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 ). 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. Kant posits that a moral act first requires good will (similar to good intentions). The prisoners were to an equal degree victims. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. The Gray Zone Chapter 3, Shame Chapter 4, Communicating . Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. The shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. He describes situations in which inmates chose to sacrifice themselves to save others, as well as small acts of kindness that kept others going even when it would have been easier to be selfish. 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 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. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. Neither forced religious conversion nor phony confession would have saved them. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). A Jew could choose to commit suicide, or to comply, and those choices did have moral ramifications. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. 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. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. 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). The 'grey zone' is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. 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. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. 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. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. 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. 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. This expansion is neither hairsplitting nor evasive, although those charges have been raised against it. 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. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. 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. 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. 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 events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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). Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. 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. 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. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. 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. 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 and the Saved Summary". 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. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words 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. 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 . 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Rubinstein's position here seems to grudgingly accept consequentialism, but only when calculated sacrifices are made in the morally correct frame of mind. The first time he states: Between those who are only guards and those who are only inmates stands a host of intermediates occupying what Primo Levi has called the gray zone (a zone that in totalitarian states includes the entire population to one degree or another).45 He then goes on to discuss how prisoner-guards such as the kapos, or by extension Chaim Rumkowski, exert abusive power towards their victims precisely because of their own lack of power in relation to their oppressors. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Print Word PDF. . Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. In his recent book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, Berel Lang argues that Levi opposes this view. . Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. 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). Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. But, because of the extenuating circumstancesthe ways in which Nazism degraded its victimswe have no right to judge them. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. 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 . Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. 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. 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. 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 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. Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. "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 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. The words "gray zone, useless violence and shame" pay special attention to the inmates who had survived the initial selection and continued increasing their chances of survival. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. Levi tells a story from the diaries of Mikls Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. 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? They inhabited a sort of moral no man's land, belonging to nobody and liked by neither group. Toggle navigation . For example, in his essay Alleviation and Compliance: The Survival Strategies of the Jewish Leadership in the Wierzbnik Ghetto and Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps (in the Petropoulos and Roth volume), Christopher Browning examines the actions of prisoners in camps that differ from Auschwitz in that a surprisingly large proportion of their inmates survived. 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). 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. 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. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. 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. 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. 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. 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. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. GradeSaver, 5 May 2019 Web. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. Nor, finally and most fundamentally, is the Gray Zone a place to which all human beingsby the fact of human frailtyare granted access, since that would then enable them conveniently to respond to any moral charge with the indisputable claim that I'm only human.8. 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. Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). 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. 1The 'grey zone' is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. 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. The speech also gives expression to his rationalization of the grisly task.23 For Rubinstein, as for Kant, good will is a necessary precondition for the possibility of morally justifiable behavior. This Study Guide consists of . One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. 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. 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.. It is well known that the members of one Sonderkommando rebelled on October 7, 1944, killing a number of SS men and destroying a crematoriumyet many scholars would still argue that this episode is not enough to exculpate the many who did not rebel. In this sense, Levi may be harsher in his evaluation of Rumkowski than is Rubinstein. 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. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. While a Kantian might condemn both his motives and his means, consequentialists are primarily interested in results, and the results in this case were more positive than they otherwise would have been. Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. 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). While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. The camps were built on a foundation of violence and this is one of the things that Levi looks at in the next essay in the book. In my opinion it is. 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. It is written by Pimo Levi, an Italian Jew who was in . Not affiliated with Harvard College. thissection. 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 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. 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 Question and Answer section for The Drowned and the Saved is a great Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. 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. 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. Levi argues therefore that, while we should think seriously about the different choices made by people such as Czerniakw and Rumkowski, we ultimately have no right to condemn 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. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The SS would never have played against other prisoners, as they considered themselves far superior to the average inmate. He had no concern for the individual. 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. . 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. While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. 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.
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