Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. In her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt famously criticizes those Jews who, she believed, collaborated with the Nazis. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. Only through deathwhether one's own or that of othersis it possible to attain the absolute: by dying for an ideal one proves that one holds it dearer that life itself.39, Todorov prefers ordinary virtue, an act of will that affirms one's dignity while demonstrating concern for others. I would argue that it is appropriate to expand Levi's zone beyond Auschwitz so long as its population is made up only of victims. Levi emphasizes that the tendency to think in binary terms--good/evil, right/wrong--overlooks important characteristics of human behavior, and dangerously oversimplifies: " . . " 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. In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). 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. Are there different kinds of violence? Browning examines the strategies used by Jewish prisoners to survive; he finds, not surprisingly, that those willing to exploit the corruption of the German guards and managers had the best chance. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12. In discussing Chaim Rumkowski and the members of the Sonderkommandos, Levi acknowledges that we will never know their exact motivations but asserts that this is irrelevant to their occupancy of the gray zone. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. . He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. On July 22, 1942, when the Nazis demanded that lists of Jews be drawn up for resettlement to the East, Czerniakw pleaded for the lives of orphaned children. Thus, Rumkowski created in the ghetto a caricature of the totalitarian German state.46 Ignoring Levi's distinction between victims and perpetrators, between those who had viable choices and those whose meaningful choices had been destroyed, Todorov sees the gray zone as permeating the entire totalitarian German state: everyone had his or her freedom limited by people higher up in the hierarchy. What Rubinstein finds despicable about Rumkowski is that he so obviously relished his position of authority and his God-like power to determine who lived and who died.
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