Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. See Helga Varden, Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door One More Time: Kant's Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis, Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. Levi tells a story from the diaries of Mikls Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. 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. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? 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 . The Drowned and the Saved, however, was written 40 years later and is the work of memory and reflection not only on the original events, but also on how the world has dealt with the Holocaust in the intervening years. First published in Italy in 1986. This would have created little risk for their friends, the Zamojskis; as members of a once-noble family, they would have no trouble getting replacement papers. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. But the members of the SS were there voluntarily; they chose to engage in atrocities. 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. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. 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. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. 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. Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. I know that murderers existed and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.9, Having drawn on Levi's discussion to make clear what the gray zone is not, Lang goes on to say what it is: In contrast to these alternatives, 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.10. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. The world of the Lager was so insane, so far removed from the niceties of everyday reality, that we do not have the moral authority to judge the actions of its victims. They saw what was going on around them and, despite the possible effects of propaganda, they had the capacity to recognize the Nazis actions as evil. 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. 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. This Study Guide consists of approximately 34pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - 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. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . . 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. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? 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. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). thissection. Even with the show of force the Germans would display, they often lacked the necessary personnel in camps to keep control of the sheer number of prisoners kept there. This violates the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, which requires that we always treat others as ends in themselves and never as means (to survival, in this instance). Collaboration springs from the need for auxiliaries to keep order as German power is overtaxed, and the desire to imitate the victor by giving orders. . 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. The Drowned and the Saved, however, was written 40 years later and is the work of memory and reflection not only on the original events, but also on how the world has dealt with the Holocaust in the intervening years. 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 Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. His exploration of what he called the "gray zone" drew attention to the space between the poles of good and evil and to the moments of blurring between victims and perpetrators. Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. 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. Horowitz begins by examining the myth of the good in the historically discredited story of ninety-three Jewish girls living in a Jewish seminary in Cracow who, according to the story, along with their teacher, chose mass suicide rather than submit to the Nazi demand that they provide sexual services to German soldiers. 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. The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. The project is more than admirable, but the former victim may not be the most suitable person to carry it out. Better for them to hate their enemies.49. . 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 '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 . 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. . Todorov presents himself as an admirer of Primo Levi, and in this book he refers to or quotes from Levi on forty-six of his two hundred and ninety-six pages. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. Death and destruction were the only absolutes in this moral universe. 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. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. Are there different kinds of violence? He discusses some of the ways in which the expression has been misappropriated and misunderstoodand why this matters. Primo Levi. Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. 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. But those choices still counted for something. But regardless of their actions Jews were condemned. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. The members of the special squads did the opposite. I do not believe so. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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. Later in the essay, Rubinstein states that Rumkowski's Give me your children speech indicates that he was under no illusions concerning the fate of the deportees. 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. 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 ). Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. 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. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . 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? Levi begins it by discussing a phenomenon that occurred following liberation from the camps: many who had been incarcerated committed suicide or were profoundly depressed. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 1, The Memory of the Offense 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. 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. On the other hand, he did argue that, because of their status as coerced victims, we do not have the moral authority to condemn their actions. 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. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. 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. His . 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. : Scapegoating in the Writings of Coetzee and Primo Levi, View Wikipedia Entries for The Drowned and the Saved. 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. Ross, hold that the moral worth of an act is intrinsic to the act itself, while consequentialists, including Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, believe that the moral worth of an act lies primarily in its consequences. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. 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). The moral action par excellence is caring.43. The book ends ("Conclusion") with the exhortation that "It happened, therefore it can happen again . 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. 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). Save for his favorites, he had concern only for that remnant of the group likely to survive the ordeal of the war. The case of Wilczek substantiates Weinberg's point in that the Starachowice camp operated until comparatively late in the war, and as a result, Wilczek succeeded in saving hundreds of lives. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. Lang explains this point first by demonstrating that, as I argued earlier, Levi rejects Kant's Categorical Imperative: Kant's critics have argued that neither life nor ethics is as simple as he implies, and Levi is in effect agreeing with this. it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). Richard L. Rubinstein, Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. 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. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. 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. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. This is a problem when it comes to painting a broad picture of something that has happened to a large group of people. Yet, even within this zone, moral distinctions do exist. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. 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. Barbour, Polly. 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. 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. 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. Lang uses the following quotation to demonstrate Levi's staunch refusal to identify himself with perpetrators such as the infamous Eric Muhsfeldt: I do not know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. 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. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. Browning concludes that such strategies of alleviation and compliance, while neither heroic nor admirable, without doubt saved Jewish lives that otherwise would have been lost. An editor He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. 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. In my opinion it is. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. 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. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. This is what makes him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. If one passed the Nazis genetic test, one's choices did make a difference. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? Is all violence created equal? Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. 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. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. 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. Although the Oberscharfhrer, too, was amazed, and hesitated before deciding, ultimately he ordered one of his henchmen to kill the girl; he could not trust that she would refrain from telling other inmates her story. 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. 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. 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. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). Rubinstein quotes an American Orthodox rabbinical ruling that, while it is permissible for a soldiers to eat pork when no other food is available, they must not lick the bones (Lecht nicht die bayner).18 He concludes that for Rumkowski the gray zone had turned black.19. 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. Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. There are various ways in which they were able to do this, not least, starving them and working them to the point of exhaustion. 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. 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. . 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." 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. 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. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. 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. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. 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. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. In certain ways, this distinction mimics the distinction between the consequentialist and the deontologist. This Study Guide consists of . Certainly some of them could have chosen to be martyrs or rescuers. (199). Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. 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. 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.. 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. Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. 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. The prisoners were to an equal degree victims.
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