With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. One of the key things that was done to the prisoners was completely dehumanizing them. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. . (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. . Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. Soon after the war ended, he wrote several books about his experience. He is careful to make clear from the outset that unusual external events contributed to the large number of survivors. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. Nor, finally and most fundamentally, is the Gray Zone a place to which all human beingsby the fact of human frailtyare granted access, since that would then enable them conveniently to respond to any moral charge with the indisputable claim that I'm only human.8. 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. 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. . " Had they liberated it in 1942 instead of January 1945, Rumkowski might have been credited with saving thousands of lives: What if Joseph Stalin's hopes of a decisive victory in early 1942 had been realized, and, as a result, the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, d, and perhaps even Warsaw, as well as many others had been liberated in the spring or summer of 1942? Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. 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. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary 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. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. 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. 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. The Drowned and the Saved Summary & Study Guide Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. The inequalities between them were just too great. thissection. 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. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. An editor 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. 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. 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. 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 - Primo Levi - Google Books Thus, Rumkowski created in the ghetto a caricature of the totalitarian German state.46 Ignoring Levi's distinction between victims and perpetrators, between those who had viable choices and those whose meaningful choices had been destroyed, Todorov sees the gray zone as permeating the entire totalitarian German state: everyone had his or her freedom limited by people higher up in the hierarchy. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 7, Stereotypes Summary & Analysis . Yet, even within this zone, moral distinctions do exist. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. In The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, she explores the images of good and evil associated particularly with women under Nazism, as these shape our perception of the Holocaust.32. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. 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. . Morality was transformed. Would not those who had been trying to keep the Jews of the ghettos alive as long as possible subsequently have been hailed for their efforts?24, Yet Weinberg's argument fails as a justification for placing Rumkowski into Levi's gray zone, for as Lang asserted, the gray zone is NOT reserved for suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight.. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). Or, Primo Levi'S Ending - Jstor The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). The Drowned and the Saved Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary 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. 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. 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). Is all violence created equal? 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. 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. 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. 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?
