But, because of the extenuating circumstancesthe ways in which Nazism degraded its victimswe have no right to judge them. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . The gray zone is NOT reserved for good people who lapse into evil or for evil people who try to redeem themselves through an act of goodness. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. 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. Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary and Analysis Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. 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. 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 - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis 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. 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. 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. 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. Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. 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. 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. The Black, White, and Gray Zones of Schindler's List: Steven Spielberg We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). Levi emphasizes that the tendency to think in binary terms--good/evil, right/wrong--overlooks important characteristics of human behavior, and dangerously oversimplifies: " . The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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. 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). 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. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. 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. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. 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. 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. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. This view holds that life has become so complicated and difficult that the job of ethics is no longer to determine the proper course of action and to correctly assign moral responsibility to those who have failed to live up to the appropriate moral standards. On the Grey Zone. Michael Rothberg - Centro Primo Levi New York However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. But regardless of their actions Jews were condemned. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . 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. They also informed on their fellow prisoners, usually so that they would get better treatment or additional food for themselves. 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). The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. 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. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. Toggle navigation . The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis - www.BookRags.com Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. . 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. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. 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. An editor everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. More books than SparkNotes. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. 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. In the eyes of the Nazis, nothing a Jew could do would stop him or her from being a Jew, and thereby slated for inevitable destruction. They could even choose to be rescuers. Each individual is so complex that there is no point in trying to foresee his behavior, all the more in extreme situations; nor is it possible to foresee one's own behavior" (60). The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com 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. Heller's parents suggest that she, too, should keep quiet. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. Privilege defends and protects privilege. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The project is more than admirable, but the former victim may not be the most suitable person to carry it out. Better for them to hate their enemies.49. 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. 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. 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. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). 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? 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. 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. 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. 4 (2010): 40321. The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. This was the chief method employed by the Germans to break the prisoners' spirits. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. 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.. In the world there is not just black and white, [Levi] writes, but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.48, Todorov appears to believe that Levi intended to include all Germans in the gray zone, including the great men of evil mentioned above. We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. 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. It is an exploration of complex human responses to unimaginable trauma. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. He establishes four categories: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. 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. Quite the contrary, it is at once morally tough-minded and morally imaginative. 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. it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the "Grey Zone" 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. His . 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. It seems to me that a defender of Levi could respond to Rubinstein by arguing that Levi did not attempt to justify or excuse Rumkowski. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. 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. In certain ways, this distinction mimics the distinction between the consequentialist and the deontologist. The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. 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 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. Morality was transformed. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. 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. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. 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. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . 1. Why does Primo Levi think it was so difficult to "be moral" in the Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. 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. 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 next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9. The Drowned and the Saved Summary 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. 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.