Judging 'Privileged' Jews

Front matter

Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the “Grey Zone”

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

Contents

CISS—

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction

“Privileged” Jews, Holocaust Representation, and the “Limit”

Introduction

“PRIVILEGED” JEWS, HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION, AND THE “LIMIT” OF JUDGMENT

CISS—

O. 17 October 1962, the fragmented and partially indecipherable manuscript of Salmen Lewenthal, a Polish Jew, was unearthed at the site where the crematoria of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp once stood. Although he died before the camp’s liberation, Lewenthal had included in his testimony the following passage:

We were shamed of one another and we dared not look one another in the face ... [...] I admit that I, too, ... [...] it appeared that my actions, too, [...] were [...] ... the truth is that one wants to live at any cost, one wants to live because one lives, because the whole world lives. And all that one wishes, all with what one is, if only slightly, bound [...] is bound with life first of all, without life [...] such is the real truth.

Lewenthal had been a member of the Sonderkommando (“special squad”) forced to work in Birkenau’s gas chambers and crematoria.” The tasks of these prisoners, the vast majority of them Jews, involved using deception to keep order among those about to be gassed; sorting their confiscated belongings; hosing down the corpses; cutting hair and extracting teeth from the bodies; burning the corpses in the furnaces or on outdoor pyres; crushing the remaining bone fragments; and disposing of the ashes, which were used as fertilizer or insulation, or were scattered on

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

the Vistula River. Men were chosen for the Sonderkommandos upon arrival at the camp or, less commonly, as a form of punishment. In return for their cooperation, members of the Sonderkommando had access to clothing, bedding, food, cigarettes, and alcohol, all taken from newly arrived “transports.” Lucie Adelsberger, who survived as a prisoner doctor in Auschwitz, writes that the members of the Sonderkommando “were well paid for their labours. They were allowed to take whatever they wanted from the booty, including cigarettes and brandy. On the other hand, they had their own death sentence in their pocket.”® There were thirteen successive “special squads” in the Birkenau extermination camp, as each group was routinely executed after approximately four months. Any refusal to cooperate was answered with immediate death. Survival invariably came down to chance.

The members of the Sonderkommandos belonged to the important category of so-called “privileged” Jews—the central focus of this book. In addition to referring to crematorium workers such as Lewenthal, the term “privileged” is used here to refer to the camp inmates who held positions as prisoner-functionaries, such as the supervisors of prisoner barracks and Kapos (“heads”) of labor squads. The term is also understood here to refer to inhabitants of the ghettos who were members of the Judenrdte (“Jewish councils”) and Ordnungsdienst (“order service,” or Jewish police), who are also viewed as having held “privileged” positions.* The ethical dilemmas encountered by this group of victims have proven very problematic for Holocaust survivors, scholars, writers, and filmmakers alike in their attempts to understand and represent such experiences. Jews suffered unprecedented persecution in the camps and ghettos, places where the normal concepts of “choice” and “responsibility” were radically undermined. When confronted with the traumatic circumstances of “privileged” Jews, the practice of passing judgment over their actions becomes highly contentious. The complexities involved in approaching this issue are revealed most clearly in an essay written by the influential Holocaust survivor Primo Levi entitled “The Grey Zone,” the central text from which this study arose.

Levi’s paradigmatic concept of the “grey zone” directly addresses the issue of “privileged” Jews and is of particular importance due to its engagement with the problem of how their extreme situations are to be understood. A crucial part of Levi’s final book, The Drowned and the Saved (first published in 1986), “The Grey Zone” raises fundamental questions regarding the treatment of liminal figures by those who represent the Holocaust.” Subjected to extreme levels of coercion, these “privileged” victims were compelled to act in ways that have been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Indeed, “privileged”

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

was a term commonly used by other prisoners to describe these individuals. A crucial, often overlooked, aspect of the Holocaust, the issue of “privileged” Jews concerns victims who, in order to prolong their lives, were forced to behave in ways that have often been interpreted as contributing in some way to the killing process. As Susan Pentlin argues in her essay “Holocaust Victims of Privilege,” in order to develop a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and its ethical implications, one must listen to the “voices from the grey zone” and explore the often taboo issues of “position and privilege.”’ Levi writes similarly that the grey zone of “prisoners who in some measure, perhaps with good intentions, collaborated with the authority, was not negligible, indeed it constituted a phenomenon of fundamental importance.”®

Drawing on his experiences in Auschwitz, Levi engages with the problematic of not judging “privileged” Jews. In his essay he is chiefly concerned with Kapos, members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos, and the controversial Jewish “elder” Chaim Rumkowski of the Lodz Ghetto. While he unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should abstain from judging their victims. In the case of the Sonderkommandos, Levi declares that “our need and ability to judge falters” and that any moral evaluation of them must be “suspended.”® Likewise, he asserts that the same impotentia judicandi “paralyses” us when considering Rumkowski’s behavior. While we should not condemn Rumkowski, Levi writes, we cannot “absolve him on the moral plane” either.’° At the same time, Levi argues that praising the morally ambiguous behavior of “privileged” Jews is also inappropriate, as he feels that “not all their acts should be set forth as examples.” In short, he contends that “privileged” Jews should not be judged for their actions in extremis—that negative and positive moral evaluations of their behavior should be suspended. Levi’s meditation on the grey zone poses a number of questions: If “privileged” Jews are not to be judged for their behavior in situations beyond their control, can judgment be suspended in the representations of their experiences? And while passing judgment on “privileged” Jews may be impossible, is it not also inevitable?

Primarily a work of cultural criticism, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine how moral judgments of “privileged” Jews are conveyed in representations of the Holocaust. In investigating this issue, I adopt what might be called a “metaethical” perspective. John K. Roth defines “metaethics” as a reflection on judgments that have already been made, which “seek[s] to understand more fully how those judgments work as well as what limits they face and problems they entail.”"* The focus of this book is on how judgments of “privileged” Jews

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

are constructed; the separate, but intrinsically related, question of why judgments of these liminal figures may be inappropriate is secondary. Nonetheless, this chapter and those that follow will also unavoidably reflect on the latter question, particularly when considering the often controversial ideas that historical and cultural representations of “privileged” Jews communicate to their audiences.

While numerous studies have focused on the contribution of Holocaust representations to collective memory, identity, and knowledge, no studies have concentrated specifically on the representation of “privileged” Jews and how this involves making moral judgments. A consensus has formed among those who have engaged with the events of the Holocaust in one form or another that capturing the “reality” of the tragedy—in writing, film, or any other medium—is impossible. Taking this idea further, many scholars argue that some or all representations trivialize the Holocaust through “simplification.” Significantly, Levi’s anxiety over this phenomenon was an important driving factor in his exploration of the issue of “privileged” Jews. Not only did he raise the question of whether judgment can be suspended, by pointing to historians and filmmakers as being particularly predisposed to making judgment, but his own representation of “privileged” Jews in “The Grey Zone” can itself be seen to entail certain judgments. Going forward, the proceeding chapters of this book explore the possibilities for portraying “privileged” Jews in different representational modes or genres.

Taking Levi’s concept of the grey zone as a point of departure, the chapters that follow provide a close analysis of representations of “privileged” Jews in important examples of Holocaust writing and film. Detailed attention is given to how judgments are revealed in Levi’s own writings, the highly influential work of Raul Hilberg, and several documentary and fiction films. Many of the specific representations to be examined have been selected in part because of their prominent status in the field of Holocaust studies. Levi’s testimonies, Hilberg’s scholarship, and the major films examined, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), are consistently highlighted for their “canonical” influence on Holocaust consciousness. Tor Ben-Mayor and Dan Setton’s less well-known documentary Kapo (1999) and Tim Blake Nelson’s fiction film The Grey Zone (2001) take considerably different approaches to representing the behavior of “privileged” Jews than the approaches taken in the seminal films of Lanzmann and Spielberg. An analysis of these representations exposes different modes of judgment vis-a-vis different modes of representation. First, however, a book that engages with such a deeply sensitive subject as the behavior of “privileged” Jews under Nazi persecution necessi-

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

tates some observations in relation to its conception, construction, and limitations.

As Geoffrey H. Hartman has remarked, Holocaust studies is a veritable “minefield,” where “even the words ... in which we express our thoughts on what happened” are disputable.'* It will already be clear from the preceding pages that the problematic implications of judging Jewish victims of the Nazis render the term “privilege” a nebulous one. Indeed, the phrase is likely to raise some curiosity, if not a degree of suspicion. While my research into this area saw several shifts in the terminology adopted, I settled on “privileged” due to its common usage both at the time of the Holocaust and in its aftermath. It must be emphasized that no matter what physical or other benefits “privileged” Jews may have gained for their cooperation with their persecutors, they experienced immense suffering and were, along with all other Jewish victims, intended to perish. The use of the term “privileged” therefore needs to be understood in the context of the unprecedented conditions of the Nazi-controlled ghettos and camps; the term’s positive connotations must be qualified. Indeed, the categorization of a group of Holocaust victims as “privileged” may be viewed as oxymoronic and the fraught nature of the term must be constantly kept in mind (hence the pervasive inverted commas).

I argue here that moral judgment is inevitable and, furthermore, that when one is faced with such a catastrophic event as the Holocaust, moral judgment is almost unanimously thought to be essential, if not obligatory. However, as Levi’s essay on the grey zone suggests, when confronted with the extreme circumstances of Jews in so-called “privileged” positions, it may be impossible to pass judgment on them. “Impossibility” here does not imply that one is literally unable to pass judgment—far from it, as the following chapters reveal. Instead, the “impossibility” of judgment refers to the perceived invalidity or inappropriateness of any moral evaluation of “privileged” Jews. Yet suspending judgment, even of those forced to confront irresolvable ethical dilemmas, is no easy task. I come to the study of the Holocaust from a non-Jewish and non- German background, although I make no claims to any form of “objectivity.” Throughout the researching and writing of this book, my own judgments have undoubtedly impacted on the final result. The more I engaged with representations of the Sonderkommandos, for example, the more I felt I sympathized with them. Other cases perhaps produced the opposite effect. This was unavoidable. Even the selection of images for a book such as this can be read as implying judgment. I have endeavored in my critical analysis to avoid “judging the judges,” so to speak, whenever I disagreed with a judgment made in their representations of

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

“privileged” Jews; nonetheless, my own limitations and the intrinsically judgmental nature of language itself mean that my own judgments will have impinged on the analysis. The emotionally and morally fraught issue of “privileged” Jews at least necessitates an awareness of this.

In order to map out the terrain to be covered in the subsequent chapters, this chapter includes the following sections, which highlight key concepts and debates that inform the book as a whole. First, a more detailed explanation of the phrase “privileged Jews” is accompanied by a broad account of the experiences of the particular groups of people to be the primary focus of analysis. The discourses and controversies that have formed around the interrelated problems of judgment and representation—problems that remain unresolved in Levi’s writings and more widely—are then surveyed, with Lawrence L. Langer’s concept of “choiceless choices” providing particularly valuable insights into the ethical dilemmas confronted by Holocaust victims. Finally, I explore the problems faced by those who attempt to represent liminal figures and the Holocaust in general by positioning judgment as a “limit” of representation, thereby charting a path for an investigation of how “privileged” Jews are portrayed in different genres.

A Matter of Life and Death: The Category of “Privileged” Jews

“Privileged” Jews include those in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who held positions that gave them access to material and other benefits beyond those available to other Jews. This study adopts a very specific definition of “privilege” in order to concentrate on the extreme ethical dilemmas that many victims faced, although the term has also been used at times to categorize Jews in Germany whose deportation was postponed due to prior military service, marriage to non-Jews, and so on, or Jews in the ghettos who held a higher socio-economic status than others. Indeed, the use of the term “privileged” in relation to victims in the ghettos and camps has been far from consistent. For example, Marlene Heinemann’s analysis of camp inmate relations in Holocaust testimonies is partly divided into reflections on “privileged” and “less privileged” prisoners. Levi himself implies a similar distinction (or “spectrum”) when he separates the categories of “privileged” prisoners at issue in this book from both the “unprivileged” prisoners and the “picturesque fauna” of “low-ranking functionaries,” who included “sweepers, kettle washers, night-watchmen, bed smoothers ... checkers of lice and scabies, messengers, interpreters [and] assistants’ assis-

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

tants.”!° Setting the ambiguities of the term aside, it is the victims who held the particularly controversial—and frequently condemned—roles of Kapos and crematorium workers in the camps or Jewish leaders and police in the ghettos with whom I am primarily concerned here. In addressing the crucial issue of “privileged” Jews, therefore, it is essential to understand—to what extent possible—the unprecedented situations in which victims became “privileged.”

A common theme running throughout survivor testimony is the extreme dehumanization experienced by Jews in the ghettos and camps and the moral compromises they were forced to make in order to survive (or at least to prolong their lives). Part of the Nazi system of dehumanization involved the creation of a complex network of “privileged” prisoners to be responsible for aspects of the administration of, and discipline within, the numerous camps and ghettos." Conditions in these settings varied markedly, both geographically and temporally, thus it is difficult to generalize.'® Isaiah Trunk’s detailed study of the Judenrdte demonstrates that although there were extensive differences between ghettos, in every one a facade of “ghetto autonomy” was used by the Nazis to disguise “the satanic purpose of using the victim himself [sic] to assist the hangman in his work.” "° Exposed to widespread starvation, disease, slave labor, and random executions, tens of thousands of Jews died in the ghettos even before deportations to extermination camps commenced. As one survivor has noted, “You can’t apply any normal criteria to the ghetto. I didn’t wonder about what was moral and what was immoral.””°

The ethical dilemmas that “privileged” Jews confronted in the ghettos are epitomized in the establishment of the Jewish councils and police forces. Being part of these organizations had the potential to prolong one’s life and the lives of one’s family members through the provision of extra food, freedom of movement, exemptions from searches and evictions, and (at least initially) immunity from deportation; however, it is crucial to keep in mind that the establishment of the ghettos was only to be a temporary measure. In the end, most “privileged” Jews did not survive the Holocaust.

The role of the Judenrdte has been the subject of intense debate, as will be discussed later in the chapter. The councils were comprised of up to twenty-four men, who were directly responsible for carrying out Nazi policies and overseeing the daily operation of the ghettos.” Supervised and often abused (verbally and physically) by the Nazi administration, Jewish leaders were made responsible for registering and housing the ghetto population; distributing life-prolonging work permits; organizing health, education, and sanitation services; rationing the always-

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

inadequate food supply; and providing law enforcement and the required number of Jews for forced labor. Faced with massive unemployment, overcrowding, hunger, and epidemics, Judenrat officials found themselves in an impossible situation. After 1941, some council members were forced to draw up lists of people demanded by the Nazis for deportation to “the East,” although due to their captors’ efforts at secrecy, it was rarely clear that this meant certain death. Indeed, many Judenrdte were established before the total physical annihilation of the Jews was decided upon. Furthermore, while a position on a council generally bestowed significant “privileges,” the vast majority of Jewish leaders died before the war ended, having been deported to various camps,” shot by killing squads, or, in some cases, dying by their own hand.” While councils were supposed to consist of the prewar Jewish community leaders, the degree of continuity varied, and there were some instances where the SS chose ordinary civilians. In any case, the ethical dilemmas Judenrat officials confronted were beyond anything they had encountered previously. The councils were formed and governed, metaphorically speaking (and often literally), at gunpoint. This may be also said of the Ordnungsdienst (Jewish police).

Figure 0.1. The senior officer of the Krakow Ghetto police (Ordnungsdienst) straightens the cap of one of his men during roll call (#06224). Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

Figure 0.2. A member of the Jewish police and a German soldier direct pedestrian traffic across the main street dividing the two parts of the Lodz Ghetto. The sign reads: “Jewish residential area, entrance is forbidden” (#37316). Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

H = St

Figure 0.3. Leon Rozenblat, the controversial chief of the Lodz Ghetto police (left), and other members of the Ordnungsdienst pose with a newlywed couple (#63000). Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

Jews became members of the Ordnungsdienst by volunteering, having advantageous contacts, or being randomly conscripted by the Nazi authorities. Armed with truncheons and sometimes whips, Jewish police were charged with keeping order in the ghettos; enforcing Nazi regulations; guarding fences and Judenrat institutions; collecting property the SS ordered to be confiscated; and, most controversially, escorting fellow Jews to the trains bound for extermination camps, sometimes even through violent means. Jewish police often had to arrest a daily quota of people for deportation, lest they suffer the same fate. While some ghetto police forces were independent of their Judenrat, they were often directly supervised by armed Germans or collaborators to ensure that they undertook the tasks expected of them and that they behaved with the required brutality. Significantly, holding these “privileged” positions could also benefit or protect one’s family. The testimony of Calel Perechodnik, one of the few firsthand accounts by a member of the Jewish police, recalls his trauma in helping the SS assemble 8,000 Jews for deportation to Treblinka. The Nazis had deceitfully promised exceptions would be made for Perechodnik’s wife and daughter, along with the families of other ghetto police, although as soon as the police had

Figure 0.4. Jewish police escort a group of Jews in the Lodz Ghetto who have been rounded up for deportation (#10055). Courtesy of USHMM Photo

Archives

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

the assistance of Jewish police (#37287). Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives done what was required of them, their families were deported anyway. Dying before the war’s end, Perechodnik wrote in the opening lines of his memoir, which is filled with loathing for himself and his fellow “privileged” Jews: “Please consider this my deathbed confession. ... I don’t ask to be absolved.”** While self-reproach is perhaps understandable under the circumstances, it might be argued that such remorse is the result of the coercive actions of the Nazi perpetrators and no cause for moral condemnation on Perechodnik’s part.” Importantly, many Jews in the ghettos (and some Jews who did not experience persecution in this setting) were subsequently incarcerated in the camps, where Nazienforced hierarchies also saw a proliferation of “privileged” positions. Prisoners in the concentration camps were subjected to primitive living conditions, constant fear, rampant disease, long hours of meaningless manual labor, roll calls in extreme weather, limited access to sanitary and medical facilities, and random physical beatings. In the various camps that made up the Auschwitz complex in particular, Jews (along with a number of other groups of prisoners) were exposed to an intentional policy of starvation and continuous “selections” for the gas chambers. Faced with the inverted morality of the univers concentrationnaire,** victims were turned against each other in a literal struggle for survival, leading to a widespread impression among prisoners that life for one meant death for another. Exemplifying this is the German prisoner doctor Ella Lingens-Reiner’s reflection on the dilemma she faced in trying

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

to use her “privileged” position in Auschwitz to help others amidst the Nazis’ obsession with numbers: “If I rescued one woman, I pushed another to her doom, another who wanted to live and had an equal right to live.... Was there any sense in trying to behave decently?””’ Similarly, in discussing the proliferation of coercion, “privilege,” and “compromise” in Auschwitz, Levi writes that the Lager was “an excellent ‘laboratory,’” and that “the hybrid class of the prisoner-functionary constitutes [the camp’s] armature and at the same time its most disquieting feature.””* Notably, most of these “privileged” positions were automatically allocated to non-Jewish inmates, particularly criminals and political prisoners, although the number of Jewish prisoner-functionaries increased toward the end of the war due to a shortage of labor. By having access to better shelter, increased rations, and other items for trade, “privileged” inmates were less vulnerable to—though not immune from—camp punishments. For these reasons, Levi writes that “prominents,” or camp officials, along with other “privileged” prisoners, including doctors, messengers, musicians, interpreters, kitchen hands, shoemakers, and so on, comprised the majority of survivors.” In terms of “privileged” prisoners in the camps, this book is primarily concerned with the Sonderkommandos (described earlier) and the Kapos.

The behavior of Kapos, who generally served as supervisors of forcedlabor squads, is a particularly controversial topic. Kapos are infamous in survivor literature for their brutal treatment of their subordinates, with some even taking part in the decision-making of the “selections” for the gas chambers. Although not all Kapos are demonized by survivors, positive portrayals are generally the exception to the rule. The behavior of Kapos often included the intimidation or abuse of some of the prisoners “beneath” them, while favoring or even rescuing others. The motivations behind the behavior of Jewish Kapos in particular are fiercely contested and inherently difficult to evaluate. Significantly, Kapos were subject to punishment by Nazi guards for any problems arising from the prisoners they were responsible for, and Jewish Kapos were arguably under more pressure to keep their positions through violence.” The most crucial distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners, whether “privileged” or not, is that from late 1941 onward the Nazis intended to kill every Jew. Any reprieve was only temporary.

Importantly, the focus of this book on (some) Jewish experiences in (some of) the ghettos and camps should by no means be viewed as representative of the Holocaust, as Nazi persecution also occurred at mass-shooting sites, in deportation trains, during the death marches toward Germany at the end of the war, and through a variety of other means. Equally, just as the experiences of Jews varied in a number of

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

settings and over a number of years, the situations, experiences, and behaviors of “privileged” Jews were incredibly diverse, with important differences existing between the groups of prisoners outlined above and within these groups themselves. On the other hand, emphasizing such differences too strongly often means passing clear-cut moral judgments on some victims over others, in effect constructing a “moral spectrum,” the likes of which will be highlighted at different stages in the forthcoming chapters. In any event, the extreme situations of “privileged” Jews during the Holocaust has placed large, if not insurmountable, obstacles in the path of moral judgment, raising the question of whether or not such judgment should be (if at all possible) suspended. By placing “privileged” Jews within what he calls the “grey zone,” this suspension of judgment seems to be what Levi recommends.

Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone” and the Problems of Judgment and Representation

Levi’s influential essay entitled “The Grey Zone” highlights the interrelationship between judgment, representation, and the category of “privileged” Jews. Indeed, Levi’s writings constantly draw attention to the problems faced by those who seek to represent the Holocaust. In his first memoir, If This Is a Man (1947), Levi emphasizes the immense physical and moral degradation experienced by Jews in Auschwitz, arguing that “our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man [sic].”** Subsequently, in his essay on the grey zone, published just one year before his suicide, Levi expands on the obstacles to representation. Here he stresses not only the incomprehensibility of the suffering of the victims, but also the problem of moral judgment. His sober, questioning, and self-reflexive analysis offers some invaluable lessons on how one might perceive and portray the Holocaust.

Levi’s “grey zone” is in the main a metaphor for moral ambiguity, a conceptual realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. It possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.”®* This in itself highlights the way in which Levi’s concept problematizes judgment, as his characterization of the grey zone could be (and often has been) interpreted to involve a merging, if not a blurring, of the fundamental categories of persecutor and victim. However, Levi stresses elsewhere in his essay, and for good reason, that “to confuse [perpetrators] with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all,

This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.

it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.”** Accepting the inherent difficulties in judging “privileged” prisoners, Dominick LaCapra reiterates that “one may judge quite harshly and with little qualification Nazis who were instrumental in creating the situation that gave rise to the grey zone.”* In short, the distinction between victim and perpetrator must be maintained.* Here then is the crux: how are distinctions between groups of victims—those with “privileged” positions and those without—to be drawn without undermining the crucial separation of victims from their persecutors?

Levi’s effort to impress on his readers the precariousness of addressing such a complex and sensitive issue is of critical importance. Meditating on the unprecedented situations that “privileged” Jews faced works toward exposing the horror and degradation of the Holocaust experience for its victims, helps to avoid falling into stereotypes that simplify or trivialize the event, and arguably leads to a deeper understanding of the Holocaust. Levi’s concept of the grey zone is particularly valuable as it destabilizes clear-cut moral distinctions, such as those between “good” and “evil,” and warns against hasty judgment—or, in some cases, calls for it to be suspended. For these reasons, an acknowledgment of the grey zone poses significant obstacles to representation, which Levi shows to be strongly related to judgment. Commenting on the human need or desire for “simplification” early in his essay, Levi writes:

[T]he network of human relationships inside the Lagers [camps] was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors. In anyone who today reads (or writes) the history of the Lager is evident the tendency, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to repeat Christ’s gesture on Judgment Day: here the righteous, over there the reprobates.*”

The notion that simplification results from passing moral judgment in and through representation is evident in this passage. Indeed, Levi opens his essay by stressing the prominent, even necessary, place of simplification in human affairs: “What we commonly mean by ‘understand’ coincides with ‘simplify’: without profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle.”*®* To state the problem Levi evokes briefly: understanding requires representation, which involves making moral judgment and, inevitably, results in simplification. Significantly, part of the reason Levi felt compelled to reflect on the grey zone was due to his concern about historical and filmic representations that he felt trivialized the complexity of Holocaust experiences. Levi singles out popular histories, the history taught in schools, and films as particularly predisposed to the simplifying trend he identi-