However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. In certain ways, this distinction mimics the distinction between the consequentialist and the deontologist. 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. 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. 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. Bulgarian-born philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has written extensively about moral issues relating to the Holocaust, perhaps most famously in his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. The Drowned and the Saved Summary | GradeSaver Yet, even within this zone, moral distinctions do exist. In the eyes of the Nazis, nothing a Jew could do would stop him or her from being a Jew, and thereby slated for inevitable destruction. Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto, adopted the opposite approach. One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. 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. These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. 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. 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. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. They could even choose to be rescuers. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. In normal moral circumstances, Levi would not hesitate to condemn Rumkowski, but because he was a victim living in nightmarish conditions, we have no right to condemn himalthough we do have an obligation to consider the moral implications of his actions. We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. 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. 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. 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. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . 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. As in all the other chapters of his book, Levi discusses the complexity of these situations. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. His . The Black, White, and Gray Zones of Schindler's List: Steven Spielberg Some historians believe that Levi committed suicide, overwhelmed by a penetrating sense of guilt at having survived an experience that killed so many. He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. 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. The fact that they may have had a few more choices and that making those choices saved more prisoners does not change their status any more than the status of the rebelling Sonderkommandos of 1944 would have changed had they somehow miraculously survived the war. Certainly some of them could have chosen to be martyrs or rescuers. 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? Kant posits that a moral act first requires good will (similar to good intentions). Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. 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. This Study Guide consists of . First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. Robert Melson's Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side also usefully expands Levi's original concept of the gray zone, applying it to Jews living on false papers. Melson describes the experiences of his own parents as they managed to obtain falsified identity papers allowing them to evade the Nazis throughout the war. 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. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. 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). Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. Victims would do better psychologically to hate their oppressors and leave the understanding to non-victims: One almost regrets Levi's commitment to his project of understanding the enemy (for his sake, not for ours: as readers we are only enriched by his accomplishment). The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . 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. 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). 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. . . The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. 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.
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