Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. But those choices still counted for something. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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. Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. 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. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. His . Adam Czerniakw, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Czerniakow.html (accessed March 16, 2016). 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. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. This is what makes him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist. 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. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the gray zone, the spies.44, Todorov disagrees. 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. 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. In 'The Grey Zone', the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into 'us' and 'them . Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. 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.. Yet, even within this zone, moral distinctions do exist. 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. While there is no question that Wilczek used his power to gain advantages for himself and for members of his family, Browning points out that he also used his influence with a factory manager named Kurt Otto Baumgarten in ways that benefitted the entire community. The point of the Rising was to make a statement to the world, to die for something noble: To the hero, death has more value than life. 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. 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. 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). An editor Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. "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). She argues, as did Gandhi, that had Jewish leaders simply refused to cooperate with the Nazis, many fewer Jews would have been killed: after all the Nazis did not have enough men to drag every Jew from his or her home to the camps. 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. 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. 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. 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. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. In my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. 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. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . 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 problem of the fallibility of memory, the techniques used by the Nazis to break the will of prisoners, the use of language in the camps and the nature of violence are all studied. 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. Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. Heller's parents suggest that she, too, should keep quiet. . In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. . " 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. 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. 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. 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 inequalities between them were just too great. Is all violence created equal? Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". . Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 53. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption, against which it is difficult to guard oneself. Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. 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). The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. 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. 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 anthology Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, both David Hirsch and David Patterson attack Todorov's positionespecially his refusal to view perpetrators as moral monsters simply because they lived in a totalitarian society. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. 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. The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. 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. 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. Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. 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. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. Still others are willing to defend Rumkowski. 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. The SS would never have played against other prisoners, as they considered themselves far superior to the average inmate. Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. thissection. 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). "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. In the prologue to the 2006 anthology Gray Zones, editors Jonathan Petropoulos and John Roth acknowledge that while Levi spoke of the gray zone in the singular his analysis made clear that this region was multi-faceted and multi-layered. They go on to say: Following Levi's lead, we thought about the Holocaust's gray zones, the multitude of ways in which aspects of his gray-zone analysis might shed light both on the Holocaust itself and also on scholarship about that catastrophe.53 They list a number of gray zones, including: ambiguity and compromise in writing and depicting Holocaust history; issues of identity, gender, and sexuality during and after the Third Reich; inquiries about gray spacesthose regions of geography, imagination, and psychology that reflect the Holocaust's impact then and now; and dilemmas that have haunted the pursuit of justice, ethics, and religion during and after the Holocaust.54. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. 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. 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. 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. A chemist by profession and a writer by compulsion, Levi, an Italian Jew forced to become Prisoner 174517 in a Nazi death camp, refused afterward to have his tattoo erased; for forty years, he wore. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). 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. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. 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. While it is true that the victims did have choices, and Levi acknowledges that it is important to study those choices, in the end he argues that we must not judge the victims as we do the perpetrators. 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 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 ). Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. 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. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. . 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. 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. . Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. 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 moral action par excellence is caring.43. Not affiliated with Harvard College. The Drowned and the Saved presents a thematic treatment of the Holocaust, revealing the how it is remembered, forgotten, and stereotyped by surviving victims, the perpetrators, and subsequent generations. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. They inhabited a sort of moral no man's land, belonging to nobody and liked by neither group. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. 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. Print Word PDF. Soon after the war ended, he wrote several books about his experience. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. 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. 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. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. 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 choice could lead to a secular salvation.15.
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