She asserts that Rumkowski acted as the Fhrer of d, noting that he went so far as to mint coins with his image on them.14, In his essay Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, Richard Rubinstein presents a scathing critique of Levi's decision to place Rumkowski in the gray zone. . " Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. thissection. 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. 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 SS would never have played against other prisoners, as they considered themselves far superior to the average inmate. We are neither angels nor demons but ordinary human beings comprising both good AND evil. http://www.amazon.com/review/R3GSXXVIVI3IV5/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0691096589&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books (accessed March 16, 2016). Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. While Horowitz does not examine the conditions that prisoners faced in the camps, she does, in my view, legitimately expand the gray zone to include female victims in ways that further our understanding of Levi's primary moral concerns. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . 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 ). 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 . (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. 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. Chapter 7, "Stereotypes," addresses those who question why many concentration camp inmates or ghetto inhabitants did not attempt to escape or rebel, and why many German Jews remained in Germany during Hitler's ascendance. It seems to me that Levi views the Hobbesian world of the Lager as 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. suicide is an act of man and not of the animal . This is what makes him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist. Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. 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. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." 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. 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. Neither forced religious conversion nor phony confession would have saved them. 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. David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. "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). 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. She argues, as did Gandhi, that had Jewish leaders simply refused to cooperate with the Nazis, many fewer Jews would have been killed: after all the Nazis did not have enough men to drag every Jew from his or her home to the camps. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. . This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. 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. Survivor Primo Levi relates how to very few live to tell their stories and unmasks the true depths of Nazi evil. You can help us out by revising, improving and updating 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. While one may disagree specifically with his way of making these distinctions or the conclusions he reaches in each of these areas, I believe that this approach is much more useful than the multiplication and stretching of Levi's gray zone in ways that were clearly unintended. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong 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. 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. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. 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. Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. 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. Privilege defends and protects privilege. Not affiliated with Harvard College. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. 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 . 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. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. Gray Zone Motif. 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 Drowned and the Saved presents a thematic treatment of the Holocaust, revealing the how it is remembered, forgotten, and stereotyped by surviving victims, the perpetrators, and subsequent generations. 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. Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. 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 - 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. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, or even the authorities of George Orwell's 1984, the Nazis did not torture to change the beliefs or behaviors of their victims. 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. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. Save for his favorites, he had concern only for that remnant of the group likely to survive the ordeal of the war. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? 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. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). He suggests that Levi strove to understand the Germans not as monsters, but as ordinary people caught up in a totalitarian hell in which no one could be held morally responsible for his or her acts, no matter how brutal. 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. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. In "The Intellectual in Auschwitz" (6) Levi speculates about how and in what circumstances being educated or cultured was a help or hindrance to coping with the situation. The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). 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. 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 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. 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.
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