First, as Levi makes clear, even full-time residents of the gray zone such as Rumkowski are morally guilty; we can and we should see that. The last part of the book consists of letters between Germans and Levi' they ask questions about his experiences and his feelings about his captors, and he answers honestly, describing his ordeal and stating clearly what he sees. In her essay, Sexual Abuse and Holocaust Literature, S. Lillian Kremer states: Although male writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi convey the effect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreational anxieties dominant in women's writing.36 Horowitz thus does a service by drawing our attention to the specific ways in which the gray zone was even more complicated for female victims than it was for their male counterparts. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. . 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. Even so, he insists, memory and the historical record are crucial to combating Nazi assumptions that their deeds would go unnoticed (they were destroying the evidence), or disbelieved. 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. 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. Members of these special squads received marginally better provisions of food and other supplies than most camp inmates, yet they knew thatlike all other prisonersthey were doomed. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". 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. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. 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. Search for other works by this author on: 2016 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, From a Holocaust Survivors Initiative to a Ministry of Education Project: Fredka Mazia and the First Israeli Youth Journeys to Poland 19651966, Artwork That Helps Frame History: Toward a Visual Historical and Sociological Analysis of Works Created by Prisoners from the Terezin Ghetto, About the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, and the True Meaning of the Gray Zone, Richard Rubinstein, Gerhard Weinberg, and the Case of Chaim Rumkowski, Morally Questionable Expansions of Levi's Gray Zone, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright 2023 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary