“The Gray Zone” as a Complex of Tensions: Primo Levi on Holocaust Survival

Abstract

An article entitled “A Holocaust Horror Story Without a Schindler”1 appeared in The New York Times of Sunday, January 7, 2001. Although clearly meant as a review of director Tim Blake Nelson’s film “The Grey Zone,” I was drawn to the article by the film title’s unambiguous reference to Primo Levi’s work. Levi had devoted a chapter to a detailed analysis of what he called “the gray zone” in his final book, The Drowned and The Saved2; an analysis that had been extensively commented upon by Tzvetan Todorov and Giorgio Agamben in separate works.3 Indeed, Levi’s notion of a “gray zone” of extreme moral ambiguity in the concentration and extermination camps has become an anchoring point for much commentary on Holocaust survival. Very provisionally, we might regard the notion of “the gray zone” as Levi’s symbolization of the moral compromise that many desperate prisoners were forced to make in order to buy themselves more time. The price exacted was collaboration with the SS, up to and including the murder of their fellow prisoners.