The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing In her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt famously criticizes those Jews who, she believed, collaborated with the Nazis. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. 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. For it assigns moral standing to a position that had been otherwise pushed aside in a way that denied any means of judging it in ethical terms and which is indeed no less categorical than the two more commonly recognized alternatives.11. GradeSaver, 5 May 2019 Web. Kant posits that a moral act first requires good will (similar to good intentions). Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. 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. They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. . 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. 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. 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. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. thissection. As Christopher Browning and others have demonstrated, no one was forced to become a perpetrator: Browning's groundbreaking study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows that members of police formations, at least in this case, could choose not to participate in atrocities. However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. 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. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). 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 . 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. The Drowned and the Saved Summary | GradeSaver It is an exploration of complex human responses to unimaginable trauma. She asserts that Rumkowski acted as the Fhrer of d, noting that he went so far as to mint coins with his image on them.14, In his essay Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, Richard Rubinstein presents a scathing critique of Levi's decision to place Rumkowski in the gray zone. The Grey Zone - OpenEdition 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). Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. 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. 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). 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. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. Even so, Melson contends that his parents should be located at the outer edges of the gray zone because they, too, were forced to make choices that should not be judged according to everyday standards of moral behavior.30 For example, his parents initially asked friends to give them their identification papers so they could move to a different part of Poland and live there under the friends identities. The prisoners would find intricate ways of communicating with each other outside of the guards' hearing and at night they would talk whilst crammed by the hundred into their tiny huts. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. Argumentative Essay On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. More books than SparkNotes. 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. 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. 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. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. 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. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? 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. 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. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. 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 camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. . . This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. Given an apparent choice between life and death, a person cannot be blamed for choosing life.31 While many moralistsKantians in particularmight disagree with this claim, it is clear that Melson's argument begins with Levi's original notion and attempts to expand it to Jews living on false papers. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. 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). 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. 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. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com 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. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. In "The Intellectual in Auschwitz" (6) Levi speculates about how and in what circumstances being educated or cultured was a help or hindrance to coping with the situation. Is all violence created equal? 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. From this perspective, perhaps Hitler was the only German who was not in the gray zone.47, In his second mention of the gray zone, Todorov praises Levi's description of life in the camps as an accomplishment unparalleled in modern literature. He admires Levi's rejection of Manicheanism whether in reference to groups (Germans, the Jews, the kapos, the members of the Sonderkommandos) or individuals. 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.. 1. Why does Primo Levi think it was so difficult to "be moral" in the "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). 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. As Berel Lang clearly states, 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.56 Levi speaks above all of the situation of Holocaust victims, whose choices were fundamentally choiceless. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. 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. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. 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). Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. Using bribery and payoffs (including the extortion of sexual favors from female prisoners), Wilczek became a Jewish Fhrer comparable to, and, some would say, even more immoral than Chaim Rumkowski. 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. Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. Levi tells a story from the diaries of Mikls Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture The Gray Zone is in that sense beyond or at least outside good and evil but morally significant, at the boundary of those ethical judgments and yet warranting a place of its own within ethics. 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