CHAPTER 1
LA âZONA GRIGIAâ
THE PARADOX OF JUDGMENT IN PRIMO LEVIâS âGREY ZONEâ
Having measured up the meanders of the gray zone and pushed to explore the darkest side of Auschwitz, not only for judging but mainly for understanding the true nature of humans and their limits, is one of the most inestimable contributions made by Levi to any future moral philosophy.
âMassimo Giuliani, Centaur in Auschwitz: Reflections on Primo Leviâs Thinking
Considerable attention has been paid by a number of scholars to Leviâs controversial notion of the âgrey zone.â The concept proved fundamental to his understanding of his Auschwitz experiences and has since been appropriated, often uncritically, in the fields of Holocaust studies, philosophy, law, history, theology, feminism, popular culture, and human rights issues relating to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.1 In spite of this, there has been no attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of the influences on the concept and its evolution, and little has been written on Leviâs moral judgments of âprivilegedâ Jews. Recent interpretations and appropriations of the grey zone often misunderstand, expand upon, or intentionally depart from Leviâs ideas. This chapter returns to Leviâs original concept in order to investigate how he judges the âprivilegedâ Jews he portrays, namely Kapos, Sonderkommandos, and Chaim Rumkowski of the Lodz Ghetto. The analysis reveals that even Levi himself could not abstain from judging those he argues should not be judged. Paradoxically, it would seem, the conceptualization of the grey zone warns against judgment but at the same time requires it.
Influences on Leviâs Judgment: The Evolution of the Grey Zone
Primo Levi was born in Turin, on 31 July 1919, into a highly assimilated Italian-Jewish family. A prolific reader who excelled in school, Levi had a withdrawn and self-effacing nature, which remained with him throughout his life. He obtained his degree in chemistry in July 1941 despite the increasing anti-Jewish measures introduced by Mussoliniâs government, with this persecution contributing to his belated sense of Jewish identity.2 Joining an untrained and ill-equipped group of partisans in late 1943, Levi was soon captured and, after revealing his Jewish background, sent to the Fossoli concentration camp.3 He was then deported to Auschwitz, where he was incarcerated from 22 February 1944 to 27 January 1945. Levi was selected for work at the Buna/Monowitz subcamp (Auschwitz III), several kilometers from the gas chambers of Birkenau. Exposed to harsh and degrading conditions, he endured manual labor for many months before obtaining a specialist position in a chemical laboratory. Levi survived the Lager due only to a combination of this âprivilegedâ position, perseverance, outside aid, and luck. On his return to Italy, Levi told his story obsessively to all around him, compiling two memoirs. He worked as a chemical analyst and manager at SIVA, a paint factory, for many years and then devoted his retirement to writing and talking, participating in hundreds of interviews and visits to schools, and compiling a multitude of stories, essays, and poems.4 Amidst frequent bouts of acute depression and other health and family problems, Levi continued to write and talk about the Holocaust until 11 April 1987, when he took his own life.
Publishing his essay on the grey zone less than a year before his suicide, Levi addressed a subject that had troubled him since his liberation. During an interview in 1979, shortly before he began writing The Drowned and the Saved, he gave a clear indication of the impetus to return to the Lager:
I feel in my stomach, in my guts, something that I havenât quite digested, connected to the theme of the Lager seen again from thirty-five yearsâ distance. After all the polemic about the identification between victim and oppressor, the theme of guilt, the extreme ambiguity of that place, the grey band that separated the oppressed from the oppressors [sic].5
From Leviâs initial memoirs of his wartime experiences through to his last essays in The Drowned and the Saved, all of his writings, whether concerning chemistry, science fiction, or the Holocaust, are preoccupied with the complex nature of humanity. The question of what constitutes a âmanâ was the central enigma that concerned Levi even before his incarceration in Auschwitz. It was the camp, perhaps, that allowed him to reach some tentative answers, although his ideas were not always consistent, and to the end of his life he would fluctuate between optimism in humanityâs potential and despair at its fallibility.
Lawrence L. Langer argues that Auschwitz had completely âsabotaged the ethical vision that [Levi] cherished as a human being.â6 Nonetheless, Levi was unable or unwilling to abandon his humanist foundations completely. While some commentators have credited Levi with establishing a new ethical system,7 others contend he was never able to escape the ethical abyss left in the Holocaustâs wake.8 Stanislao Pugliese sees in Leviâs testimony not just an effort to âbear witness,â but also âto search for an ethical line of conduct and moral reasoning based on classical humanism but cognizant of humanityâs changed moral status after Auschwitz.â9 Similarly, Bryan Cheyette succinctly outlines the âethical uncertaintyâ at the heart of Leviâs Holocaust writings. Emphasizing âthe division between Leviâs renowned scientific detachment and his profound uncertainties about the efficacy of any intellectual or moral system,â along with his âtremendous distrust of words,â Cheyette qualifies the common impression of Levi as the dispassionate observer to show him caught between the necessity and impossibility of representation.10 Cheyette stresses Leviâs âagonyâ at contemplating the vulnerability of Holocaust representations to succumbing so easily to stereotypes, with this agony including his own fear of betraying his and othersâ experiences.11 In an interview in 1975, Levi explicitly demonstrated his awareness that âa human being is a âunique,â complicated objectâ and that âwhen that object is reduced to a page, even by the best writers, itâs reduced to a skeleton.â12
The problems of judgment and (mis)representation were major dilemmas for Levi in many more of his writings than just âThe Grey Zone.â Ian Thomsonâs biography points to Leviâs almost obsessive preoccupation with this theme from the time of his liberation from Auschwitz:
It is not true that Levi turned to unprecedentedly bleak themes in The Drowned and the Saved or, as some romantic critics like to believe, that a wave of shame and pessimism had washed over him. Bianca Guidetti Serra [a longtime friend] first heard the words âgrey zoneâ from Levi in 1946. âRight from the beginning,â she told me in 1992, âthere was always this problem of understanding what had happened and why men had behaved in the way they did. The Drowned and the Saved could just as easily have been Primoâs first book as his last book.â13
After choosing a career in science over literature, Levi always insisted he had never seriously considered writing before Auschwitz, although he did engage in sporadic creative writing throughout his youth, some of which shows a strong interest in the (not always virtuous) nature of human beings. According to another of Leviâs biographers, âUomoâ (âManâ), an unpublished piece written during the war, tells the story of a man searching within himself in an attempt to understand his nature, only to find darkness and incomprehensibility.14 While Leviâs experience in Auschwitz was the watershed event that triggered his interest in what would evolve into the grey zone, the concept arose from numerous personal, social, and cultural influences. Mapping out the development of Leviâs ideas on judgment, representation, and the grey zone over time reveals that Leviâs reflections on the issue of âprivilegedâ Jews grew out of much more than a mere retrospective contemplation of his eleven months in the Lager.
A number of commentators have discussed at length Leviâs deeply ingrained humanist sensibilities,15 yet his wartime experiences fundamentally challenged his strong belief in human dignity, rationality, and responsibility. Levi found himself in close proximity to moral compromise even before his arrival in the Lager. Vanda Maestro, a Jewish inmate he fell in love with at Fossoli, spent the night with the campâs Italian commandant in an unsuccessful attempt to save herself from deportation.16 Arturo FoĂ , a 67-year-old Jewish poet who had fanatically praised Fascist ideology, was also deported in the same cattle car as Levi. FoĂ âs fellow occupants undoubtedly felt he had betrayed them, and he did not survive the journey, although the reasons for his demise remain uncertain. FoĂ âs relatives believe other prisoners on the train beat him to death. Levi never wrote about these episodes, and when he was asked about FoĂ , he either denied the alleged murder had occurred or he broke down in tears.17 Describing the journey to Auschwitz in his memoir, Levi writes: âMany things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that there remain no memory.â18 This obscure line reveals a tension between memory and forgetting, representation and silence, the impulse to judge and its inappropriateness. Levi would return to these dilemmas in his later work.
The corrupting influence of Auschwitz on human beings arguably disturbed Levi most and would eventually be depicted with greatest clarity in âThe Grey Zone.â As noted earlier, Levi himself survived partly due to the âprivilegesâ he obtained from his position in the Buna chemical laboratory during the last few months of his imprisonment. Although this position did not involve the kind of âmoral compromiseâ that he would write about in The Drowned and the Saved, he nonetheless dwelt much on the subject of survivor guilt.19 Levi does not hesitate to admit to his âcondition of privilegeâ as a chemical specialist and to having âdeeply assimilated the principal rule of the place, which made it mandatory that you should first of all take care of yourself.â20 Levi expressed much shame over this, particularly in the later years of his life, even though he knew such shame was unjustified.
Eager to observe and understand the world around him, Levi took mental notes of everything he could, preserving detailed memories of the minutiae of camp life that would form the backbone of his memoirs. He commented more than once that Auschwitz had been for him a kind of university.21 At the beginning of If This Is a Man, he writes that his memoir âhas not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.â22 Leviâs astuteness and dete...