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. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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. 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. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. 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. 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 . First published in Italy in 1986. "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). 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. Browning examines the strategies used by Jewish prisoners to survive; he finds, not surprisingly, that those willing to exploit the corruption of the German guards and managers had the best chance. . The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. 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. 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. 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. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. Barbour, Polly. 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. With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. He acknowledges that his parents situation, while life-threatening and humiliating, never approached the level of horror and despair faced by Levi and other camp prisoners. A special camp was built to house the prisoners and the managers were able to pay the SS for the inmates labor. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). 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. Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. . The Drowned and the Saved - New York University We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. . everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. 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. 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. Counterfeiting in more ways than one, they illustrate what Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi called "the grey zone of collaboration." In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi says of his Holocaust experience, "the enemy was all around but also inside[;] the 'we' lost its limits." The Counterfeiters, then, is about the complexity of defining the "we . 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. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. At the beginning of his book, Todorov tells us that his interest in comparing the events of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Rising is motivated by his belief that: they did indeed shed light upon the present.37 He repeats this assertion in the book's epilogue and adds: What interested me is not the past per se but rather the light it casts upon the present.38 Indeed, the purpose of his book is clearly to articulate a post-Holocaust ethics based on insights he develops through his examination of life in totalitarian societies. 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). universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). 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. Yet, even within this zone, moral distinctions do exist. 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. (199). Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. 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. More books than SparkNotes. The words "gray zone, useless violence and shame" pay special attention to the inmates who had survived the initial selection and continued increasing their chances of survival. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. It seems to me that Levi views the Hobbesian world of the Lager as so insane, so far removed from the niceties of everyday reality, that we do not have the moral authority to judge the actions of its victims. 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. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide, teaching or studying The Drowned and the Saved. . These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. 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. . 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. 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. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 1, The Memory of the Offense 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. He quotes Moses Maimonides, who wrote: If they should say, Give us one of you and we will kill him and if not we will kill all of you, the Jews should allow themselves to be killed and not hand over a single life.16 Yet Rubinstein's condemnation of Rumkowski is not based only on the latter's willingness to sacrifice some for the sake of the rest. 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 gray zone is NOT reserved for what Lang calls suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight. Some argue that we have no right to judge the actions of people who could not have known what we know today. I know that murderers existed and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.9, Having drawn on Levi's discussion to make clear what the gray zone is not, Lang goes on to say what it is: In contrast to these alternatives, 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.10. Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, or even the authorities of George Orwell's 1984, the Nazis did not torture to change the beliefs or behaviors of their victims. You can help us out by revising, improving and updating 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. Finally, Horowitz quotes Jean Amry, who says of torture: It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners.35. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. 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. 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. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. The Gray Zone Chapter 3, Shame Chapter 4, Communicating . The SS never took direct control. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. 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. 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. As Christopher Browning and others have demonstrated, no one was forced to become a perpetrator: Browning's groundbreaking study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows that members of police formations, at least in this case, could choose not to participate in atrocities. Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. 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). He establishes four categories: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. 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. 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. Privilege defends and protects privilege. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - eNotes.com . They also informed on their fellow prisoners, usually so that they would get better treatment or additional food for themselves. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. I would argue that, despite his enormous admiration for Levi, Todorov misreads him completely. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. See Helga Varden, Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door One More Time: Kant's Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis, Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. 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. He is careful to make clear from the outset that unusual external events contributed to the large number of survivors. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. . Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. The Grey Zone - OpenEdition Instead, as some seem to suggest, the job of ethics, in the face of postmodern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality, without condemning them for doing so or demanding their punishment. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. 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. 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). Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis - www.BookRags.com 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. Is all violence created equal? Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. In my opinion it is. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. 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 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. 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. 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. It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in . David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. A Jew could choose to commit suicide, or to comply, and those choices did have moral ramifications. Although the Oberscharfhrer, too, was amazed, and hesitated before deciding, ultimately he ordered one of his henchmen to kill the girl; he could not trust that she would refrain from telling other inmates her story. The Drowned and the Saved Summary & Study Guide 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. Abstract. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . 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. From this perspective, perhaps Hitler was the only German who was not in the gray zone.47, In his second mention of the gray zone, Todorov praises Levi's description of life in the camps as an accomplishment unparalleled in modern literature. He admires Levi's rejection of Manicheanism whether in reference to groups (Germans, the Jews, the kapos, the members of the Sonderkommandos) or individuals. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. 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. 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. I will argue that Tzvetan Todorov commits this last fundamental error with his claim that all people living in totalitarian societies reside in the gray zone. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. 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. 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. 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. 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. It follows immediately after an extended description of Elias the dwarf, whom Steinberg also remem-bers as extraordinary. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. He states that for Levi, just as there is an objective line between good and evil, there exists the same status for an area between the two.5 He explains Levi's notion of the gray zone by first clarifying the ways in which the term is most often misunderstood: The gray zone is NOT reserved for ethical judgments in which it is difficult to decide whether good or evil dominates.6 The purpose of the gray zone is not to label so-called hard cases. While Levi acknowledges that these exist, not all hard cases are in the gray zone and not all moral situations in the gray zone are hard cases.7.