Chapter 1 - Introduction: What Is a Grey Zone and Why Is Eastern Europe One?

Summary

The concept of grey zones, which is the unifying concept of this volume, is probably most well known from Primo Levi's account of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. In The Drowned and the Saved (1988) he describes the confusion and ambiguity experienced by those arriving at a concentration camp. Contrary to the expectations of the newcomers, such places were not split into neatly decipherable blocs of victims and perpetrators. This was due to the existence of a hybrid class of ‘prisoner-functionaries’: fellow inmates who, in order to secure their own survival, assisted SS officers in both mundane and brutal ways. Levi describes how ‘the “we” lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched out before us’ (1988, 37). For those who experienced the atrocities of the camps, this disrupted the common tendency to separate good from evil, and as Levi notes, those who have since sought to understand and describe the camps have encountered the same difficulty. The Lager, as Levi calls the concentration camp, is a grey zone in which ‘the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This grey zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge’ (Levi 1988, 42; see also Petropoulos and Roth 2005).

As Javier Auyero has argued in relation to Levi's writings, the ‘grey zone’ stands forth as a zone of ambiguity that severely challenges pervasive polarities such as we/they, friend/enemy and good/evil – what Levi refers to as the ‘Manichean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities […] prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels – we and they’ (Levi, quoted in Auyero 2007, 32). For Primo Levi, Auyero asserts, the grey zone is an actual physical space, the concentration camp, but also just as much a conceptual tool that warns us against rigid or even misleading dichotomies.