from the Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary), Get The Drowned and the Saved from Amazon.com. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. At the camps, prisoners were not permitted to communicate with those on the outside, although sometimes they did, when their particular work detail was working outside the camps, in villages nearby. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. Print Word PDF. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . Browning singles out Jeremiah Wilczek, a former gangster who connived his way into a leadership position in the Lagerrat (camp council) and Lagerpolizei (camp police). The SS would never have played against other prisoners, as they considered themselves far superior to the average inmate. . Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. Only the drowned could know the totality of the concentration camp experience, but they cannot testify; hence, the saved must do their best to render it. I agree that we do need more ways of speaking with precision about regions of collaboration and complicity during World War II.57 However, with Levi and Lang, I oppose moral determinismthe belief that in the contemporary world almost no one can be held completely responsible for his or her acts, and that the job of ethics, in the face of post-modern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality without condemning them for doing so. Barbour, Polly. 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. The Drowned and the Saved study guide contains a biography of Primo Levi, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. In the eyes of the Nazis, nothing a Jew could do would stop him or her from being a Jew, and thereby slated for inevitable destruction. There is some evidence to suggest that he bribed Baumgarten to arrange the removal of the sadistic camp commandant Willi Althoff, and to have the Ukrainian guards moved outside the camp fence. It follows immediately after an extended description of Elias the dwarf, whom Steinberg also remem-bers as extraordinary. The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. Given an apparent choice between life and death, a person cannot be blamed for choosing life.31 While many moralistsKantians in particularmight disagree with this claim, it is clear that Melson's argument begins with Levi's original notion and attempts to expand it to Jews living on false papers. 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. Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. Neither forced religious conversion nor phony confession would have saved them. In normal moral circumstances, Levi would not hesitate to condemn Rumkowski, but because he was a victim living in nightmarish conditions, we have no right to condemn himalthough we do have an obligation to consider the moral implications of his actions. I believe that the most meaningful way to interpret Levi's gray zone, the way that leads to the greatest moral insight, requires that the term be limited to those who truly were victims. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. He states that for Levi, just as there is an objective line between good and evil, there exists the same status for an area between the two.5 He explains Levi's notion of the gray zone by first clarifying the ways in which the term is most often misunderstood: The gray zone is NOT reserved for ethical judgments in which it is difficult to decide whether good or evil dominates.6 The purpose of the gray zone is not to label so-called hard cases. While Levi acknowledges that these exist, not all hard cases are in the gray zone and not all moral situations in the gray zone are hard cases.7. Heller's parents suggest that she, too, should keep quiet. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. His exploration of what he called the "gray zone" drew attention to the space between the poles of good and evil and to the moments of blurring between victims and perpetrators. . Instead of the teleological and the intersubjective, one can speak of the world of things and the world of persons, object and subject relations, cosmos and anthropos, I and thou, and so forth.42 Having alluded to Martin Buber, Todorov makes clear that he prefers the profound joy of the intersubjective action that expresses, he believes, both the rational and the caring aspects of our fundamental human nature: The accounts I have read of life in the camps convince me that the moral action is always one that the individual takes on himself (the moral action is in this sense subjective) and [is] directed towards one or more individuals (it is personal, for when I act morally I treat the other as a person, which is to say he becomes the end of my action). The Drowned and the Saved presents a thematic treatment of the Holocaust, revealing the how it is remembered, forgotten, and stereotyped by surviving victims, the perpetrators, and subsequent generations. 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. "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). (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. The gray zone is NOT reserved for good people who lapse into evil or for evil people who try to redeem themselves through an act of goodness. Indeed, a deontologist would argue that the uprising did not cleanse the rebels of the moral stain from the thousands of murders in which they were already complicit. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. This Study Guide consists of . Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. He had no concern for the individual. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. 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. In the world there is not just black and white, [Levi] writes, but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.48, Todorov appears to believe that Levi intended to include all Germans in the gray zone, including the great men of evil mentioned above. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. In my opinion it is. Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words 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. After giving brief historical accounts of Jewish cooperation with rulers and of Rumkowski's specific actions, Rubinstein rejects Gandhi and Arendt's claim that had Jews simply refused to cooperate in any way with the Nazis, many fewer would have been killed. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. In the latter film, a female collaborator Francoise Hemmerle is portrayed as evil, while her male counterpart, Armand Zuchner, is described simply as an idiot. Horowitz contends that this demonization of female collaborators is widespread and gender-based. (199). This is what makes him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist. This is not the same as the Golden Rule, which states that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.2 The Golden Rule suggests that we are motivated to treat others well by self-interestthat is, by the desire to be treated well ourselves. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). . Kant posits that a moral act first requires good will (similar to good intentions). Famously, in his speech Give Me Your Children, Rumkowski begged the Jews of the d ghetto to comply with a German order to hand over their children aged 10 and under in order to save as many adults as possible.13, Hannah Arendt attacked Rumkowski as a traitor and believed that, had he lived, he should have been put on trial as though he were a Nazi war criminal. They could even choose to be rescuers. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. In all of these respects, there is relevance for those who work with individuals who are seriously ill or disabled, and in a larger sense, the book forces consideration of the many and ongoing instances of man's inhumanity to man. Levi's intent in introducing his notion of the gray zone is to say that it is, while Rubinstein argues that it is not. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016).