Save for his favorites, he had concern only for that remnant of the group likely to survive the ordeal of the war. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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.. 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. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. Abstract. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. 4 (2010): 40321. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. Knowing her daughter would never agree to deprive her mother of such protection, Mrs. Tennenbaum asked her to hold the pass for a moment; then she went upstairs and killed herself. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . 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. 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. Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. Indeed, for Kant, even to consider the results of one's actions is inappropriate. I agree that we do need more ways of speaking with precision about regions of collaboration and complicity during World War II.57 However, with Levi and Lang, I oppose moral determinismthe belief that in the contemporary world almost no one can be held completely responsible for his or her acts, and that the job of ethics, in the face of post-modern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality without condemning them for doing so. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide, teaching or studying The Drowned and the Saved. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. . Browning examines the strategies used by Jewish prisoners to survive; he finds, not surprisingly, that those willing to exploit the corruption of the German guards and managers had the best chance. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. 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. 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. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. : Scapegoating in the Writings of Coetzee and Primo Levi, View Wikipedia Entries for The Drowned and the Saved. 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. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. 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. 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. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? In my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. Indeed, the primary purpose of the concept of the gray zone is to point out the morally dubious actions of many of the Jewish victims. 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. But, because of the extenuating circumstancesthe ways in which Nazism degraded its victimswe have no right to judge them. Is all violence created equal? Indeed, a deontologist would argue that the uprising did not cleanse the rebels of the moral stain from the thousands of murders in which they were already complicit. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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. For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. 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. 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. Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . Each man imprisoned alongside Levi will remember his experience a little differently, and although there will be universal truths and memories that are substantiated by a number of people, as time passes, memories can become less sharp and less defined. universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). The Drowned and the Saved - Wikipedia I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. 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. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. 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 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. 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. 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. 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.. 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. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. 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. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Argumentative Essay On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. While I would agree that circumstances varied in the zones of German domination and some bystandersfamilies with young children to protect, for examplecould not have been expected to act heroically, I would still contend that their circumstances were not sufficiently dire to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. Primo Levi. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. In my opinion it is. I would argue that, despite his enormous admiration for Levi, Todorov misreads him completely. He acknowledges that, using consequentialist tactics of sacrificing the weak and powerless (e.g., children) in order to save the maximum number, Rumkowski did in fact save more lives than he would have if he had instead followed the path of Czerniakw. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. 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. In this chapter he considers also whether religious belief was useful or comforting, concluding that believers "better resisted the seduction of power [resisted collaborating]" (145) and were less prone to despair. 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 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? The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). The Question and Answer section for The Drowned and the Saved is a great 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. This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. 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. This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. 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. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. 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.
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