The Drowned and the Saved Summary & Study Guide Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. 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. Levi's account of Henri is part of his extended analysis of "the drowned and the saved," those who will go under (Dante's "sommersi") and those who can survive. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. 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. Important as all these topics may be, I argue that to fold them into Levi's notion of the gray zone dilutes the moral force of his position. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary 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. Are there different kinds of violence? 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. Levi tells a story from the diaries of Mikls Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz. For them, all Jews were condemned by genetics; there was literally nothing a Jewish person could do or say to escape annihilation. 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.. universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). 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. 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. 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. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. 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. Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. 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. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. . . " The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. The Drowned and the Saved Summary | GradeSaver For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. 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. On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. IN HIS MUCH-DISCUSSED CHAPTER "The Gray Zone" from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi recounts the disturbing story of the morally corrupt Judenrat leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, whose willing collaboration with the Nazis nonetheless failed to save him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. . 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 Drowned and the Saved Irony | GradeSaver 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 7, Stereotypes 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. 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. On the other hand, in choosing to take his own life without revealing to the community the fate that awaited it, without exhorting people to fight back, Czerniakw acted with dignity but without real concern for others.41. 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). While some scholars have expanded Primo Levi's term gray zone in appropriate and insightful ways, others have misused it so completely that it is now in danger of losing its essential meaning. 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. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He reassures us that morality survived the evil of the Holocaust: Morality cannot disappear without a radical mutation of the human species. In other words, intersubjective morality is intrinsic to human nature. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. In his recent book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, Berel Lang argues that Levi opposes this view. The prisoners would find intricate ways of communicating with each other outside of the guards' hearing and at night they would talk whilst crammed by the hundred into their tiny huts. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. 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. The Drowned and the Saved Metaphors and Similes | GradeSaver Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. Print Word PDF. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 3, Shame Summary & Analysis . Rubinstein's position here seems to grudgingly accept consequentialism, but only when calculated sacrifices are made in the morally correct frame of mind. 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. 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. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. 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. Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. Part of my disagreement with Petropoulos and Roth returns us to Levi's discussion of SS-man Eric Muhsfeldt. : Scapegoating in the Writings of Coetzee and Primo Levi, View Wikipedia Entries for The Drowned and the Saved. . 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. 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 drowned and the saved the gray zone summary
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