Levi argues therefore that, while we should think seriously about the different choices made by people such as Czerniakw and Rumkowski, we ultimately have no right to condemn them. . Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. Once again, the Nazis most demonic crime was to coerce victims into the role of perpetrator, to force Jews to participate in the humiliation and murder of their fellow Jews. Are there different kinds of violence? The first time he states: Between those who are only guards and those who are only inmates stands a host of intermediates occupying what Primo Levi has called the gray zone (a zone that in totalitarian states includes the entire population to one degree or another).45 He then goes on to discuss how prisoner-guards such as the kapos, or by extension Chaim Rumkowski, exert abusive power towards their victims precisely because of their own lack of power in relation to their oppressors. 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. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. . universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. . Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. 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. 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. "Useless Violence" (5) gives examples of how the Nazis tormented their prisoners with "stupid and symbolic violence.". Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. 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. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. 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. Rubinstein quotes an American Orthodox rabbinical ruling that, while it is permissible for a soldiers to eat pork when no other food is available, they must not lick the bones (Lecht nicht die bayner).18 He concludes that for Rumkowski the gray zone had turned black.19. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. 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. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. 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. 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. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. 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. Morality was transformed. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? 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). . Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). 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. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. 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). Primo Levi. In my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. On September 4, 1942, Rumkowski delivered his infamous Address at the Time of the Deportation of the Children from d Ghetto.20 Rubinstein quotes Rumkowski as saying, I share your pain. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. 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. Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary The first-person narrator becomes a "we" as Levi steps into the classic researcher role, observing from a vantage point in the future looking back at the past. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. An editor 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 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. 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. 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. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. John Roth. The problem of the fallibility of memory, the techniques used by the Nazis to break the will of prisoners, the use of language in the camps and the nature of violence are all studied. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi titles his second chapter The Gray Zone. Here he discusses what he calls National Socialism's most demonic crime: the attempt to shift onto othersspecifically the victimsthe burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.1 He is referring here specifically to the Sonderkommandosthe special squads chosen by the SS at Auschwitz to perform horrendous tasks. Read Argumentative Essays On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi and other exceptional papers on every subject and topic college can throw at you. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi argues that it is unfair to judge the victims of genocide using moral tools that are appropriate to normal, everyday life. 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. It existed before he used it, and is useful in distinguishing between the types of behavior engaged in by members of various groups within Nazi Germany. This is a problem when it comes to painting a broad picture of something that has happened to a large group of people. The Drowned and the Saved, however, was written 40 years later and is the work of memory and reflection not only on the original events, but also on how the world has dealt with the Holocaust in the intervening years. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. 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. 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. 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. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. . The inequalities between them were just too great. 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. 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. Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). The prisoners were to an equal degree victims. 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. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. While Levi does not say that Muhsfeldt's moment of hesitation is enough to purge him of his guilt (he still deserved to be executed as a murderer), Levi does say that it is enough, however, to place him, too, although at its extreme boundary, within the gray band, that zone of ambiguity which radiates out from regimes based on terror and obsequiousness.25 I agree with Lang's conclusion that Levi decides on balance that Muhsfeldt does not belong there and concurs in the verdict of the Polish court which in 1947 condemned him to death for the atrocities he had taken part in.26 Levi believes that this was right. He goes on to say: It is not difficult to judge Muhsfeldt, and I do not believe that the tribunal which punished him had any doubts.27, No tribunal could have absolved him, nor, certainly, can we absolve him on the moral plane. The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. . His . 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. The last part of the book consists of letters between Germans and Levi' they ask questions about his experiences and his feelings about his captors, and he answers honestly, describing his ordeal and stating clearly what he sees. Death and destruction were the only absolutes in this moral universe. But those choices still counted for something. 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? 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. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. When Melson asked his mother about the fate of the real Zamojskis, she indicated that she neither knew nor cared, as they had chosen greed over their moral duty to help friends. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . 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. 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. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide, teaching or studying The Drowned and the Saved. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. 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 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. More books than SparkNotes. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. But he then goes further in marking a place for judgments that are not bound to either of the traditional categories but still remain within the bounds of ethics itself. From the heroic perspective, it does not matter that the Warsaw Rising failed. 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. Another anthology dealing with these issues is Elizabeth Roberts Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, eds., Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). Heroes such as Colonel Okulicki of the Polish Home Army choose to fight and die for principles that usually are abstractions (such as the idea of the Polish nation). On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. 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.

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