Henry 2009 the grey zone Flashcards
biographer Betty Jean Lifton informs us that Czerniaków who gave up a visa to Palestine to serve his community, killed himself
when he found out he could not exempt Jewish children from deportation
the contemporary criticism of the corruption of the Warsaw Jewish council and its police was
widespread and deeply felt
the most fierce and unforgiving attacks by jews living in the Warsaw ghetto on the complicity of other jews were directed
against the jewish police
Wladyslaw Szpilman points out that the Jewish police in the Ghetto was made up largely of young men from the prosperous classes of society
He stresses his brother Henryk’s moral courage in refusing to join the Jewish policemen
here ws a perverted universe where bread was money; water wasn’t drinkable;
your number was your name
here it was not only useless but harmful to think and try to understand
how things happened
here too language was Babel, a confusing linguistic
cacophony that, unfathomed, could lead to death
your own language, whatever it was, was no longer adequate to describe your reality
and you were unable to learn enough German to understand the constant shouted commands
there was a constant struggle against hunger, thirst, fatigue, the deadly cold of the polish winter
and the deteriorating physical labour on ones malnourished body
if you could not adapt,
you would die
if you managed to adapt, you could only survive with
constant luck
psychologically, the prisoners were inundated with
shame
humiliated at every turn, they were ashamed of their smell, ashamed if not having sufficiently rested
ashamed of letting themselves be reduced to their current state, shamed of having survived even to this point, ashamed of having made all of the various moral concessions that made it possible for them to survive
the Nazi goal was precisely to
demolish each individual
they ad achieved their goal of making sure the prisoners were
‘dead; before they mounted the scaffold
Levi leaves us with the horrific image of this
dead man walking
given the goal of the Nazi project and the unbearable daily conditions imposed upon the prisoners, it is perhaps not too surprising that the
pre-concentration camp ethics of the Jewish community collapsed completely
there was no sense of solidarity with
one’s companions
Survival of Auschwitz -“man is bound to pursue his own ends
by all possible means”
we can more readily understand the how one can pass from individual self-interest at any cost to
complicity with the enemy
the drowned and the saved uncompromisingly breaks down the absolute distinction between
prisoner and oppressor and introduces us to the murky world of Auschwitz
generally speaking, one had no allies with whom one might have joined
in resistance or simple solidarity
there were many different levels of existence in the ‘Grey zone’ some only slightly complicit
with the Nazis others required total contamination
the Kapos were mainly non-Jews, either common criminals or
political prisoners
Levi was particularly interested in the few fewer Jewish “prominents” (Kapos, cooks night guards) because unlike the non-Jewish prominents who received these offices upon entrance into the camps
Jewish prisoners had to plot and struggle hard to gain them
always worrying that their hated oppressors would remove them from from power
in order to show their worth, they became even more cruel and tyrannical than their non-Jewish cohorts
the sonderkommando lived in rigorous isolation, completely
segregated from the rest of the Auschwitz population
Thirteen such squads, each composed of between
700 and 1000 men, succeeded each other in Auschwitz
Every new Sonderkommando burned the bodies of the
preceding one
the SS ‘psychologists’ noticed that recruitment was easier if one drew from
among them from among those desperate, disorientated people, exhausted from the journey, bereft of resistance
but they were hardly privileged simply because they had enough to eat
their task was unendurable; their days closely numbered. they had no other choice but this work or death and could have only hoped that somehow their situation would change before their immanent execution
certainly the German plan was to turn the Jews
against each other from their entrance into the ghettos to their death in the gas chamber
“represented an attempt to shift onto others- specifically, the victims,
the burden of guilt”
football match between SS and Sonderkommanders
nothing could be more emblematic of the ‘grey zone; than this match where the line between victim and oppressor is blurred and prisoners and perpetrators exist on an equal footing
the complicity that bothered 0Primo was the fact that he
worked a s a chemist I a Nazi Laboratory
this collaboration with the Nazis which kept him inside and alive during the winter of 1944-1945 would continue to
haunt him even though, according to one of his biographers he “sabotaged production by muddling test tubes and botching samples”
Primo knew he did not betray his principles in order to survive
he didn’t kill anyone
he wanted to survive “not to live and tell, but to live
in order to tell”
the first of the three lessons I have learned from reading ‘survival’ and ‘drowned’ is to
follow Levi’s lead and be a witness to what I have read rather than a judge of those who were complicit
if Primo refuses to judge them, on what grounds would we
authorise ourselves to do so
for Levi, who speaks out often against hasty and facile moral judgements, no one has the
right to judge the complicit under the Nazis, certainly not those who have never been to Auschwitz
it is simply impossible for us to know what we would have done
had we been faced with the same dilemma
not to judge the complicit, however,
is not to condone what they did
regardless of the ‘grey zone’ where they worked and played together, one must maintain an absolute distinction
unlike the Nazis who if they refused to be a part of the killing machine, were simply reassigned, the Jews, most specifically the Sonderkommandos, had no other choice if they wanted to live
whereas Levi tells us that no human tribune can produce judgement on the sonderkommanders
many courts of justice have been able to condemn unambiguously those who carried out the slaughter of the Jews and far more easily those who masterminded the genocide
(drowned) “to confuse [the murderers] with their victims
is a moral disease or an aesthetic affection or sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth”
by insisting on both the blowing up of crematorium in Auschwitz by the Sonderkommandos and their frenzied attempt to save the life of the young Hungarian girl who survived the gas chamber
Levi provides proof that we cannot equate oppressor and complicitous victim
The Drowned and the saved where the ‘grey zone’ seems to encompass almost everyone
but even in this heavy mist where it is difficult to differentiate between beings, Levi unyieldingly upholds the distinction between oppressor and victim
the final lesson I’ve learned form Levi’s work, the one I, above all, hope to retain
concerns the responsibility of the reader in the presentation of the drowned and the saved
Levi warns us that in “dredging the abyss” where the Sonderkommandos worked, “one is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close ones mind”
but this he states is a temptation one must resist”
we must then become the
tellers of the tale told by Primo
our reading is an act of witnessing that must pass form the
page to the stage of our lives not only in memory of those who suffered these outrages bit in an effort to prevent their recurrence
(drowned) “what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow
could overwhelm us and our children”
our task is therefore to work in the present using Levi’s wisdom to create a world
where another Auschwitz would be impossible
“the habit of never remaining
indifferent individuals’
Levi did not believe that the Holocaust was unique in the sense
it could only happen once
