the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary

Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. 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. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. The Drowned and the Saved Metaphors and Similes | GradeSaver The corpses were then taken to the crematoria to be burned. . 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. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. 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. 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. 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? 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 world of the Lager was 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. GradeSaver, 5 May 2019 Web. We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. 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). 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). 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. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Adam Czerniakw, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Czerniakow.html (accessed March 16, 2016). Horowitz traces the growth of this story, which has been proven false, into a powerful myth immortalized in a popular poem and repeated in certain Jewish religious services. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. Levi emphasizes that the tendency to think in binary terms--good/evil, right/wrong--overlooks important characteristics of human behavior, and dangerously oversimplifies: " . Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). For them, all Jews were condemned by genetics; there was literally nothing a Jewish person could do or say to escape annihilation. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. 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. He establishes four categories: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. 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. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. 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. 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. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. . 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. 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. Print Word PDF. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. Are there different kinds of violence? 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. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". John Roth. Only through deathwhether one's own or that of othersis it possible to attain the absolute: by dying for an ideal one proves that one holds it dearer that life itself.39, Todorov prefers ordinary virtue, an act of will that affirms one's dignity while demonstrating concern for others. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Morality was transformed. 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. When those pleas were denied, he returned to his office and committed suicide, leaving a note that said: I can no longer bear all this. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis 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. 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. 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. From the heroic perspective, it does not matter that the Warsaw Rising failed. 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. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . In her essay, Sexual Abuse and Holocaust Literature, S. Lillian Kremer states: Although male writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi convey the effect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreational anxieties dominant in women's writing.36 Horowitz thus does a service by drawing our attention to the specific ways in which the gray zone was even more complicated for female victims than it was for their male counterparts. 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. He is the author of Woody Allen's Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films (2013); Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002); and Rights, Morality, and Faith in the Light of the Holocaust (2005). However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. 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. 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? Lang uses the following quotation to demonstrate Levi's staunch refusal to identify himself with perpetrators such as the infamous Eric Muhsfeldt: I do not know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. 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. 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. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. Examining the actions of people in extreme situations, including inmates of camps such as Auschwitz, Todorov concludes that horrific conditions did not destroy individuals capacities for acts of ordinary virtue, but instead strengthened them. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - eNotes.com Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary Levi's account of Henri is part of his extended analysis of "the drowned and the saved," those who will go under (Dante's "sommersi") and those who can survive. 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. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. 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 my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . In doing so he relies on Levi's own criteria and the essential element of mortal risk. While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. 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. 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. 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. In all of these respects, there is relevance for those who work with individuals who are seriously ill or disabled, and in a larger sense, the book forces consideration of the many and ongoing instances of man's inhumanity to man. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. 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. 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. 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. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . 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. 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. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. 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. Ethical Grey Zones - A Companion to the Holocaust - Wiley Online Library 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. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. 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. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. They could even choose to be rescuers. A special camp was built to house the prisoners and the managers were able to pay the SS for the inmates labor. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . Levi tells a story from the diaries of Mikls Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz. 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. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. 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. Levi wonders about the nature of these men and considers whether their "survival of the fittest" mentality is the natural reaction to being imprisoned in a death camp where they might be killed at any moment. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Abstract. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. 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. 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. 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. 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. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. If one passed the Nazis genetic test, one's choices did make a difference. . Hirsch asks, Would Todorov wish to argue that the social regimen (if it can be called that) created by the Germans throughout the Konzentrationslager system is what he would consider a normal social order?51 Patterson goes much further, claiming that good and evilin the eyes of Arendt and Todorov, as well as the Nazisare matters either of cultural convention for the weak or of a will to power for the strong. With regards to the premises of their thinking, Arendt and Todorov are much closer to the Nazis than they are to the Jews.52 While I reject such hyperbole as inflammatory, I do agree with Hirsch and Patterson that Todorov's claim that the entire German population could be located in the gray zone is a misuse of Levi's terma misuse that undermines our ability to properly assign moral responsibility. 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. Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. Is all violence created equal? The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. In this sense, Levi may be harsher in his evaluation of Rumkowski than is Rubinstein. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . As head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), Rumkowski chose the utilitarian approach to his dilemma: he hoped that by working with the Nazis, and proving to them that the d ghetto was so productive that it was worth maintaining, he could save as many Jewish lives as possible. The Grey Zone - OpenEdition To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. 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. One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. 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. 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. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. Or, Primo Levi'S Ending - Jstor Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words Primo Levi. 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. 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.

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