Levi believed in free will, in the possibility that each of us could choose to engage in the Jewish activity of tikkun olam (the repair of the world's injustices). The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. 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. The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. He discusses some of the ways in which the expression has been misappropriated and misunderstoodand why this matters. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. 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. 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. A special camp was built to house the prisoners and the managers were able to pay the SS for the inmates labor. One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. 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. The SS would never have played against other prisoners, as they considered themselves far superior to the average inmate. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. 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. . Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. 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. As Christopher Browning and others have demonstrated, no one was forced to become a perpetrator: Browning's groundbreaking study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows that members of police formations, at least in this case, could choose not to participate in atrocities. In doing so he relies on Levi's own criteria and the essential element of mortal risk. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. 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. 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. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. . Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. 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. Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Melson acknowledges that his mother's actions were morally dubious: whether she was willing to admit it or not, Melson's mother put the lives of the Zamojskis at risk when she stole their identities. 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. 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. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. More books than SparkNotes. Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. 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. Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. 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. Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. 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. Yet, even within this zone, moral distinctions do exist. 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. Hirsch asks, Would Todorov wish to argue that the social regimen (if it can be called that) created by the Germans throughout the Konzentrationslager system is what he would consider a normal social order?51 Patterson goes much further, claiming that good and evilin the eyes of Arendt and Todorov, as well as the Nazisare matters either of cultural convention for the weak or of a will to power for the strong. With regards to the premises of their thinking, Arendt and Todorov are much closer to the Nazis than they are to the Jews.52 While I reject such hyperbole as inflammatory, I do agree with Hirsch and Patterson that Todorov's claim that the entire German population could be located in the gray zone is a misuse of Levi's terma misuse that undermines our ability to properly assign moral responsibility. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto, adopted the opposite approach. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. 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. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. 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. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. One of the key things that was done to the prisoners was completely dehumanizing them. Privilege defends and protects privilege. one is never in another's place. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. 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. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. 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. 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 . These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 3, Shame Summary & Analysis 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. 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 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.
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