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? This Study Guide consists of approximately 34pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. While Levi tells us that Muhsfeldt was executed after the war, and contends that this execution was justified, he does suggest that Muhsfeldt's hesitationno matter how momentarywas morally significant. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in . The Drowned and the Saved Irony | GradeSaver The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. Ethical Grey Zones - A Companion to the Holocaust - Wiley Online Library While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. 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 Drowned and the Saved Summary & Study Guide 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). Survivors such as Primo Levi did engage in self-blame for the tragic choices they had to make or even when they had not transgressed any moral code or principles. The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. 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. . Thus, Melson concedes that his mother acted immorally, yet he argues that her choices, like those of the prisoners Levi describes, were inescapable and dictated by circumstances.. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. 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. 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. Willingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto the lords of death reign, and close by the train is waiting.29. 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. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . . 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. The SS never took direct control. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. Even so, he insists, memory and the historical record are crucial to combating Nazi assumptions that their deeds would go unnoticed (they were destroying the evidence), or disbelieved. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. 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. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. 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. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? Unable to pay the fee, Melson's mother tricked them into showing her their papers. 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. 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). . Richard L. Rubinstein, Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. . Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. Chapter 1, "The Memory of the Offense," dissects out the vagaries of memory, rejection of responsibility, denial of unacceptable trauma and out and out lying among those who were held to account by tribunals as well as among the victimized. 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. There are various ways in which they were able to do this, not least, starving them and working them to the point of exhaustion. Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. 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. They could even choose to be rescuers. For example, in his essay Alleviation and Compliance: The Survival Strategies of the Jewish Leadership in the Wierzbnik Ghetto and Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps (in the Petropoulos and Roth volume), Christopher Browning examines the actions of prisoners in camps that differ from Auschwitz in that a surprisingly large proportion of their inmates survived. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. 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 presents a thematic treatment of the Holocaust, revealing the how it is remembered, forgotten, and stereotyped by surviving victims, the perpetrators, and subsequent generations. The Grey Zone - OpenEdition This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. 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? 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. 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. 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. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. when writing The Drowned and the Saved, he was moved to admit that "this man's solitary death, this man's death which had been reserved for him, will bring him glory, not infamy." In the anthology Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, both David Hirsch and David Patterson attack Todorov's positionespecially his refusal to view perpetrators as moral monsters simply because they lived in a totalitarian society. 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. 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. This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. On the Grey Zone. Michael Rothberg - Centro Primo Levi New York everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. She asserts that Rumkowski acted as the Fhrer of d, noting that he went so far as to mint coins with his image on them.14, In his essay Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, Richard Rubinstein presents a scathing critique of Levi's decision to place Rumkowski in the gray zone. Not affiliated with Harvard College. The Gray Zone is in that sense beyond or at least outside good and evil but morally significant, at the boundary of those ethical judgments and yet warranting a place of its own within ethics. (199). 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. For them, all Jews were condemned by genetics; there was literally nothing a Jewish person could do or say to escape annihilation. Quite the contrary, it is at once morally tough-minded and morally imaginative. Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. . The members of the special squads did the opposite. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? I would argue that, despite his enormous admiration for Levi, Todorov misreads him completely. 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. However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. 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. 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. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. He had no concern for the individual. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . A Jew could choose to commit suicide, or to comply, and those choices did have moral ramifications. 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. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - eNotes.com "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). Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. . " However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. 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. 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. 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. Barbour, Polly. First, as Levi makes clear, even full-time residents of the gray zone such as Rumkowski are morally guilty; we can and we should see that. The inequalities between them were just too great. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. 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. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. The camps were built on a foundation of violence and this is one of the things that Levi looks at in the next essay in the book. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words They also informed on their fellow prisoners, usually so that they would get better treatment or additional food for themselves. Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. 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. 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. This was the chief method employed by the Germans to break the prisoners' spirits. 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. As Lang points out, Levi acknowledged that it might be interesting to compare the actions of ordinary people who chose to become perpetrators with immoral acts committed by victims. 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. To his parents disgust, the Zamojskis demanded an exorbitant sum of money. 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. 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 Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books It is an exploration of complex human responses to unimaginable trauma. The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. 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. One of the key things that was done to the prisoners was completely dehumanizing them. You can help us out by revising, improving and updating Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. 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. . 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 7, Stereotypes 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. 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. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. 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. Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. 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. For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. 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. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. 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. 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. 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. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge.