the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary

I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. Abstract. Todorov presents himself as an admirer of Primo Levi, and in this book he refers to or quotes from Levi on forty-six of his two hundred and ninety-six pages. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). . The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. 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. 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. 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. He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. . 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. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. 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. . The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. 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. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. Under Bentham's Utilitarian Principle, one should act to bring the greatest amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people while inflicting the least amount of harm to the least number of people. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. In doing so he relies on Levi's own criteria and the essential element of mortal risk. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. Levi's decision to focus on Rumkowski suggests that he believes his actions were immoral no matter what his intentions; he should escape our condemnation solely because of his status as a victim. 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. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. 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. 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 shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 299. Morality was transformed. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. 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. 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. 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. The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. While Horowitz does not examine the conditions that prisoners faced in the camps, she does, in my view, legitimately expand the gray zone to include female victims in ways that further our understanding of Levi's primary moral concerns. universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). suicide is an act of man and not of the animal . Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. 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. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. . These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. Death and destruction were the only absolutes in this moral universe. 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). The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. 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. Print Word PDF. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. 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. 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). In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). Even though his first book Se questo un uomo -published in English as Survival in Auschwitz -did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it . The Question and Answer section for The Drowned and the Saved is a great . 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. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. Unable to pay the fee, Melson's mother tricked them into showing her their papers. The Drowned and the Saved Irony | GradeSaver We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. First published in Italy in 1986. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. 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. 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. 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. 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. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. 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. 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. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. 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. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in . 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. I do not believe so. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. 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. 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.. Barbour, Polly. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the "Grey Zone" The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Ethical Grey Zones - A Companion to the Holocaust - Wiley Online Library 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. 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. 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. Neither forced religious conversion nor phony confession would have saved them. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. Part of my disagreement with Petropoulos and Roth returns us to Levi's discussion of SS-man Eric Muhsfeldt. 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. 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? They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. 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. The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. 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. Each man imprisoned alongside Levi will remember his experience a little differently, and although there will be universal truths and memories that are substantiated by a number of people, as time passes, memories can become less sharp and less defined. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. 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. 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. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. 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. Gray Zone Motif. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. 1. Why does Primo Levi think it was so difficult to "be moral" in the 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. 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. Ultimately, for an act to be good it must accord with his famous Categorical Imperative: one should act as one would have everyone else act in the same circumstances, and always treat others as ends rather than as a means to an end. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". Primo Levi. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. They brought the greatest amount of harm (a terrifying death) to the greatest number of people (the thousands of victims) while bringing pleasure to very few (Nazis dedicated to the extermination of the Jews). 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. On the other hand, in choosing to take his own life without revealing to the community the fate that awaited it, without exhorting people to fight back, Czerniakw acted with dignity but without real concern for others.41. The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. The Gray Zone; a difficult moral location inhabited by prisoners who worked for the Nazis. Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. 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. Quite the contrary, it is at once morally tough-minded and morally imaginative. 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. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. But the members of the SS were there voluntarily; they chose to engage in atrocities. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. 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. 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. On the Grey Zone. Michael Rothberg - Centro Primo Levi New York everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the gray zone, the spies.44, Todorov disagrees. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . 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? The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 3, Shame Summary & Analysis Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. 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. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. 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. 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. Indeed, for Kant, even to consider the results of one's actions is inappropriate. Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto, adopted the opposite approach. In 1946, Gandhi said in an interview that if he had been a Jew under the Nazis he would have committed public suicide rather than allow himself to be re-located into a ghetto.4 From this perspective, there is no question that the members of the Sonderkommandos would be condemned as collaborators and murderers. . Ross, hold that the moral worth of an act is intrinsic to the act itself, while consequentialists, including Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, believe that the moral worth of an act lies primarily in its consequences. 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. 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 corpses were then taken to the crematoria to be burned. 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. 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 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. 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. She argues, as did Gandhi, that had Jewish leaders simply refused to cooperate with the Nazis, many fewer Jews would have been killed: after all the Nazis did not have enough men to drag every Jew from his or her home to the camps.