This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . 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. 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. Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . This is the essence of Levi's notion of the gray zone. . He had no concern for the individual. Unable to pay the fee, Melson's mother tricked them into showing her their papers. A Jew could choose to commit suicide, or to comply, and those choices did have moral ramifications. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). 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. 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. 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. Kant would say people always have choices, however; the men should have refused to act immorally even if that refusal resulted in their own immediate death. Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. 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. 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. 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. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. The prisoners were to an equal degree victims. 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. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. Toggle navigation . These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Not affiliated with Harvard College. 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. They could even choose to be rescuers. This is a problem when it comes to painting a broad picture of something that has happened to a large group of people. . Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. 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. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. . " 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). 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. Levi's intent in introducing his notion of the gray zone is to say that it is, while Rubinstein argues that it is not. His invocation of the gray zone is meant to insulate those victims from ordinary moral judgments, since it is unfair to apply traditional standards to people whose choices were so limited. Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. While these analyses are admittedly simplistic, they are sufficient to indicate my point that the acts of the Sonderkommandos would be difficult to justify using traditional moral theories. This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. 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. In certain ways, this distinction mimics the distinction between the consequentialist and the deontologist. 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. . The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . . He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. . "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. 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. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. A special camp was built to house the prisoners and the managers were able to pay the SS for the inmates labor. 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. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. 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 ). 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. 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. Neither forced religious conversion nor phony confession would have saved them. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. 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. In his recent book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, Berel Lang argues that Levi opposes this view. In the face of the actions of an Oskar Schindler, a Raoul Wallenberg, or the inhabitants of the village of Le Chambon, how can bystanders honestly contend that they were forced to do nothing? 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. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. You can help us out by revising, improving and updating 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. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. 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. One of the key things that was done to the prisoners was completely dehumanizing them. But those choices still counted for something. 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). You'll be clean, I promise you.34 While the actions of male victims are accepted as guiltless ones coerced by what Lawrence Langer calls choiceless choices (e.g., Heller's grandfather gave up his wife to save himself), women have been judged by a harsher standard that condemns forbidden sexual contact. To say that Muhsfeldt, for that brief instant, was at the gray zone's extreme boundary does not mean that perpetrators and bystanders deserve the same moral consideration and leniency that Levi demands for those who were condemned to live in horrific conditions as they awaited their seemingly inevitable deaths. For example, he seemingly agrees with Levi's assessment of the members of the Sonderkommandos, who also compromised morality for the sake of short-term survival. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. To his parents disgust, the Zamojskis demanded an exorbitant sum of money. 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. He describes situations in which inmates chose to sacrifice themselves to save others, as well as small acts of kindness that kept others going even when it would have been easier to be selfish. 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. They take Levi's willingness to include Muhsfeldt at the extreme boundary of the gray zone (in his moment of hesitation in deciding whether to kill the girl) as license to exponentially expand the gray zone into areas that Levi does not mention. The case of Wilczek substantiates Weinberg's point in that the Starachowice camp operated until comparatively late in the war, and as a result, Wilczek succeeded in saving hundreds of lives. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. According to this story a 16-year-old girl miraculously survived a gassing and was found alive in the gas chamber under a pile of corpses. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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? Quite the contrary, it is at once morally tough-minded and morally imaginative. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. The shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. Primo Levi. 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. 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. 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 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 profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. 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. John Roth. Part of my disagreement with Petropoulos and Roth returns us to Levi's discussion of SS-man Eric Muhsfeldt. 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. suicide is an act of man and not of the animal . He compares this episode to the story told by the character Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. Members of these special squads received marginally better provisions of food and other supplies than most camp inmates, yet they knew thatlike all other prisonersthey were doomed. Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. Search for other works by this author on: 2016 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, From a Holocaust Survivors Initiative to a Ministry of Education Project: Fredka Mazia and the First Israeli Youth Journeys to Poland 19651966, Artwork That Helps Frame History: Toward a Visual Historical and Sociological Analysis of Works Created by Prisoners from the Terezin Ghetto, About the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, and the True Meaning of the Gray Zone, Richard Rubinstein, Gerhard Weinberg, and the Case of Chaim Rumkowski, Morally Questionable Expansions of Levi's Gray Zone, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright 2023 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do.12 Here he acted in accordance with the deontological approach, refusing to collaborate with evil no matter what the consequences. 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. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. The Gray Zone; a difficult moral location inhabited by prisoners who worked for the Nazis. In this sense, Levi may be harsher in his evaluation of Rumkowski than is Rubinstein. I do not believe so. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. 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. 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). Bystanders also had meaningful choices. Thus, Rumkowski created in the ghetto a caricature of the totalitarian German state.46 Ignoring Levi's distinction between victims and perpetrators, between those who had viable choices and those whose meaningful choices had been destroyed, Todorov sees the gray zone as permeating the entire totalitarian German state: everyone had his or her freedom limited by people higher up in the hierarchy. Some might respond that the members of these special squads had no choice because the Nazis forced them to act as they did. 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). universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82).
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