Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. Toggle navigation . Under Bentham's Utilitarian Principle, one should act to bring the greatest amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people while inflicting the least amount of harm to the least number of people. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. Horowitz tells us that when Heller's memoirs appeared in the 1990s, she was condemned by many in the Jewish community and caught in a gender-specific double-bind: if Heller did not love Jan then she prostituted herself; if she did love him, then she consorted with the enemy., Heller's aunt also suffered sexual violationshe was raped by a German soldierbut she chose to keep it secret from all but a few close relatives. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 3, Shame Summary & Analysis As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. 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. Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. This would have created little risk for their friends, the Zamojskis; as members of a once-noble family, they would have no trouble getting replacement papers. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. Had they liberated it in 1942 instead of January 1945, Rumkowski might have been credited with saving thousands of lives: What if Joseph Stalin's hopes of a decisive victory in early 1942 had been realized, and, as a result, the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, d, and perhaps even Warsaw, as well as many others had been liberated in the spring or summer of 1942? . Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. Richard L. Rubinstein, Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. 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. In normal moral circumstances, Levi would not hesitate to condemn Rumkowski, but because he was a victim living in nightmarish conditions, we have no right to condemn himalthough we do have an obligation to consider the moral implications of his actions. But the members of the SS were there voluntarily; they chose to engage in atrocities.

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