The Oppressed and the Oppressor Anonymous College

Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved provides another perspective on the holocaust and uses real-life stories and experiences to explain the nature of the behavior of those involved, the oppressed and the oppressor. His essays are important in considering how to think about the people involved in the holocaust and how important it is to think of the whole picture when you are judging one of the people involved.

In one of Levi’s essays, “The Gray Zone”, he spends the majority of the section discussing what makes it so difficult to place black and white judgement on those involved in the terrible events that occurred in the holocaust. He explained that there exists a place in between the black and white areas that exist to most people who think about these events. It is difficult to place each and every person into either a “right or wrong” category because every personal action that took place at this time has been blurred by the terribleness of the situation to everyone involved. Levi described a soccer game that was played between the (SS) and the people who were in charge of burning all the bodies of prisoners at Auschwitz who had been gassed or killed in a different way. This soccer game becomes Levi’s prime example of a...