For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. Ethical Grey Zones - A Companion to the Holocaust - Wiley Online Library 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. Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. Levi's intent in introducing his notion of the gray zone is to say that it is, while Rubinstein argues that it is not. 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. 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. 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. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 7, Stereotypes Summary & Analysis This Study Guide consists of approximately 34pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - A chemist by profession and a writer by compulsion, Levi, an Italian Jew forced to become Prisoner 174517 in a Nazi death camp, refused afterward to have his tattoo erased; for forty years, he wore. 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. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. The Gray Zone; a difficult moral location inhabited by prisoners who worked for the Nazis. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. Important as all these topics may be, I argue that to fold them into Levi's notion of the gray zone dilutes the moral force of his position. This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. He discusses some of the ways in which the expression has been misappropriated and misunderstoodand why this matters. Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. 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. 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. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. Horowitz tells us that when Heller's memoirs appeared in the 1990s, she was condemned by many in the Jewish community and caught in a gender-specific double-bind: if Heller did not love Jan then she prostituted herself; if she did love him, then she consorted with the enemy., Heller's aunt also suffered sexual violationshe was raped by a German soldierbut she chose to keep it secret from all but a few close relatives. 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. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - eNotes.com 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. Even with the show of force the Germans would display, they often lacked the necessary personnel in camps to keep control of the sheer number of prisoners kept there. He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. Melson acknowledges that his mother's actions were morally dubious: whether she was willing to admit it or not, Melson's mother put the lives of the Zamojskis at risk when she stole their identities. 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. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. 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). These two kinds of virtuethe ordinary and the heroicdiffer with respect to the beneficiaries of the acts they inspire: acts of ordinary virtue benefit individuals, a Miss Tenenbaum, for example, whereas acts of heroism can be undertaken for the benefit of something as abstract as a certain concept of Poland.40 Todorov views Mrs. Tennenbaum's suicide as morally superior to that of Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. 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. Browning concludes that such strategies of alleviation and compliance, while neither heroic nor admirable, without doubt saved Jewish lives that otherwise would have been lost. The Black, White, and Gray Zones of Schindler's List: Steven Spielberg Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. 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). Privilege defends and protects privilege. The point of the Rising was to make a statement to the world, to die for something noble: To the hero, death has more value than life. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. 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. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. He acknowledges that, using consequentialist tactics of sacrificing the weak and powerless (e.g., children) in order to save the maximum number, Rumkowski did in fact save more lives than he would have if he had instead followed the path of Czerniakw. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. She uses this story to illustrate her contention that Jewish tradition demands of women that they give up their lives rather than submit to rape. 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. In the prologue to the 2006 anthology Gray Zones, editors Jonathan Petropoulos and John Roth acknowledge that while Levi spoke of the gray zone in the singular his analysis made clear that this region was multi-faceted and multi-layered. They go on to say: Following Levi's lead, we thought about the Holocaust's gray zones, the multitude of ways in which aspects of his gray-zone analysis might shed light both on the Holocaust itself and also on scholarship about that catastrophe.53 They list a number of gray zones, including: ambiguity and compromise in writing and depicting Holocaust history; issues of identity, gender, and sexuality during and after the Third Reich; inquiries about gray spacesthose regions of geography, imagination, and psychology that reflect the Holocaust's impact then and now; and dilemmas that have haunted the pursuit of justice, ethics, and religion during and after the Holocaust.54. 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. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. 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. 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. 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. 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. The situation of the victims was so constrained that they truly reside in the gray zone, a place too horrific to allow for the use of the usual ethical procedures for evaluating moral culpability. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis 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. Nor, finally and most fundamentally, is the Gray Zone a place to which all human beingsby the fact of human frailtyare granted access, since that would then enable them conveniently to respond to any moral charge with the indisputable claim that I'm only human.8. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. Argumentative Essay On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). Indeed, for Kant, even to consider the results of one's actions is inappropriate. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. 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. Later in the essay, Rubinstein states that Rumkowski's Give me your children speech indicates that he was under no illusions concerning the fate of the deportees. . Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. 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. While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. 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. 4 (2010): 40321. In "The Gray Zone" (2) Levi challenges the tendency to over-simplify and gloss over unpleasant truths of the inmate hierarchy that inevitably developed in the camps, and that was exacerbated by the Nazi methodology of singling some out for special privileges. 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 is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. 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 tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . To his parents disgust, the Zamojskis demanded an exorbitant sum of money. Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the "Grey Zone" Unable to pay the fee, Melson's mother tricked them into showing her their papers. Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. Chapter 7, "Stereotypes," addresses those who question why many concentration camp inmates or ghetto inhabitants did not attempt to escape or rebel, and why many German Jews remained in Germany during Hitler's ascendance. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). While it is true that the victims did have choices, and Levi acknowledges that it is important to study those choices, in the end he argues that we must not judge the victims as we do the perpetrators. On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. 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 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. The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . Gray Zone Motif. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. 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. On July 22, 1942, when the Nazis demanded that lists of Jews be drawn up for resettlement to the East, Czerniakw pleaded for the lives of orphaned children. For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). "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). Hirsch asks, Would Todorov wish to argue that the social regimen (if it can be called that) created by the Germans throughout the Konzentrationslager system is what he would consider a normal social order?51 Patterson goes much further, claiming that good and evilin the eyes of Arendt and Todorov, as well as the Nazisare matters either of cultural convention for the weak or of a will to power for the strong. With regards to the premises of their thinking, Arendt and Todorov are much closer to the Nazis than they are to the Jews.52 While I reject such hyperbole as inflammatory, I do agree with Hirsch and Patterson that Todorov's claim that the entire German population could be located in the gray zone is a misuse of Levi's terma misuse that undermines our ability to properly assign moral responsibility. He did not suggest that we ignore the moral implications of the actions of the special squads or of Chaim Rumkowski; indeed he insisted that we examine these implications carefully. 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. Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. For example, is the random beating of a prisoner by a guard the same as the beating of a fellow prisoner by a starving and dying man who wants his last piece of bread? First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary It was their job to herd selected Jews to the gas chambers by lying to them, telling them that they were going to take showers. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. Would not those who had been trying to keep the Jews of the ghettos alive as long as possible subsequently have been hailed for their efforts?24, Yet Weinberg's argument fails as a justification for placing Rumkowski into Levi's gray zone, for as Lang asserted, the gray zone is NOT reserved for suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight.. For it assigns moral standing to a position that had been otherwise pushed aside in a way that denied any means of judging it in ethical terms and which is indeed no less categorical than the two more commonly recognized alternatives.11. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. 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 Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. 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). SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. Had the Melsons been arrested and their deception uncovered, it is likely that the Germans would have arrested and punished the Zamojskis for aiding Jewseven if they protested that they had not known. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. 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). 1. Why does Primo Levi think it was so difficult to "be moral" in the It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. 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.