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. Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . 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. 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. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. Chapter 7, "Stereotypes," addresses those who question why many concentration camp inmates or ghetto inhabitants did not attempt to escape or rebel, and why many German Jews remained in Germany during Hitler's ascendance. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. The Drowned and the Saved - jstor.org "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9. The Drowned and the Saved Summary Abstract. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics Indeed, for Kant, even to consider the results of one's actions is inappropriate. 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. when writing The Drowned and the Saved, he was moved to admit that "this man's solitary death, this man's death which had been reserved for him, will bring him glory, not infamy." The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com His . It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. For example, in her memoir Strange and Unexpected Love, Fanya Heller describes her relationship as a teenager with a uniformed Ukrainian with the right to grant or take her life. As the repeated urging of her parents to be nice to Jan reminds us, love was a viable currency in the genocidal economy.33 While Heller suggests that her relationship was uncoerced and that she and Jan were able to create their own private and contained world, removed from the horrors outside of it, there was no chance that the affair would continue after the war, much less that she and Jan would marry. Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. He is careful to make clear from the outset that unusual external events contributed to the large number of survivors. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. 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. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). To an extent apparently unsurpassed by any other Nazi-appointed Jewish leader, he was the Fhrer of his tiny kingdom for much of his reign, a role he appears at times to have savored.22. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. 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. Once again, the Nazis most demonic crime was to coerce victims into the role of perpetrator, to force Jews to participate in the humiliation and murder of their fellow Jews. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. . "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). If one passed the Nazis genetic test, one's choices did make a difference. 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. Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. 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. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. He had no concern for the individual. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. 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. 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). Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. 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. I will show that certain misuses of the term travel far from Levi's original intention and become part of a relativistic challenge to contemporary ethics. The Drowned and the Saved - New York University The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. The Drowned and the Saved ( Italian: I sommersi e i salvati) is a book of essays by Italian - Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi on life and death in the Nazi extermination camps, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Auschwitz ( Monowitz ). 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. Toggle navigation . Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. Bulgarian-born philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has written extensively about moral issues relating to the Holocaust, perhaps most famously in his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. He compares this episode to the story told by the character Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. Search for other works by this author on: 2016 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, From a Holocaust Survivors Initiative to a Ministry of Education Project: Fredka Mazia and the First Israeli Youth Journeys to Poland 19651966, Artwork That Helps Frame History: Toward a Visual Historical and Sociological Analysis of Works Created by Prisoners from the Terezin Ghetto, About the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, and the True Meaning of the Gray Zone, Richard Rubinstein, Gerhard Weinberg, and the Case of Chaim Rumkowski, Morally Questionable Expansions of Levi's Gray Zone, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright 2023 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. 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 . The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. 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. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. This is the essence of Levi's notion of the gray zone. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. 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. 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). 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. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. 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. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. 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. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. 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. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. This was the chief method employed by the Germans to break the prisoners' spirits. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. 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. 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. 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. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). While a Kantian might condemn both his motives and his means, consequentialists are primarily interested in results, and the results in this case were more positive than they otherwise would have been. 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). 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. But, because of the extenuating circumstancesthe ways in which Nazism degraded its victimswe have no right to judge them. He discusses some of the ways in which the expression has been misappropriated and misunderstoodand why this matters. One may absolve those who are heavily coerced and minimally guilty: functionaries who suffer with the masses but get an extra (read more from the Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary), Get The Drowned and the Saved from Amazon.com. Summary In a seminal 1986 essay, Primo Levi coined the term the "Grey Zone" to describe the morally ambiguous world inside Auschwitz concentration camp, where the clear-cut victim/perpetrator binary broke down. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. 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. 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. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Morality was transformed. More books than SparkNotes. First published in Italy in 1986. 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 Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis I do not believe so. 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. For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. 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. 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? Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. 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. "Useless Violence" (5) gives examples of how the Nazis tormented their prisoners with "stupid and symbolic violence.". Primo Levi. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. 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. 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. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. . Chapter 1, "The Memory of the Offense," dissects out the vagaries of memory, rejection of responsibility, denial of unacceptable trauma and out and out lying among those who were held to account by tribunals as well as among the victimized. Or, Primo Levi'S Ending - Jstor everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. 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). They saw what was going on around them and, despite the possible effects of propaganda, they had the capacity to recognize the Nazis actions as evil. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. 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. The Question and Answer section for The Drowned and the Saved is a great 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. 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. Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. 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. Ethical Grey Zones - A Companion to the Holocaust - Wiley Online Library For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. 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. It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in . 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. Later in the essay, Rubinstein states that Rumkowski's Give me your children speech indicates that he was under no illusions concerning the fate of the deportees. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Levi emphasizes that the tendency to think in binary terms--good/evil, right/wrong--overlooks important characteristics of human behavior, and dangerously oversimplifies: " . This Study Guide consists of . Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. 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. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. Written by people who wish to remain anonymous Subjectivity and irony The irony of subjectivity comes through loud and clear in this account of Nazi concentration camps. 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. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing 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. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. Is all violence created equal? Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. It is an exploration of complex human responses to unimaginable trauma. . 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. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. 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? This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. Some scholars argue against this interpretation of Kant, claiming that he does not intend the Categorical Imperative to apply when dealing with agents of an illegitimate government such as that imposed by the Nazis.3 I find these arguments intriguing, but in the end I reject this interpretationas do, I believe, most scholars of Kant. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). His exploration of what he called the "gray zone" drew attention to the space between the poles of good and evil and to the moments of blurring between victims and perpetrators. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary Gray Zone Motif. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. He establishes four categories: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. 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 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. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . 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. Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the "Grey Zone" Primo Levi. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. Not affiliated with Harvard College. 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. As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). 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. In her next section, Horowitz compares the portrayal of female collaborators to that of men in Marcel Ophuls's films The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis - www.BookRags.com 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. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. 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. 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. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges.
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the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary