The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. 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. The corpses were then taken to the crematoria to be burned. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. 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? Print Word PDF. Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. In his book The Question of German Guilt, first published in German in 1947 and in English-language translation in 1948, Karl Jaspers suggests a framework for evaluating German responsibility. But the members of the SS were there voluntarily; they chose to engage in atrocities. 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. This is the essence of Levi's notion of the gray zone. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the gray zone, the spies.44, Todorov disagrees. 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. This Study Guide consists of approximately 34pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. 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. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". . Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto, adopted the opposite approach. Finally, Horowitz quotes Jean Amry, who says of torture: It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners.35. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. 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. "Useless Violence" (5) gives examples of how the Nazis tormented their prisoners with "stupid and symbolic violence.". It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. She uses this story to illustrate her contention that Jewish tradition demands of women that they give up their lives rather than submit to rape. Soon after the war ended, he wrote several books about his experience. To say that Muhsfeldt, for that brief instant, was at the gray zone's extreme boundary does not mean that perpetrators and bystanders deserve the same moral consideration and leniency that Levi demands for those who were condemned to live in horrific conditions as they awaited their seemingly inevitable deaths. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. 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. The shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. I would argue that, despite his enormous admiration for Levi, Todorov misreads him completely. . 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. 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. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. "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). 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. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. 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. Indeed, the last lines of The Drowned and the Saved make Levi's position on this issue explicit: Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [perpetrators] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the beautiful words of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.55. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. But those choices still counted for something. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. . 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. . " 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. In this sense, Levi may be harsher in his evaluation of Rumkowski than is Rubinstein. You'll be clean, I promise you.34 While the actions of male victims are accepted as guiltless ones coerced by what Lawrence Langer calls choiceless choices (e.g., Heller's grandfather gave up his wife to save himself), women have been judged by a harsher standard that condemns forbidden sexual contact. Even though his first book Se questo un uomo -published in English as Survival in Auschwitz -did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it . The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. He did not suggest that we ignore the moral implications of the actions of the special squads or of Chaim Rumkowski; indeed he insisted that we examine these implications carefully. . 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 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. 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). Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. Under Bentham's Utilitarian Principle, one should act to bring the greatest amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people while inflicting the least amount of harm to the least number of people. 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. Read Argumentative Essays On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi and other exceptional papers on every subject and topic college can throw at you. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. 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. 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? Adam Czerniakw, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Czerniakow.html (accessed March 16, 2016). 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. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. 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. Survivors such as Primo Levi did engage in self-blame for the tragic choices they had to make or even when they had not transgressed any moral code or principles. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. 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. 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. There is some evidence to suggest that he bribed Baumgarten to arrange the removal of the sadistic camp commandant Willi Althoff, and to have the Ukrainian guards moved outside the camp fence. In my opinion it is. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. Primo Levi. The inequalities between them were just too great. 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. Still others are willing to defend Rumkowski. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . 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. His . 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 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. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? 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. 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. This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. 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. 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.. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. : Scapegoating in the Writings of Coetzee and Primo Levi, View Wikipedia Entries for The Drowned and the Saved. 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. Morality was transformed. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . If one passed the Nazis genetic test, one's choices did make a difference. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi argues that it is unfair to judge the victims of genocide using moral tools that are appropriate to normal, everyday life. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . Abstract. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. 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. 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). Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words 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. The last part of the book consists of letters between Germans and Levi' they ask questions about his experiences and his feelings about his captors, and he answers honestly, describing his ordeal and stating clearly what he sees. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. An editor Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). 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. 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. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. 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. 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. They also informed on their fellow prisoners, usually so that they would get better treatment or additional food for themselves. I do not believe so. Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. 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. 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. 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. 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. These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise 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. He establishes four categories: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. 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. 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. 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. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. The Gray Zone Chapter 3, Shame Chapter 4, Communicating . Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. 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." Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. 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. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. While Levi tells us that Muhsfeldt was executed after the war, and contends that this execution was justified, he does suggest that Muhsfeldt's hesitationno matter how momentarywas morally significant. 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. On Amazon.com one reviewer of Todorov's Hope and Memory was inspired to claim that Levi talks about a Gray Zone inside which we all operate. In doing so he relies on Levi's own criteria and the essential element of mortal risk. Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. Sander H. Lee, Primo Levi's Gray Zone: Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Fall 2016, Pages 276297, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcw037. Save for his favorites, he had concern only for that remnant of the group likely to survive the ordeal of the war. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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. He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. 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. He discusses some of the ways in which the expression has been misappropriated and misunderstoodand why this matters.
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