This blog post examines how Auschwitz’s ‘gray zone’ became a complex space where survival, collaboration, innocence, and responsibility intertwined, deeply exploring the erosion of humanity and moral judgment under extreme conditions.
Life continues always, everywhere. Even in Auschwitz, daily life existed. Prisoners could at least choose how to live and die, and the range of those choices was remarkably diverse. Even there, humans were agents of their actions. They each experienced, appropriated, and acted upon the extreme circumstances in their own ways. Therefore, the seemingly contradictory ‘daily life in Auschwitz’ actually existed, and the ‘history of daily life in Auschwitz’ is also possible. While the primary subject of historical narration is generally the structures and forces that move society as a whole or individuals, the focus of the history of daily life is on how people act and how interactions between people produce and transform historical concreteness. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, focused on “everyday life in extreme circumstances,” or “extraordinary everyday life.” He meticulously documented and analyzed humanity under attack, collapsing and hurtling toward destruction, and how humanity could survive and revive.
Levi used the term “the gray zone” to describe this. This was because the binary distinction between perpetrator and victim alone could not adequately describe the patterns of life within this ‘extraordinary everyday’. According to his observations, the way of life chosen by most people was one of resignation and conformity. Only a tiny minority among them survived. Levi described these survivors as “an anonymous crowd/subhumanity, constantly replaced yet always the same, marching in silence and laboring with great effort.” So who were the majority of survivors? First, there were those who gained authority by being selected by the SS and became the ‘privileged class’. This ‘privileged class’ constituted an extremely small minority among the prisoners but exhibited the highest survival rate. Fundamentally, to survive in a situation where rations were woefully inadequate, one had to secure more food, and to do that, one had to obtain ‘privilege’, whether great or small. And privilege, by its very nature, defends and protects itself. For instance, what awaited a newly arrived ‘newcomer’ was not the comfort of fellow inmates, but the shouts, insults, and fists of the ‘privileged class’. They sought to break the ‘newcomer’, to extinguish the embers of dignity that the other still held onto, even if they themselves had long since lost it.
Others survived by different means. These were individuals who, though not part of the ‘privileged class,’ adapted to the ‘jungle’ by relying on their survival instincts. Their lives, unconcerned with dignity or conscience, implied the painful and arduous struggle of a solitary individual against all others. Consequently, significant deviations and compromises regarding moral principles were inevitable.
Thus, the ‘gray zone’ is a place where perpetrators and victims, masters and slaves, both diverge and converge simultaneously. It is a place highly likely to confuse our very judgments. In a sense, ambiguity is the essence of the ‘gray zone’. The sources of this ambiguity are diverse. First, evil and innocence are intermingled. Prisoners were fundamentally innocent. Yet they could, to some extent, voluntarily inflict evil upon others. The paradox that the actions of the ‘gray man’ are both innocent and not innocent arises here. Of course, the evil he commits is clearly on a different level from the evil perpetrated by the Nazis. Another source lies in the actor’s motivation. For instance, the block leader held certain authority as part of the ‘privileged class’. While appearing to cooperate outwardly, a minority who actually participated in the resistance movement sometimes exploited this authority. Yet they also sacrificed other innocent people for the sake of the resistance organization.
So what created this ‘gray zone’? First, the Nazis needed the help of the oppressed due to manpower shortages. Since these collaborators were once enemies, the best way to control them was to taint them, establishing bonds of complicity. Second, the more intense the oppression, the greater the tendency among the oppressed to willingly cooperate. Under harsh circumstances, people become ‘grey individuals’ for various reasons. Yet this ambiguity of the ‘grey zone’ can also be a source of serious confusion and distortion. Witnessing situations where perpetrators and victims are reversed and intermingled, one might insist that it is difficult to assign responsibility to anyone.
However, the question Levi poses to us is different. He demands constant reflection on humanity and human nature. The simplistic dichotomy that the perpetrators, the Nazis, were evil and the victims, the prisoners, were innocent, merely turns the memory of Auschwitz into a passive, fossilized cliché. What matters is persistently re-examining questions that yield no clear answers and fundamentally questioning established conventions. Only when we confront the face of the ‘monster’ head-on and refuse to look away can we, as humans, avoid becoming monsters ourselves.
